Lesson notes. July 8, 2025.
Technique: on our last lesson in person we may skip scales and sight-reading.
Write down any questions and we can address those specifically.
Write down any questions and we can address those specifically.
- Reading
- Melodic Sight-reading. Try 3 times through.
- 1- survival. 2- Identify patterns and simply the thinking process. 3- Try the best you can.
- Fully-written piece. Jazz Etude #2. Analyze as much as you can, rather than reading notes. Try to learn as much as possible from the piece, notice how chords are built, 3-7, 1-7 shells, shells+3rd, etc. Walking bass, notice that it is built from structural notes, linked by 1/2 step or contiguous notes that belong to the scale.
- Improv. Notice the chords above and use them as cues on the notes needed to improvise over them.
- Melodic Sight-reading. Try 3 times through.
- Mercy, Mercy, Mercy
- Theme. Excellent.
- Improvisation. Blues scale, based on the minor pentatonic.
- Major pentatonic: black keys of the piano starting on F#
- Minor pentatonic: same but starting on D#. The blue note is A-natural.
- Jordu (next lesson). These below are the notes from the previous lesson.
- -A- Theme. Kick rhythm a little bit ahead for great effect.
- Try accompanying the theme with full chords (just like you already do), but also start using 3-7 reduction
- -B- Playing this section with full chords is a great exercise, but difficult. Still, do it so you learn to switch chords quickly. Then exercise playing with 3-7 in chromatic motion, which is much easier for the LH and you can then focus better on the RH melody
- Improvisation. We will start very simple.
- -A- Play around the C minor scale and listen to the dissonances it creates. Hold each chord indefinitely and improvise on top of it. We will practice this at the lesson.
- -B- This section is much more difficult to prepare because the chords change quickly. Let's start with a simple idea: Try a blues scale. I would personally try G blues scale because the notes are a bit more compatible with the chords in the environment of flats. Below is the C Blues scale. See if you can build a G blues scale from this model
- Transcription.
- I am going to listen to the recordings and see which may be best for your level. I will post here the one we may be starting next lesson.
- My first choice would be Richie Powell solo: 3:43. Easy to transcribe. It is short and you could just transcribe the RH. It doesn't have difficult fast runs.
- Clifford Brown solo: 0:55 Very melodic, it is melodically more interesting, but it also has difficult fast runs that you may have to skip for now.
