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All Blues

Another week, another tune. This one’s a classic, and strictly speaking, it’s actually just a blues in concert G. But I was trying to capture some of the original Miles Davis version. (On which all the solos kill me, though I used to focus on the Coltrane; lately, I’ve reached a new appreciation of just how badass Cannonball Adderley was–that’s the first sax solo, for those who are curious.)

These days, I’m trying to get better at walking the line between “inside” and “outside”: the more traditional, “tonal” sounding playing that I’ve been working on since picking up the horn again, and the wilder, more “atonal” approach that dominated my playing in my younger days.

There’s only a little of that here. I’m focusing on it a lot harder in the rendition of “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” (the Duke Ellington tune), where I’ve been practicing the tune intensively, to find the places where slipping between those modes works best, as well as figuring out how to do it so that, even when I’m playing against or across the chord structure, I’m still really playing “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” (Which is a bit of a tough task: it’s a bit like trying to figure out how to make a chocolate cake, where parts of it have chocolate, and other parts have banana and hot peppers, but it’s still somehow truly a “chocolate cake.”)

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