Over There - Queen of Sheeba 7/11/15

A most interesting session today. I found listening to the smaller groups quite revealing. I think when we play as a full group we perhaps don’t always take as much responsibility for our own part - it’s easy to rely on our neighbours (that’s your neighbour in the class rather than your neighbour at home … ) In the small group setting everyone has to know where they are and be ready to come in with their solo or backing etc.

I thought our extended version of Queen Of Sheba was tremendous. Sadly, I didn’t record this. Top work from our rhythm section and special thanks to Beau Barnard for stepping in at short notice on the bass.

I did however record our three performances of Over There and they are now in the Dropbox. There is some lovely playing on these tracks.

Band 1 is Annie, Wook, Patrick, Stuart, Beau & Charlie

Band 2 is Ash, Kim, Jim, Mike, Beau & Charlie

Band 3 is Steve L, Steve F, Neil, Aprile, Beau & Charlie

Also, I had a go at home, doing a short solo over the iRealPro backing I sent out last time. This is attached below and is in the Dropbox. For me, the biggest challenge was the time. It was OK if I stuck to slow moving notes but playing faster often made me lose my place. I found by staying diatonic (in the major scale) most notes sounded OK but I wanted to try some different colours on the ‘tweaked’ chords. This was hard - I had several goes at it! Thanks to Steve for finding this piece.

Look forward to seeing you all on November 27th (I’ll get the new music out shortly)

Cheers Mark

Over There - Feedback

Hi Everyone,

There was some beautiful playing again today - and some exciting risk taking!

I’ve just created a couple of backing tracks for Over There  which you might find useful.

Over There (backing1) does four cycles of the regular chords and then two cycles of some ‘tweaked’ chords (see below) before finishing with two more cycles of the regular chords again, plus the backing line (featuring some dodgy singing from some bloke…) The so-called ‘tweaked’ chords feature the two variations we discussed today: adding #5 to the first chord in bar 3 and adding 13, b9 and b5 to the first chord in bar 4. I have also put in various 7ths and the occasional 9th. All of this stuff happens at different points during the Terence Blanchard recording (I haven’t just made it all up!!) 

Over There (backing2) does just four cycles of the ‘tweaked’ chords

_______________________________________________________

The ‘tweaked’ chords in concert are as follows:

|| G∆    A/C# | G∆/B    A7 | G∆#5    Em9 | A13b9b5    D/F# ||

NB  G∆#5 could be notated as B/G

A13b9b5 could be notated as Ebm/A

_______________________________________________________

The ‘tweaked’ chords in Bb are as follows:

|| A∆    B/D# | A∆/C#    B7 | A∆#5    F#m9 | B13b9b5    E/G# ||

NB  A∆#5 could be notated as C#/A

B13b9b5 could be notated as Fm/B

_______________________________________________________

The ‘tweaked’ chords in Eb are as follows:

|| E∆    F#/A# | E∆/G#    F#7 | E∆#5    C#m9 | F#13b9b5    B/D# ||

NB  E∆#5 could be notated as G#/E (or Ab/E)

F#13b9b5 could be notated as Cm/F#

Mark