Tuesday, December 02, 2014

Philly Joe starts a chorus: The Theme

Another micro-transcription looking at how Philly Joe Jones plays the beginning of a chorus. The tune is The Theme, from the Miles Davis album Miles (what it says on the cover), or The New Miles Davis Quintet (how it's usually cataloged). This is what Joe plays when the horns come in after the bass solo, at 1:40. The opening roll is on the last measure of the bass solo:




It's a variation on the same sort of thing he was doing last time, with a fill before the top of the chorus, a strong crash on beat 1, with accents around beat 4 of that measure, and the next measure. The accents and the comping generate a lot of momentum; it was hard to end the transcription where I did. He doesn't play the hihat consistently until the third measure after the double bar, so I left it out at the beginning; we're really looking at Joe being an arranger here, and the consistent hihat in bar 3 of the new chorus really acts as an arrangement element.

This is another record you definitely own, but here:

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