PRACTICE PORTAL

“SATELLITE”, from the Coltrane record, COLTRANE SOUND, is conceptually similar to songs like “COUNTDOWN” and “26-2″. it demonstrates his intense scrutiny and re-imagining of jazz harmony. in Coltrane, we are blessed to have a musician who was a deep thinker and theoretician, as well as a highly skilled practitioner, a rare combination in any discipline. we’re also very fortunate that Coltrane’s development was so well documented… “SATELLITE” is more appealing to me than, say, “GIANT STEPS” because at the end of each chorus there’s an eight measure pedal point that allows the chord progression to breathe a bit and a soloist to regroup for the next pass. throughout his six chorus solo, instead of letting up, Coltrane uses those eight bars to build the momentum of his solo through the use of dissonance. as a result, the top of each successive chorus sounds like a dam breaking, unable to hold the water behind it. Trane plays a beautiful solo accompanied by Elvin Jones on drums and Steve Davis on bass…

JOHN COLTRANE- SOLO FROM “SATELLITE” (mp3)

SOLO TRANSCRIPTION FOR “SATELLITE” (pdf)

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)