Beegie Adair's Christmas albums are masterpieces 🎄🎹

Reader,

You can't go anywhere this time of year without hearing Christmas jazz in every storefront. I love it, especially when some of the great Beegie Adair recordings are played.

Beegie is a modern legend of all kinds of swing, ballads, and love songs. But perhaps best known for her holiday albums. So let's take a look inside one of her solos over Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.

Free Workshop this Friday 🎄🎹

This week we'll be exploring some simple block chord movements, ala George Shearing, and apply them to the tune White Christmas.

On Zoom at 1pm Eastern, this Friday, Dec 13.

If you want to come to these, but 1pm on Fridays doesn't fit your schedule, reply to this and let me know a better time.

Today's 2-5-1

Each week I share 2 transcribed phrases, 5 ideas observed from 1 featured jazz recording.

Here are 5 observations I have about this tune as a whole.

1. Beegie plays with such lyrical melodic phrasing. It's as if her hands are singing -- pushing and pulling the rhythm, in a legato articulation.
2. She also loves to play accelerating or decelerating runs and arpeggios. You can see one example of this in the 2nd excerpt above, where the line starts with 16th notes and then decelerates into 8th note triplets at the end.
3. She is the queen of the tritone substitution with big lush voicings. You find them all over her recordings, as seen twice in the 2nd example
4. Look at the colorful notes Beegie targets in her lines. In the top example, she targets the major 7th on the Ab chord, the 9th on the Ab-, and the 7th on G7.
5. I'm jealous of Beegie's fluency with big lush chords, which are often 5 or 6 note voicings, which rarely double notes.

This week on the YouTube channel

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3 Must Know Jazz Chords from Charlie Brown