Of course there are a lot of great jazz guitarists.  At his best, I absolutely love Grant Green.  His tone is creamy, his lines are clear and musical, and he draws strongly from the common Bebop vocabulary.  I decided to transcribe this particular track because I thought the solo was a great jazz guitar study piece – very musical and mostly harmonically specific.

FYI this performance is in Bbm, which is not in the “usual” key.  The Real Books have this tune in Gm.

If I Should Lose You – Grant Green – Guitar Transcription

And here is the transcribed track on Youtube:

Some time later, I heard from Dan Loschen, who was trying to make sense of the form. I’ve recently listened to all the recorded versions (that I know of), and come up with this rationale for the form.

The song is AABA with an interlude.  The interlude is the first four bars of the B section, repeated 2-4 times.  (One could say it is to the B section what Peace Piece is to the A section of Some Other Time.)

Referring back to the original recording from 1964 – actually there are two full takes of that track on the Complete Bill Evans on Verve box set – it’s pretty clear that the intended form is this:

• Rubato piano intro
• Interlude
• AABA (Stan plays the head)
• AABA (Stan solos)
• Interlude
• AABA (Bill solos)
• Interlude
• AABA (Stan plays the head)
• Interlude, longer for fade

In the album cut from that session, the interludes are 16 bars long, but only 8 bars on the alt take (which also has just a single A section on solo piano prior to the first interlude).

I believe things just got a little out of control in the live version from 1974.  Here is the form that was played:

• AABA (rubato piano intro)
• Interlude (8)
• AABA (Stan plays the head)
• ABA (Stan solos – it seems pretty clear Stan played the B section early and the others followed)
• Interlude (16)
• ABA (Bill solos – I think he just copied Stan’s form mistake as an inside joke type of thing)
• Interlude (16 – Bill solos through the interlude)
• AABA (Bill solos, but doesn’t hack the form this time)
• Interlude (16)
• AABA (Stan plays head)
• Interlude to breakdown

My guess: the reason Bill’s solo continued through the interlude was that Stan had left the stage and therefore couldn’t play the head out yet.  So Bill continued to play beautifully around the form one more time.   Halfway through the interlude after Bill’s second chorus, the audience suddenly applauds, which I’d bet was when Stan made a hasty return to the stage.

The live version of this song shows that the jazz greats occasionally have “form malfunctions.”  They just handle it better than I usually do.

Update: Here is the live version, via Youtube:

McSplivens is a Bb blues on Dexter Gordons’ “A Swingin’ Affair” with the always-interesting Sonny Clark on piano.  This transcription includes Sonny’s first three choruses (there are two more not transcribed here).

McSplivens – Sonny Clark

It hasn’t been long since I converted the site to a blog format.  I’m hoping to cross-link with other jazz-related blogs, and to start getting comments that are not from spammers.

So please leave comments that do not have links to Viagra merchants, etc.  ;-)

California Dreaming

I Feel The Earth Move

I played all the instruments; pulling this together was time consuming, but I couldn’t be happier that I did it.  What a great activity to do with my daughter!  The solo section in Earth Move is a little self-indulgent, but oh well…

Update: Fixed broken links!

This I Dig of You

Alone Together

I emailed the following question to David about this solo:

I hope you don’t mind a musical question: on Alone together from your Manhattan CD, in a couple of places you play “tension” lines composed of F, Ab, Db, Eb over this:

Dm7 | Em7b5  A7 |

It sounds good, but I’d like to understand what led you to those note choices.  How did you get there?

Here is his reply:

Hi John,

Well, that’s a very good question and thank you for your astute listening.  I just checked out the solo you’re talking about and here is my justification (in retrospect…..of course).  The F Ab and Db represent notes relevant to D minor (G7 b9 #11) and to A7alt. (as the Eb7 tritone sub).  And THEY SOUND GOOD TOGETHER!!  I’m glad to hear you’re making sense of the diminished wholetone stuff!

Best,
David

Dig Dis

This with Stan Getz, Live at Storyville, in 1952. I’ve been meaning to work up some mojo for Cherokee, and it’s an interesting problem. My mid-tempo vocabulary doesn’t work on Cherokee because of the fast tempo, not to mention the difficult key centers on the bridge. I like Al Haig’s vocabulary on this solo (one chorus only), but it’s also an interesting solo to listen to because he was having difficulty getting the eighth notes out fast enough. At the end of the bridge, you can hear Getz start snapping his fingers because Haig kept getting behind (by which I mean he couldn’t seem to play his ii-V patterns quite fast enough, so he’d finish late and need a couple of bars to “regroup”). I had to “rationalize” the timing of some of this, since certain licks dragged so much. I suspect Al had been drinking…

Parker ’51 / Cherokee

Ascension