Hey Folks,
Ed posted a link to this Chris Potter transcription that I was reading through this morning. The thing about cats like Potter is that they can paint the changes! Check out this line that's played over a turnaround. It was actually originally double time. I did a lesson on turnarounds a while back with similar material too.
-Tyler

Just got this home last week, love it already.

Tons of great ideas in this one exercise! When I was in grad school, I had a great piano player as a teacher, David Hazeltine. He kind of just made this up on the spot, but really covered so much stuff in 8 measures! Hope you enjoy it!

Behn

Another from the Romanian Concert. Man I love the 'Tennessee Waltz'.

Here is take two of Autumn Leaves with some thoughts on improv. A simple technique is to play a motive and move it around the scale. The strength of the motive allows it to be played out of the scale of the underlying chord or used over a reharmonized chord. I'm doing this at the beginning of my solo. The motive is a simple three note scalar motive that I'm moving around. When it sounds out, I'm playing A, B, C# during the measure of the A-7b5. The dissonance creates the interest. If everything is always perfect and played in the scale with a minimum of tension, it can get pretty boring.

Here's a clip of Billy and I playing the classic Autumn Leaves. We did two takes. This was first tune of the day that we played. The topic of comping has been popular on the site with Behn doing some nice lessons. This clip shows some various comping possibilities.

Some of the techniques include double stops, single note walking type bass lines, pedal point (on the bridge), reharmonization, use of guide tone lines, stacking voicings, open versus closed voicings, chord arpeggiation, counterpoint with the soloist, etc.

This is a clip of Billy and I playing a nice ballad, Hoagy Carmichael's Skylark.

Guys, here's another version of Basin Street Blues for comparison. There are some different left hand comping techniques in this clip versus take one.

Some of the techniques include single note guide tone lines. For example, on the second last bar of the tune (Bb Bb7 Eb Eb-), I'm bringing out the line of Bb, Ab, G, Gb to F going into the last bar of Bb. Using the guide tone lines, we can play fairly sparse while still sounding the changes.

I did this quickly for a student and figured I'd post it here in case any of you guys want to try it.

It's in the key of Eb. It's Fmin7 Bb7 Ebmaj7 C7 progression.

Look at each voicing and name the chord.

Remember these are vibes voicings. For many of them there will be no roots so keep the progression going in your mind.

Get it?

I see some enharmonic mistakes. Like Fb which is E of course.

Anyway check it out. If you fill it out and post it, I'll look it over.

Guys, here's the videoclip of Basin Street Blues from our Sunday session at the house. The audioclip of this track was previously posted. More clips of the session are up on my YouTube channel. If anyone has any questions about what I'm doing on these clips in terms of techniques, what I'm thinking about, improv techniques, etc., feel free to ask. Ed