Tunes

Just a quick tip here. Dig by Miles is a great melody to study. Try playing it and tapping your feet on 2 and 4! Try playing it by yourself and just making it swing. All the offbeats make it a challenge.

I think it's great to study melodies and to work on phrasing them. Actually I think it's an Art the way some players play melodies. I know I too often overlook them and take them for granted. But there's so much to learn playing and studying melodies.

Our next TOTM is Autumn Leaves. Here is one of my favorite versions. Do you know who Eva Cassidy is? Man check her out, she is pretty heavy. More of a blues singer, but wow, she gives me chills. She died very young and in her prime. I'm a huge Eva Cassidy fan and this is my most favorite versions of Autumn Leaves.

We won't use this to study, but I just figured I'd post it.

POST YOUR FAVORITE VERSIONS OF AUTUMN LEAVES IN THE COMMENTS. WE WILL BUILD A HUGE JUKE BOX OF AUTUMN LEAVES!

Check out the versions below. All the interpretations. Man!!!

I was working in a lesson with Nathaniel and we were working on here's that rainy day. I've been messing around with stuff we worked on and thought I'd pass it along. We were working on these sort of clusters and voicings. Here's a PDF with some of the stuff we were talking about.

This might actually be a GREAT TOTM (tune of the month).

Just banged it out. Let me know if anything is weird.

Hey guys,

This is a GREAT exercise for writing, improvising, and tune learning. The idea is to write a new melody over the chord changes to an old standard tune. You can alter the harmony a little bit here and there to fit your new melody but the idea is that you could call a standard tune everyone knows, but it will sound completely different.

I get to play with David Friedman

Smokin!!!!