Author: sarahpaik

A trumplet player who recently passed away (just last month). His range is incredible, and the buildup with the drums at 4:49 was predictable but enjoyable! I enjoyed his use of the plunger looking device, which I feared would turned gimmicky but fortunately did not. He makes great use of space, and he takes plenty of time to breathe between ideas. I also happen to know the drummer!

Bill Evans again! The solo I was thinking of transcribing starts around 2:00. His inner voicing abilities are so great. There’s a lot of development of simple ideas in this solo, which make it easier to see what he was thinking when playing.

Another master. I like his use of big chords and octaves in the right hand. It really creates a strong melodic voice. His left hand is solid (but the voicings are different from those most commonly heard today) and almost percussive. I also like that he is smiling.

20 more!
Constellation – Charlie Parker
Dexterity – Charlie Parker
Miles Davis – Denial
Dizzie Atmosphere – Dizzy Gillespie
The Flintstones Theme
Cottontail – Miles Davis
Passport – Charlie Parker and Dizzy
Anthropology – Charlie Parker
Lester Leaps In – Lester Young
Oleo – Sonny Rollins
Third Rail – Michael Brecker
The Eternal Triangle – Sonny Stitt
Shag – Sidney Bechet
Moose the Mooche – Charlie Parker
Wail – Bud Powell
Swing Spring – Miles Davis
Serpent’s Tooth – Miles Davis
Steeplechase – Charlie Parker
Lemon Drop – George Wallington
Chasin’ the Bird – Charlie Parker

Sources:
http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?/topic/1558-songs-based-on-i-got-rhythm/
http://emp.byui.edu/WatkinsM/applied/09%20Rhythm%20Changes.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_jazz_contrafacts
http://jazzguitarlegend.com/the-contrafact/
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090322201138AA3FOqH

I never listened to a lot of Coltrane, but he’s actually pretty good. What I liked about his solo is that he uses pretty simple ideas. His playing is not as cerebral as Miles, but he still shows some restraint in his technical displays. Listening to the solo, I got a strange feeling that the phrases were too short. For some reason, everything felt very repetitive and there was no real climax or resolution. I don’t know…is it just me? I didn’t hear a narrative in the song, and that’s the best part for me.

This is Bill Evans’ take on I Should Care. For the melody, he doubles up his left and right hand, and he places chord tones between the octaves. The left hand doesn’t always follow the exact melody, and there’s a little bit of walking and counterpoint which add a nice feel. Around 3:55, he uses big block chords in the left hand which sound really rich, then he does a right hand chord sequence. Bill Evans’ chord voicings are the most commonly used in jazz piano, so it makes sense that his chords sound so classic and familiar. Something he uses a lot of is drop-2 voicing, which is something I want to work on.

I like Herbie’s chromatic movements around 4:10. He starts off his solo with simple ideas. He moves pentatonic arpeggiations around chromatically, which is something I’m trying to get more fluent at. His comping was pretty quiet during most of the solos, which is different from Oscar Peterson. Roy Hargrove has a great ear for melody – he seems to emulate a lot of Miles Davis in that he focuses on melodic impact over dexterity.

Not a hugely creative cover, but around 1:00, he starts improving over the second verse basically just using any and every scale. A lot of the scales are pentatonic and moved around chromatically like we did in class. As I said, nothing really that original, but I like to listen to this just to keep the sounds of these different scales in my head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EaqD4N9S9s

This is just an audio recording, but I thought it would be useful to listen to the ideas from the masters. Oscar Peterson brings in a lot of blues licks. I heard some variation of 1-2-3 at least four times (I probably missed a lot of them) through both solos. Also, Peterson has some trills that he uses all the time. I think I can learn them.

Not jazz (more like jazzish-R&B), but as I was listening to this song, I heard some harmonic scales in his ad lib. At 4:06, you hear a minor arpeggio. At 4:12, you can hear the harmonic minor scale as he comes down in thirds. When I hear about the harmonic minor, my mind immediately jumps to music from Aladdin – Egyptian/Arabic music. But this goes to show that even in R&B, you can still use the harmonic scale.