PRACTICE PORTAL

Following up on recent posts about diatonic transpositon of melodies, i decided to take things a little further and apply this process to a denser melody. as of late, i’ve been putting a lot of time into shedding music from Coltrane’s middle period. on songs like “Giant Steps”, “Countdown” and “26-2″, Coltrane took his harmonic, and corresponding melodic, exploration to new heights of complexity. in an earlier post where i compared solos by Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley on “Grand Central”, i mentioned that while Adderley functioned on the molecular level, so to speak, Coltrane operated on the atomic level, applying his groundbreaking harmonic ideas to conventional bebop progressions as well as his original music. “26-2″ is loosely based on Charlie Parker’s “Comfirmation” changes. the 32 bar melody is quite a challenge to play and blowing over the changes is incredibly difficult because the constantly evolving chord progression only slightly lets up (but not much!) during the bridge. one of the rules i outlined for diatonic transposition is that 11ths should be raised on all Major and Dominant 7th chords. well, rules are made to be broken. while i did raise the 11ths on all Major chords, i decided not to do so with  the Dominant chords this time. you can play the transcription as written and then try it with the 11ths raised. listen to what your ear tells you. as you play through the different transpositions you’ll find any number of cool melodic ideas you might want to explore in your own blowing…

“26-2 STUDY” (pdf)

Tags: Exercise, John Coltrane, Transcription

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 10th, 2009 at 9:40 AM and is filed under EXERCISES, TRANSCRIPTIONS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.