Category: Vocabulary

Miles Davis on Doxy

This weekend I’ll be playing in the house band for an educational jam session. It’s always a pleasure to work with students as they muster up the courage to improvise on a tune, or confidently showcase the techniques they’ve been working on.

One of our jam tunes this week will be Doxy, written by Sonny Rollins. This tune became an early jazz standard and is often one of the first tunes that beginning improvisers learn.

For this week’s Transcription Tuesday, we’ll look at the beginning of Miles Davis’ solo on Doxy from the album Bag’s Groove released in 1957 (the actual recording took place three years earlier in 1954 and features Sonny Rollins on tenor saxophone, Horace Silver on piano, Percy Heath on bass, and Kenny Clarke on drums).

If you are new to the jazz language, this is a great solo to learn and to study. You can use the steps outlined in yesterday’s How To Start Transcribing to learn the solo by ear, and then check your work against the notated version below.

Once you’ve learned the sound of the solo, try to make sense of the note choices and rhythms by studying the harmony. I didn’t include the chord changes in the transcription, but careful listening to the bass and piano on the recording will reveal the harmony (or you can surely find a chord chart online).

I find the simplicity and clarity of this excerpt inspiring and the tune overall is fun to play. I encourage you to try using some of this language in your own playing.

Wynton Kelly on Freddie Freeloader

 

 

If you are not already familiar with the album Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, do yourself a favor and go listen right now. As one of the most popular and best-selling jazz albums of all time—it went quadruple platinum in 2008—any jazz fan should at least be aware of this great work.

For this Transcription Tuesday, I chose to focus on the first chorus of the piano solo on Freddie Freeloader. While Bill Evans is the pianist for most of the album, this track features the great Wynton Kelly instead.

I love Kelly’s touch and bouncy time feel, as well as his melodic blues-based language. Pay attention to the way he uses chord tones as arrival points for the melody.

One of my favorite parts of this chorus is the final two bars. The form is generally based on a 12-bar blues in Bb, with an unusual Ab7 chord in bars 11 and 12. Kelly arpeggiates a Bb major triad over the Ab7 harmony creating a wonderful polychordal sound that can by described as Ab13#11. Once you wrap your ears around how this chord works, you will begin hearing it in countless other tunes that have been recorded since.

Descending Bass Line Intro

Listening to a playlist of Christmas music, I heard a bass line that I knew I had heard before in a different context. The line uses a descending “major bebop” scale which is essentially a major scale with an added half-step between the fifth and sixth scale degrees.

As a bass line, playing this scale in a descending pattern over the span of two octaves can fill four bars of 4/4 time and makes for a nice intro.

This first example is played by John Clayton on Diana Krall’s Christmas Songs album on the tune “Winter Wonderland.”

 

The second example is played by Sam Jones and is used not as the actual intro but as the first four bars of the head on “Sleepin’ Bee” from the album Nancy Wilson/Cannonball Adderley (1961).

 

Here is the transcription of both lines. I have boxed the scale degrees that are essentially the same in both lines. Jones and Clayton each embellish and end the line slightly differently, but the primary pattern is quite effective and recognizable.

Descending Bass Line Intro - C Instruments

Transcription Tuesday: Donald Byrd on “On It”

Donald Byrd’s solo on Elmo Hope’s “On It” is a particularly clear example of the hard bop aesthetic. Over the 12-bar blues structure Byrd deftly incorporates both bebop vocabulary and elements of the blues language.

For this transcription, I’ve included three versions—For C, Bb, and Eb instruments. You can flip through them using the arrows.

Update: a previous version of this post had the transcriptions in the wrong key. This should be fixed now.

Transcription Tuesday: Sonny Rollins on St. Thomas

Sonny Rollins is known for his motivic development and this excerpt from his solo on “St. Thomas” is one of his most famous recorded examples.

Ted Gioia writes in The History of Jazz that:

“Rollins excelled in using these [simple musical motives] as thematic material—restating them, varying them, elaborating on them—a jazz equivalent of the development section in sonata form.”

Beginning with the short two-note motive, Rollins masterfully uses all three of these methods—restating, varying, and elaborating—to tell an engaging and original story.

Sonny Rollins on St Thomas

 

 

Transcription Tuesday: Billy Higgins on The Sidewinder

Allaboutjazz.com calls Billy Higgins “reportedly the most recorded jazz drummer in history, and certainly one of the most beloved.”

Here is an excerpt from “The Sidewinder,” one of his classic grooves, (iTunes link).

