A lot of fakebooks and other sources give the middle eight of Softly As In The Morning Sunrise (in the key of Cm / Eb) as: | Eb | ./. | C7b9 | ./. || Fm | F#dim | DØ | G7b9| I've never been able to make sense of the change F#dim | DØ. … Continue reading The Middle 8 Of Softly
Here's another post in a series on simplifying chords for soloing. This is not rocket science, so advanced players don't need to read it. Lockdown has been a good time for revisiting standards that I learned in my jazz infancy and haven't reconsidered since. Tunes for which I worked out an approach based on my … Continue reading The pitfalls of Fake Books
In my last post (You Can Constructively Ignore Harmony) I talked about simplifying harmony by removing unnecessary chords. Often people use pentatonic scales to reduce the complexity of a scale. The removal of notes from a scale makes a stronger, more defined sound. In this post I'll talk about simplifying approaches to dominant chords by thinking … Continue reading A Simplified Approach To Soloing On 7b9
Following on from yesterday's post Too Much Harmony?, a good approach to learning to solo on a standard would be to have in your mind a version for soloing that weeds out as many chords as possible, leaving only the most important. So taking the first 8 bars of I Thought About You as an … Continue reading You Can Constructively Ignore Harmony
The first four bars of Triste I've been revisiting the first four bars of Triste by AC Jobim. What is going on there? The original (on the album Wave, 1967) is in A, and not Bb as it is usually played by the people I play with. Fair enough, A is an atrocious key for … Continue reading The first four bars of Triste
The benefits of memory When playing music, reading it can really get in the way of freedom of interpretation. And the need to read means you haven’t internalized the structure. How can you possibly get inside it to improvise with meaning if you haven’t internalized it? Also it’s often my experience that players who are … Continue reading How to develop memory for musical structures
Piano players use rootless voicings a lot of the time. Guitarists tend to learn chords with the roots in. Possibly it’s easier for piano players, who can add the bass in the left hand, when there is no bass player. You can get a lot more colour out of four note chords if you leave … Continue reading Rootless Voicings
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