Professor's Note

About Rhythm & Improvisation

Svend often structure the rhythm to blur the polska-meter in 3 beats in the bar. The down- & up-bow signs come on every second beat in this example from a sketch . (A downbow can give morepower than an upbow)

Compare with these bars. (It starts with an upbow)

And here he abruptly goes from 3 beats in the bar to 2 beats in the third bar.

The accents are often placed between the heavier beats - it gives swinging feeling.

and faster:

Improvisation

Svend always improvised with great care to the chord-changes and the chords possible alterations and upper structure. In the 70's many musicians like Herbie Hancock and Jean-Luc Ponty played tunes with passages of only one or a few chords or ostinatos, and often improvised using Pentatonic Scales.

Svends improvisations over Part D's 2-bar ostinato (// G / Dm7 // - that define a scale using only the white keys) show a rather moderate use of pentatonic scales. The used pentatonic scales are always inside the chord, where the young "modern" musicians use different pentatonics both inside and "outside" the chord and scale.

Bar 58 ....................

Dm7-pent: D-F-G-A-C // G6-pent: G-A-B-D-E.

Bar 66..

Here is a "mild" version of little "outside" of the tonality/scale.

Svend also uses cascades of fast ornamentations (inspired by Ponty and others?). The 2 or 3 different figures is "easy" to play: same fingering but on neighbour-strings. See bar 63-64, and bars 4 and 8 in the NRK-example (I have omitted a couple of bars with fast notes. Listen to the mp3).