This once-a-month Friday has become my only chance to play with these guys anymore. Thankful for the chance to stretch out, play a little jazz, groove to some 12 bar blues, and ponder a Steely Dan tune here and there. We didn't dive into anything new this time, which was odd. It seemed like more of the same. No worries there, as we have plenty to pull from. Without a master list in front of us, we tend to grab the same ones over and over. We played a reverent
Stella By Starlight. I need to come up with some good reharminizations for that one; I always liked playing the tritone Db9 under the G7+5 in the bridge. I'm certain there are some hipper ones that are more desirable. The opening chord sequence of Em7(b5) to A7(b9) can be thought of from a melodic perspective as a D minor scale (even harmonic minor to include the C#) leading to Eb7 (the tritone of A7) - that's a nice jumping point for the first 2 bars...
Here's a link to a John Scofield article I found while poking around - from one blogger to another, right? He gives some good ideas about simply running scales and later arpeggios over the changes in order to really learn a tune. Then he explains that this is simply a way to memorize or get the tune in your head; real players don't simply run scales during their solos. It's a nice approach. As I get older and hopefully wiser, I find that I need to make the most of what time I do have to play. This is a good method to consider, provided the faithful reader has many of the correct tools at one's disposal. Check it out.
http://somuchsound.blogspot.com/2012/02/sco-how-to-practice-tune.html
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