Playing the jazz standard “Someday My Prince Will Come” with a playalong

Let’s play “Someday My Prince Will Come” with an Aebersold playalong. This is from volume 58 “Unforgettable Standards”. It starts off with an 8 bar vamp till ready. We’ll play our - what I call our John Taylor chord. We’ll just play over B flat major in the right hand - with the sus4 version of it. What about the scales that go with this? Well, this is a piece that’s very much rooted in B flat and you can play mostly on B flat and get away with it. If you want to be a bit more precise remember to look out for major sevenths.

We’ve got an E flat major7 in bar 3 with a sharp eleven and we’ve got an E flat major7 in the third bar of the second time.

Now that’s more important because, if you go to the second time bar - the fifth line -

it’s clearly a II-V-I to E flat major: F minor7, B flat7, E flat major, so play over E flat major for those 3 bars.

There’s 3 diminisheds: D flat diminished or C sharp diminished and E diminished. They are all modes of C 0sharp diminished scale.

If you want to be precise, I guess, bar 2 D7 sharp5 is the whole tone scale of D. E flat major7 sharp 11, we’ve discussed this -

this is a Lydian mode, as it’s called, of E flat major: it’s E flat major but you sharpen the fourth.

G7 sharp 5 is a whole tone scale based on G. I think all the rest of the chords we know about.

One small thing, perhaps, when I get to the final bar I may change it to say B major7 or A flat major7, or something, just because 3 bars of B flat major7 is a bit too static. You get a bit more chromatic tension and release that way. Then finally, how do we play the chords in the left hand?

Three ways: there’s legato, there’s stabbed and there’s Amen. Amen tends to be used a bit less in waltz time because, I guess, there’s less time to get it in. Then where do you play them? You can play them, as usual, in different parts of the bar - typically on 2, or the and of 1 - and so on - are some of the places where you might use them. Finally, I’m going to play 3 choruses. The first 2 choruses the bass is playing, roughly speaking, 1 to the bar. In the third chorus it plays 3 to the bar, so the piece lifts up a bit and swings a bit more.