Week 5 Exercises

So I’d like you to do a few exercises on what we have discussed in this session. First of all play the tune “Inchworm”. More importantly, improvise on the 2 chords Eflat major7, Fmajor7 using the lower voicings first and the upper voicings second, so you get used to the feel of those two chords

and using our three approaches: scalic, chordal and motivic - where we use elements of the tune. Then I’d like you to look at the turnaround and have a go at improvising on the turnaround, again getting a feel of the chords in the left hand - that’s the key thing - and appreciating that you can just stay on the tonic scale, on the major scale that you’re aiming for. That’s the good news; not much to do. The bad news is that I would like you to do it in several keys. As you know, there are twelve keys.

If I call C a flat key

then there are 6 flat keys: C, F, Bflat, Eflat, Aflat and Dflat;

and 6 sharp keys: G, D, A, E, B and Fsharp. The flat keys are more important in jazz because the trumpet and saxophone use flat keys and so those are the ones that are predominantly used. It doesn’t mean to say that the sharp keys aren’t important, but we can get to them a bit later. What I suggest you do is that you try out your “Inchworm” chords, the two chords, in the keys of - shall we say let’s do half of then - so we’ll do 4 flat and 2 sharp. So the 4 flats I suggest are C, F, Bflat and Eflat, those keys, and the 2 sharps are G and D.

Then we can look at increasing our keys as the course progresses. As I say, what is important is really to get the feel of our voicings and to get to them quickly. That is obviously going to take us some time, but we need to make a start.