Playing “Blue Room” with a playalong using lower voicings

Let’s start using our playalong to play the tune using lower voicings.

Given that there are 2 positions for Fmajor7: the third inversion, the 69 chord - let’s choose our lower voicings and let’s try and choose voicings which are close by.

Our very first chord is Fmajor7 - it’s that.

It starts off with a turnaround: so we know Dminor7 is the first inversion, Gminor7 is the third inversion, C7 is the ninth voicing. Then we come to Cminor7 which is the second inversion, F7 which is the thirteenth, Bflat major, for which I am using the 69 voicing, then Eflat7 which I am going to play as the ninth voicing because it is quite close to Dminor7 — the first inversion, G7 - thirteenth, Gminor7 - the third inversion, C7 - the ninth voicing. Then it happens again. Now we are at the second time bar Gminor7, as before C7, home to Fmajor7. Now we come to the middle 8. The first chord is C7, then we play Gminor7, C7, Fmajor7 again.

Then we play Aminor7 - third inversion, D7 - the ninth voicing, because it’s only a tone away from C7 - the ninth voicing, then it’s II, V and then Dminor7, G7, Gminor7, C7 as before. Then, here we go with the turnaround - last line - OK, we’re going to play the tune in this octave so that it’s away from the voicings so that there is no overlap. One important thing to point out to you is that we are going to use the Aebersold playalong. The Aebersold playalong starts with a 4 bar introduction of the chord C7.

So I’ll just play C7 and then I’ll try and play the tune simply just using two chords to the bar with my lower voicings.

Here’s the first bar of the introduction.

Now here’s the tune.

Now the middle section.