Here's all the lessons and performances of Ed Saindon's tune 'Life's Blessings.

We spent the month of March studying Ed's tune and we had a blast. Check out all the comments. There's a lot of valuable information here.

Hi Everyone,

I've attached a chart I made of the appropriate tensions for each chord in Life's Blessing. Ed checked it out for me and made the necessary corrections and I thought this could be of use to anyone working on the tune. The tensions can be used either in voicings for comping or lines while soloing. Good luck everyone!

Jon

Here are seven choruses of improvisation on the progression of Life's Blessing.

Again, as I mentioned in the other video playing the melody, the left hand is functioning as accompaniment as well as helping out the right hand to execute lines.

Try to fill out the 8th notes between both hands as opposed to trying to carry everything with the right hand. Also, try to keep the left hand moving. Try to keep changing the spreads of the mallets in each hand as much as possible. For example, in left hand, you can play a whole step and then invert that interval to play a 7th.

Two choruses playing the melody along with the accompaniment.

Feel free to change the rhythms of the melody and try to embellish the melody with grace notes, passing notes, fills, etc.

In terms of the accompaniment, try to get the harmony (including tensions) across either with voicings or counterpoint.

Try to get both hands to help each other out. The left hand can come up to help the right hand play the melody and the right hand can go down to fill out a voicing along with the left hand. Also, dampening is important when playing counterpoint against the melody.

On this video, I'm playing the melody along with any bits of accompaniment that I can attempt to fit in without taking away from the clarity of the melody.

It's a good way to work on the left hand in terms of getting it to focus on melody and accompaniment at the same time.

Hello everyone,

Here's the first video of me playing Life's Blessing. Please excuse the sound and video quality. I'm not too good when it comes to the technical recording and video stuff.

On this video, I'm doing one chorus of left hand comping in which I'm bringing out guide tone lines as well as some bass motion. I also use quite a few 10ths which seems to work well with this type of tune.

If anyone has any questions about this, just let me know.

Ed

F Blues with left hand comping along with soloing with the right hand. Dedicated to one of my favorite pianists in this type of style (with left hand comping four to the bar), Dave McKenna.

Hey Everyone,

I just recorded this (in Tony's terms, a "Quick and Dirty Video") last week when I was taping some things for the Life's Blessing study. The progression from this rendition is based on Keith Jarrett's version of Shenandoah from his recording The Melody at Night, With you.

Ed