Some things to note:

  1. The time feel is famously somewhere between straight and swing.
  2. Seemingly insignificant details make it work. For instance, Higgins lays out on the very first beat of the head and enters on beat 2.
  3. Higgins sticks the exact same groove with no improvisation until partway through the first solo. Sometimes simple is best.

Billy Higgins on Sidewinder

Transcription Tuesday: Miles Davis on So What

MilesDavisKindofBlue.jpg
Miles Davis – Kind of Blue. Copyright held by the PHOTOGRAPHER JAY MAISEL. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

September 28 marked the anniversary of the death of Miles Davis, the iconic jazz trumpeter and composer. This New York Times article from 1991 came up in my newsfeed and sparked my interest in revisiting some of his music from the standpoint of his influence on the jazz language. The full article is worth a read, but here is what the author, Jon Pareles says about his contribution to the idiom:

His solos, whether ruminating on a whispered ballad melody or jabbing against a beat, have been models for generations of jazz musicians. Other trumpeters play faster and higher, but more than in any technical feats Mr. Davis’s influence lay in his phrasing and sense of space. “I always listen to what I can leave out,” he would say.

Here is an excerpt from the beginning of Miles’ solo on “So What” from Kind of Blue. There are so many elements to examine in this short sample, but if nothing else pay attention to the phrasing and sense of space.

Miles Davis on So What

 

For further examples of phrasing and space, check out the previous post on Coltrane’s “I Hear A Rhapsody”.

John Coltrane on I Hear A Rhapsody

John Coltrane - Lush Life.jpg
John Coltrane – Lush Life. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia. 

From: Lush Life (Red Garland, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Al Heath, drums)

This cut of I Hear a Rhapsody is from Lush Life, one of Coltrane’s earliest albums as a bandleader. He recorded it in late 1957 and early 1958.

There are plenty  of things to analyze melodically and harmonically in what he plays, but it’s just as valuable to look at what he doesn’t play. Like all great improvisors, Coltrane uses space. When you listen closely to this and other solos, you can hear his intense, clear ideas punctuated by rest. 
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John Coltrane on Giant Steps, Part 1

Coltrane Giant Steps.jpg
“Coltrane Giant Steps.” Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

The first time I saw this solo analyzed, it was like a veil had been lifted and I could suddenly see more clearly.

This tune has a (deserved) reputation for being devilishly difficult, in part because of the rapid harmonic motion through seemingly unrelated chord changes. Harmonic analysis reveals that there are really just three basic key centers happening here, and the standard ii-V and V-I and progressions are used throughout.

But what is perhaps more interesting from a language perspective, is how simple the melodic/rhythmic material is. The vast majority of the excerpt here is made up of chord arpeggios or diatonic scalar patterns.

In language learning, an important concepts is “comprehension,” or the ability to understand the message that is being communicated. In musical terms, we want to be able to understand how the melody and harmony are related so that we can truly learn and apply this vocabulary in other contexts.

This excerpt, despite its supposed complexity, might be easier to comprehend than many other solos. Lets look at a few examples.

Bar 2 (first bar of the form):

  • the first chord Bmaj, and the melody notes are F#, D#, B—a simple 5-3-1 arpeggio of a Bmaj triad
  • the second chord is D7, and the melody notes D, E, F#, A are simply the scalar pattern 1, 2, 3, 5 of the D7 chord.

Bar 3

  • Over a Gmaj chord, melody notes are G, D, B—a simple 1-5-3 descending arpeggio of a Gmaj triad

Bar 9

  • Even longer runs like bar 9 are comprehensible. A descending Bb Dominant Bebop scale over Bb7 chord (and it’s related Fmin7).

 

Just like learning a spoken language, try this simple approach for developing fluency with this material:

  1. Pick a word or phrase you like
  2. Try to comprehend it
  3. Begin using it in other contexts.

Check out this excerpt that begins at about 0:26 into the tune.

John Coltrane on Giant Steps pt1

Transcription Tuesday: Grant Green on Green’s Greenery

Grantstand.jpg
“Grantstand” by AMG. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

Grant Green plays a concise and expressive solo over the blues form on the tune “Green’s Greenery” from the album Grantstand. This tune is included as the bonus track on the CD version of the album and was not included on the original 1961 release, although it was recorded during the same session.

Brother Jack McDuff (organ) and Al Harewood (drums) create a solid rhythmic foundation for Green to groove on, and the buoyant swing feels great throughout. McDuff and Yusef Lateef (tenor sax) both solo later in the track, and Green improvises two more choruses before returning to the closing melody.

Grant Green on Green's Greenery