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Reader,
Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. What better way to celebrate this joyous week than by playing the blues, am I right?
Thats exactly what Oscar Peterson plays over Santa Claus is Coming to Town in our transcription this week.
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Live Workshop This Friday
This week will will be talking about how to take a traditional holiday melody and transform, embellish and improvise to make it swing.
On Zoom at 1pm Eastern, this Friday, Dec 27.
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Today's 2-5-1
Each week I share 2 transcribed phrases, 5 ideas observed from 1 featured jazz recording.
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Santa Claus is Coming to Town
Oscar Peterson (piano), Dave Samuels (vibes), Lorne Lofsky (guitar), David Young (bass), Jerry Fuller (drums)
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Here are 5 observations I have about this tune as a whole.
- Oscar plays in Ab. How fluent are you soloing in the blues in Ab!? Yeah, me neither. What a beast. (Many of his lines use the F blues scale though, which is much more reasonable)
- In the first excerpt, notice how many b-naturals there are. That's the flat-3rd of Ab, the blue note. That note does not exist at all in the original melody, but Oscar uses it constantly for that blues flavor. (Those should be Cb's to be proper... sue me).
- In the last 2 measures of the first excerpt, Oscar approaches chord tones from a half-step below. If you've taken the 7-day blues challenge, you'll recognize this as exactly what I teach on Day 2.
- The second excerpt is crunchy. So many syncopated dissonant chords and triplet embellishments
- Yet, at the same time, the solo outlines the original melody rhythmically and gesturally.
This week on YouTube
Last week I sent you my Christmas gift, a full transcription of the solo from O Tannenbaum from A Charlie Brown Christmas.
But, did you know, I recorded myself doing that transcription for YouTube?
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Our Community is Moving
As our online community has grown, the platform I use to run it has not scaled well. And so, we need to switch to a different platform. I have a few people testing this with me now, and we'll be inviting everyone else in progressively over the next couple of weeks.
I will send you an email invite to setup your new account over there in January, so keep an eye out for that.
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Josh Walsh
Say hi 👋🏻 on YouTube or BlueSky.
Or, just reply to this email.
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The 🎅🏻 40% Off Holiday Sale 🎅🏻 ends this week.
For a limited time, get our All-Access Pass for only $119. This includes includes all of our content, including our most comprehensive course, Jazz Fundamentals. You also get access to the replay archives of all of our live workshops.
Not ready to buy anything, yet? Take our free 7-day soloing challenge - Learn step-by-step how to invent simple but authentic solo phrases.
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