🎵 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 4
Over the first three weeks of this series, we've built a solid foundation:
• Learning the form
• Internalizing common voicings
• Introducing basic comping rhythms
• Developing a feel for the harmonic movement of rhythm changes
This week, we take another step forward.
👉 We're introducing more syncopated comping rhythms.
🎵 Play A Great Rhythm Changes In 3 Months – Week 3
Over the first two weeks of this series, we've focused on building a harmonic foundation:
• Learning the form
• Internalizing common voicings
• Hearing the movement of the harmony
• Developing familiarity with rhythm changes
The rhythm was intentionally simple so all of our attention could be placed on the chords.
This week, that changes.
👉 We're introducing comping rhythms.
Many of the voicings in this lesson will already be familiar from Weeks 1 and 2. That's by design.
🎵 Play A Great Rhythm Changes In 3 Months – Week 2
Last week, we focused on learning the form and internalizing a set of common rhythm changes voicings. The rhythm was intentionally simple so all of our attention could be placed on the harmony.
This week, we're continuing that approach.
👉 The focus is still harmony, not rhythm.
The written rhythm remains simple because we're trying to build a larger vocabulary of voicings before we start introducing rhythmic comping concepts.
🚨 New Series Alert – Play A Great Rhythm Changes In 3 Months
Over the past few months, we worked through Play A Great Blues In 3 Months, building a complete approach to the blues through comping, guide tones, lines, vocabulary, melodies, and chord melody.
Now it's time for the next challenge:
👉 Rhythm Changes
If the blues is one of the foundational forms in jazz, rhythm changes is the next major milestone.
🚨 Play a Great Blues in 3 Months – Week 14
We’ve covered a lot over the course of this series:
• Guide tones
• Blues comping
• Chromaticism
• Whole tone and diminished language
• Chord melody textures
• Harmonic movement underneath simple melodies
For our final lesson, we bring many of those ideas together using:
👉 “The Intimacy of the Blues”
This arrangement continues the idea of using a relatively simple melody as a framework for richer harmonic movement underneath.
This week introduces:
🚨 Play a Great Blues in 3 Months – Week 13
Over the last few weeks, we’ve been combining blues melodies with chord voicings and moving toward a fuller chord melody approach.
This week, we use a very simple melody:
👉 “C Jam Blues”
Because the melody is so minimal, it gives us room to focus on something else:
👉 Dense harmonic movement underneath the melody
This lesson introduces several important concepts: