Solar Bass Transcription

'Solar' from the album "Walkin'" by Miles Davis, is a full on ii V work out! This transcription looks at how Percy Heath approaches the first four choruses. The tune is 12 bars long and can be split into 4 ii V's of all shapes and sizes.

Lick Of The Month #8

To kick off 2013, the first LOTM is a nice chilled out ii V I from valve trombonist, Bob Brookmeyer that appears on Stan Getz's version of Misty. This version of the song is down a whole step from the way it is usually performed, which I must admit did cause me a lot of confusion trying to figure out the theory behind this lick. Moral of the tale is 'Always Check The Chords!'

Take The A Train Transcription

This week I've been looking at 'Take The A Train' and more importantly how bass legend, Anthony Jackson, played a chorus from it! Out of all the great versions out there I picked this one to see how an electric bassist tackles it rather than an upright player like all the other transcriptions I have done so far.

Lick of the month #3

Welcome to LOTM number 3! This months lick is a 2 for 1 special using some nice ideas I've pulled from a transcription of 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat' I was working on but shamefully got defeated by! There are some monstrously quick runs in this solo which I'll hopefully finish off one day when my ears catch up with the sax shredding on display. But waste not, want not, here's some of the licks I did manage to get my chops onto.

I've wrote these licks up to work over an Eb blues. The first bar starts around the 9th and then descends an Eb- arpeggio. The second bar is based around F# major, the relative major of Eb-. The G that sets off the second lick is a major 3rd  of Eb- which gives us a nice bit of tension before resolving the lick on an F#, the minor 3rd.

Another Way To Look At Autumn Leaves

Carrying on with Autumn Leaves, have a listen to this version by The Bill Evans Trio.

LaFaro takes a completely different approach to the Sam Jones line I looked at last month. Where as Jones seemed to take each chord and walk through it in quite a traditional approach, LaFaro treats pretty much the whole first chorus as one big C-, playing almost exclusively straight up and down the C Dorian mode. He does break out of this occasionally and outlines the chords a little more but in a more broken approach than Jones took. 

One example of this is over the same ii V I we used in the last post. 

Over the C- LaFaro plays R 3 5 R, goes back to C Dorian over the F7 and then plays 3 7 5 R for the BbM.

So there we have a very quick look at another way to approach the changes in this tune, it's not something I'd thought of doing before and I'm definitely going to be spending some time experimenting with this way of approaching bass lines. 

Click here to download the PDF, which on a side note I have now started uploading as PDF's as quite a few people were having trouble opening the XPS files. Enjoy!

Lick of the month #2

Our second LOTM is another ii V i from Autumn Leaves, but this time it's a minor ii V from the bassist, Sam Jones.

This is a great lick with some simple but effective tricks in it. Here it is in the original key and then in two more keys, moving through the cycle. This lick should be practised in all keys even though I've only wrote it out in the first three!

The opening bar plays root, natural 9, 3, root. The natural 9 is used as a tension note between the root and the third as it is out of the key but still fits quite nicely. The second bar starts on a chromatic run down to the root, practise this as it is a great way to get out of the habit of jumping straight onto the root for beat 1! The last beat in this bar is a chromatic note leading to the root of the i chord. This lick is finished off with a simple R 3 5 3 arpeggio which helps to reinforce the harmony of the chord sequence after a bar of almost all chromatic notes.

As you can see from the example above, you may have to tweak these licks to take them through all 12 keys but the ideas are still the same - the A-7 arpeggio in the final example is ascending rather than descending.