Transcription: Elvin Jones - Foolin' Myself - 04

UPDATE: Boy I suck. This is of course the third solo chorus, and the fourth total entry in this series. I'll fix that... sometime. 

Continuing that Elvin Jones transcription from late last year— Elvin Jones playing on Foolin' Myself, from Lee Konitz's album Motion. This page begins at 2:55 in the track. We're getting into some more involved stuff here. 

You can see he plays some denser 16th note stuff in the sixth line— that's the last four bars of the bridge. I've adjusted them slightly to make them practiceable licks. In the first three bars he's playing a three beat pattern: 

Play that in 6/4 to add hihat the way you'd play it in 4/4:  

In the last bar of that line he plays a six note pattern, twice, with one note different. You can practice it either way: 

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Transcription: Elvin Jones - Foolin' Myself - 03

We'll keep going with this. Part 3 of Elvin Jones playing on Foolin' Myself, from Lee Konitz's record Motion. This is the second chorus of Konitz's solo, starting at 1:57 in the track. 

The previous entries were pretty clean and straightforward, here there are a few unusual/organic things that don't resolve perfectly as something to practice. 

Like there are some 16th notes on the last beat of the fourth line— the 4e&a1 there. It didn't come out as intended, and there's no reason to practice it like it's deliberate vocabulary. And at the end of the 8th line there are four bass drum notes in a row, in a triplet rhythm— the first two are ghosted, the last two are played. It's an artifact of Elvin's technique, and of a certain physical momentum.  

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Transcription: more medium tempo Elvin

Here's some more of Elvin Jones playing that same tune from yesterday, Foolin' Myself, from Lee Konitz's record Motion. This is the first chorus of Konitz's solo, starting at 0:58:

It's pretty straightforward if you want to learn what he's doing— take it 1, 2, or 4 measures at a time, ignoring the dynamic markings and articulations at first. Swing the 8th notes. 

Or just listen and follow along. You can approach it looking for “stuff to play”, but I listen now it just sounds like someone accomplishing time— I just hear attention to time. 

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Transcription: Elvin plays in 2

A little transcription of Elvin Jones playing in 2, on the hihat, on the head of Foolin' Myself from the Lee Konitz album Motion. In case you're short of comping ideas, or phrasing ideas when playing in 2. I've never played the tune, but it's a regular old 32 bar standard.  

That's open hihat all the way through, except + is a closed sound, and a staccato mark is half-open. He plays it softly with the foot in a few spots too. In fact much of the time he closes the hihat before the beat:  
 

This happened a lot on my titanic yet-unfinished transcription of Chasin' The Trane, too— his hihat landed before the 2 and 4. 

The rhythm is swung all the way through, but there are a few spots where I marked a dotted 8th and 16th note rhythm— where a comping note was very tight against the following beat. Those were ghosted, generally. 

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Very occasional quote of the day: Lee Konitz

From my friend and collaborator saxophonist Tim Willcox on his lesson with Lee Konitz, who died yesterday:

When it came down to asking Lee my very specific questions about how he practiced and learned to do this and that, Lee said, “I never really practiced that stuff. I just learned by osmosis... from playing with those guys every night.” And then he said, “why don't we play?”

Transcription: Jack Dejohnette - Peasant Dance

Hey, the longest transcription we've done in awhile, here, a three pager. It's Jack Dejohnette playing on a very interesting record I had not really heard before: Peacemeal, by Lee Konitz, recorded in 1969. It's a quintet, with Konitz on alto and tenor, and some electronic device, and Marshall Brown on valve trombone and baritone horn. This is a jazz arrangement of Peasant Dance, from Bela Bartók's Mikrokosmos. This is the blowing over a vamp starting at 1:20. 

It was difficult at times for me to isolate the bass drum from Eddie Gomez's bass playing, so I probably left some out, or put some things in that were actually the acoustic bass. Dejohnette swings his 16th notes for much of this; relating that back to this recent post, that's equivalent a normal jazz tune played at quarter note = 230— getting towards the upper limit for swinging the rhythm.

After the recent Max Roach series, I like the idea of making study guides based on transcriptions— maybe I'll get to that later in the week.

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