Category: music

A year ago I wrote about composing a solo on All the Things You Are and it still remains the jazz standard that I have the most comfort with. Since then, I also joined an online jazz community and have been upping my game a bit. When this standard came around again, I took the opportunity to find a good version to transcribe and landed on the version from Johnny Griffin, A Blowin’ Session. This is a fairly ridiculous lineup with three (3) tenors at the top of their game: Johnny Griffin, John Coltrane, and Hank Mobley, along with Lee Morgan, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Art Blakey. Insane! I transcribed a chorus of Mobley’s solo mainly because it’s the chillest one, and I had the best chance of hearing it without a ton of slowing down the music. Transcription follows.

Quick thoughts on this one: we have a fun jazz cliche in bar 6 over the ii-V; the descending figure around bar 29 going into the turnaround sounds a lot like some phrases in his Remember solo.

Latest transcription is Scrapple. The head and transcribed solo are fun to play, but I really struggled with improvising on this one, especially the A section where it stays in F almost the whole time. Parker, of course, makes it sound effortless. Fun finding on this one is the lick starting in bar 15 in the improvised bridge where Bird plays a G7 arpeggio to the F, then descends C mixolydian to the third over C7, then arpeggio back up to the 9th. This same lick appears twice in the solo, once at bar 34 and again in 47 (shifted left by a beat).

Next up is probably a ballad.

I forgot to mention in the previous post on On Green Dolphin Street that one reason I liked the song was due to a version on a Tito Puente compilation in which there is some stratospheric trumpet work. I used to play the horn but my embouchure atrophied years ago. Still, I love the sound of it, whether warm and sparse like Miles Davis or bright and blazing high like whoever was on this Puente record. Well, I finally looked it up, and it was Maynard Ferguson, so I guess that makes sense.

When I bought Blue Train on a whim some 25 years ago, I was expecting some great Coltrane solos, but I was not prepared for the brass section burning it up on this album. I’d later learn that Lee Morgan did all the fast trumpet lines on the title track, and I’d go on to listen to his other hard bop work. Blue Train is still a banger.

I transcribed the first three choruses so far and will probably get to the other two in the next week or so. There is also a complete transcription over on jazzomat in case you disagree with my choices.

I really like the second chorus a bit more than the fast but patternistic 3rd and 4th choruses. The final phrase has everything: a decent amount of chromaticism, while still outlining the chords really well with nice voice leading. It has an interesting rhythmic variation with the triplet figure moving a beat earlier in each subsequent measure. It has that great sounding 3 to b9 arpeggio over the vi7b9 which, okay, I understand it is a cliche, but I love this cliche.

Here I am playing along with the recording:

I still haven’t tried playing any of it on trumpet but someday I’ll give it a go.

The album Sonny Side Up, featuring both Sonny Stitt and Sonny Rollins, is fire, and Sonny Stitt’s chorus from On the Sunny Side of the Street is hard to beat. I’ve had this whole album on repeat for the last month or so and there’s not a bad track.

Dizzy Gillespie sings on “Sunny” and there’s a video of him playing it with Stitt:

On the recording, Stitt plays a bunch of rapid fire 16th note patterns over the bridge which makes it hard for me to play above 70% speed — good patterns worth incorporating into the practice routine. But the last A section is the high point, especially the emphasis on chromatic progression from the G7 to Am7 near the end. Here’s my transcription.

New transcription: another Parker blues, Billie’s Bounce.

August’s tune is another Parker blues: Bloomdido. I transcribed all four choruses this time around, which was educational in that Parker repeats the same licks at the same place in more than one chorus, for example the C minor pentatonic figure in bars 21, 33, and 57 resolving to the 3rd of the F7. In two of those cases, he leads into it with a descending G mixolydian b9 b13 scale using a 3rd to b9 (B to A flat) intervallic leap which sounds amazing. The tempo is whipping by, so I didn’t really notice those until breaking it down, but there are a number of sounds worth stealing here.

I transcribed this tune by hand without my instrument during a 6 hour flight using a virtual piano and slow downer app; consequently I don’t actually know how to play it yet. I have maybe the first 2 choruses down at about half speed but will need a couple weeks of practice to memorize the rest and get it up to speed. So, no video yet!

July’s video is short and sweet. Rather than transcribe a solo this time around, I learned the head without actually writing it down and then composed a single chorus. The changes are a very bare bones B-flat blues, so this was an opportunity to check up on my voice leading and whatever bebop licks have found their way into my fingers.

A few observations on this process:

• my composed chorus is, not surprisingly, better than my improvised solos (not shown), so more work to do here
• despite this being a very straightforward I-IV-V, I initially wrote in a G7 arpeggio in bar 8, so I can see some progress in my ear anticipating common jazz harmonies, even if they aren’t actually there

The recording is solo with no backing track or metronome. There are a couple of places, especially during rests, where I rush the tempo, and there’s a bar where I obviously failed to get my pick and left hand in sync, but on the whole I think it’s alright.

Here we go again, this time trying a Charlie Parker Jazz blues. I thought blues was easy. Wrong!

I cut the video off early because I didn’t actually learn the 3rd chorus, just knew the next two bars or so.

Here’s the transcription — I know there are errors after having compared to the Omnibook but I’m going to leave it here for now. New month, new tune!