Improvising on “All The Things You Are” using 5 major scales

So let’s use our 5 scales to improvise on “All The Things You Are”.

I’m going to go back on what I said on improvising because here what I really want to do is to try and persuade you that the major scales - the 5 major scales - sound more or less right when we just use the notes that are in the scale. They’re about 90, 95% right and the amount by which they don’t quite work we’ll discuss in the next section.

I’m going to, at least for one chorus, run up and down the notes of the appropriate scale so that you can hear what they sound like. Perhaps I’ll do 2 choruses and in the second chorus I’ll try and make it a little bit more musical - a little bit closer to real improvising.

This particular track is from volume 55 of the Aebersold playalongs - “Yesterdays” it’s called - and we’re doing the slow version of “All The Things You Are”. It starts off with an 8 bar introduction which is a 2 chord vamp - so it’s one chord of A flat major7 followed by one chord of G flat major7.

We will just improvise on the scales of A flat major7 and G flat major7 - very similar to what we did with “Inchworm” where we had F major7 and E flat major7 - with the exception that the last bar of the 8 bar introduction is like the last bar of our version of the tune - namely it’s a G-based chord and a C-based chord that takes us back to the F minor7 which is the start of the tune.