🎵 Play A Great Standard In One Month – Body & Soul – Week 1
Welcome to the next installment of Play A Great Standard In One Month!
After spending two full series exploring blues and rhythm changes, we've moved into a new phase of our studies: applying those concepts to some of the most important standards in the jazz repertoire.
🎵 Play A Great Standard In One Month – Stella – Week 4
Last week, we worked through a full chorus of "Stella By Starlight" using clear, relatively simple melodic ideas. The goal was to hear the harmony through basic scale and chord tones without feeling like every phrase needed to be a complicated bebop line.
This week, we're taking that same basic framework and adding another layer:
👉 Chromaticism.
So What - head; transcribed solo; improvised solo; head
Audio is from iReal Pro
🎵 Play A Great Standard In One Month – Stella – Week 3
Over the past two weeks, we've been developing our approach to "Stella By Starlight" through voicings and chord melody.
Week 1 established our harmonic foundation, while Week 2 explored how to combine those voicings with the melody to create a complete arrangement.
This week, we're shifting our attention to improvisation.
👉 Finding clear melodic lines.
🎵 Play A Great Standard In One Month – Stella – Week 2
Last week, we began our study of "Stella By Starlight" by developing a practical set of voicings through the entire form.
This week, we're taking those voicings and putting them into a more musical context:
👉 A basic chord melody.
🎵 New Series Alert – Play A Great Standard In One Month!
We've spent the last two series taking a deep dive into two of the most important forms in jazz:
• Play A Great Blues In 3 Months
• Play A Great Rhythm Changes In 3 Months
Those 14-week series gave us plenty of time to develop comping, voicings, melodic vocabulary, substitutions, and improvisational concepts over forms that show up everywhere in jazz.
Now we're ready to move a little faster.
👉 Play A Great Standard In One Month
🎵 Play A Great Rhythm Changes In 3 Months – Week 14
We've made it to Week 14 and the final lesson in our Play A Great Rhythm Changes In 3 Months series!
Over the course of this series, we've worked through rhythm changes from a number of different angles:
• Common four-mallet voicings
• Comping rhythms
• Guide tones and 3rds & 7ths
• Bebop, diminished, and chromatic vocabulary
• Chord and scale outlinings
• Substitute harmony
• Longer melodic phrases
• Transposition and register considerations
🎵 Play A Great Rhythm Changes In 3 Months – Week 13
Last week, we moved rhythm changes from B♭ into F, beginning our work on taking the concepts from this series into different keys.
This week, we're staying in F, but we're shifting our attention back to comping.
👉 More specifically, we're returning to the voicings from Week 1 and transposing them into our new key.
On paper, that sounds simple: take every voicing from B♭ and move it into F.
On the vibraphone, however, it doesn't always work that way.
🎵 Play A Great Rhythm Changes In 3 Months – Week 12
Over the past seven weeks, we've built a strong vocabulary for rhythm changes through guide tones, chord outlinings, scale motion, substitutions, and bebop language.
This week, we introduce something equally important:
👉 Playing in a new key.
🎵 Play A Great Rhythm Changes In 3 Months – Week 11
Over the past six weeks, we've steadily expanded our rhythm changes vocabulary.
We've explored: