New Transcription Posted: Sam Jones on Autumn Leaves

[Intenzity]

A classic that probably a lot of folks have done themselves, but if you haven't, check it out here on my blog, with some analysis and witty commentary as usual.

http://bassoridiculoso.blogspot.com/...on-leaves.html

Download the thing as a pdf and check it out. Good stuff in there.

Enjoy.

[SR505bassman]

Thanks for the transcription and analysis - well done!

[steve9000gi]

Looked over your transcription last night. Excellent work. As always, there were some notes I wasn't sure of (yeah, some of those Eb's could have been E's, as you noted) but I didn't find any obviously wrong notes. With great respect, some observations:

0) Possibly a trivial detail, but your work is so beautiful it would be nice for everything to be as nearly perfect as possible: The opening lick happens 23 times. You say "repeat 24x" which could be interpreted as meaning either 24 or 25 times total, so I'd suggest saying "play 23x." I’d also count out the end (I didn't, myself).

1) I assume it's an artifact of your transcription/scoring software, and I can see how it happened, but what you call bar 6 is actually bar 28. I'll use your numbering scheme with quotes here, but it would be nice to have the correct bar count.

2) Is the chord at the beginning of the bridge really Am7b5? I've always wondered about that with this recording anyway, and studying the bass makes it even more questionable. In almost every case (bars "19", "51", "83", "115", "147", "179") the bass plays it as a D chord, I think D7, and the one time he starts the bridge with an A (bar "211"), the second half of the bar is a D, strongly implying that he's treating it as a D chord starting on the 5th (which he does on other chords elsewhere in the song). As an addendum, I’m tempted to think that’s an F# on beat 3 of bar “51”, treating it as some kind of D Major as he does elsewhere.

3) It seems strange to me that he never smooths that tritone root progression from EbM7 to Am7b5 (e.g, bars "14" - "15") by playing a line on EbM7 that ends up on the 5 of the chord on beat 4, i.e., Bb, and then, on beat 1 of the next bar, drops down a half step onto the root of the Am7b5, and the Bb is a chord tone to boot. No criticism -- it's a superb bass line -- but it seems to me like it would be an unavoidable choice, at least sometimes. Wonder what I’m not getting.

4) Yeah, it is interesting how he plays the E natural on beat 2 of the Cm. It makes me think about theoretical discussions where it's said you're more free in your note choices on the "weak" beats, i.e., 2 and 4, but, as you say, he's not necessarily using it as a half step approach note into the F7 (although he does in bar "23").

5) Final picky point: You've done everything else so well, why not put in the final note?

Thanks again for your fine transcription. More, please. How about “One for Daddy-o” off the same record?

-Steve

[AMp'D.2play]

Thank you!

It's been nice to compare/contrast this to what I've come up with working on this standard in Ed Friedland's BWBL book.

An interesting observation (for me) is I've used this transcription as an exercise for jotting down the scale degrees ... as Ed does both in the BWBL and Bass Method books ... and there's A LOT of use of roots & 5ths. A handful of 3rds and chromatic approaches, too.

Broken down like that, I'm starting to realize that a good walking bass line doesn't have to be as intimidating as it first appears. Not saying it's "easy", but I'm starting to see how the pieces of the puzzle fall into place.

[MalcolmAmos]

Yes I was glad to see his use of R's, 3's & 5's. He did not venture far from those three notes. Lot of bass can be played with just those chord tones.

I've been exploring what I call generic bass lines lately. For example:

• Every basic chord will have a root, a 5 and an 8.
• All major chords will have a 3.
• All minor chords will have a b3.
• The 6 is neutral.
• The 2 and 4 make good passing notes, so if you do not linger on them or land on them they too are generic.

If you are a little selective with the 3 or b3 and the 7 or b7 there are a lot of generic bass lines that will work over all the chords in the song.

We tend to make it complicated.

[Intenzity]

Thanks for the awesome feedback! This is great, I was hoping for info like this. Very much appreciated!

Originally Posted by steve9000gi

0) Possibly a trivial detail, but your work is so beautiful it would be nice for everything to be as nearly perfect as possible: The opening lick happens 23 times. You say "repeat 24x" which could be interpreted as meaning either 24 or 25 times total, so I'd suggest saying "play 23x." I’d also count out the end (I didn't, myself).

Good point, I was counting the times it was played and it should be said how you mention. The end as well should probably be changed to make the repeats come out the right number of times.

Originally Posted by steve9000gi

1) I assume it's an artifact of your transcription/scoring software, and I can see how it happened, but what you call bar 6 is actually bar 28. I'll use your numbering scheme with quotes here, but it would be nice to have the correct bar count.

Yea, I dont know what PrintMusic was thinking, but all those are auto-generated, or auto-misgenerated as this case may be. Perhaps I copied and pasted a bar around there, sometimes it does odd stuff when you copy/paste. Not sure what happened there. I will see what is going on.

Originally Posted by steve9000gi

2) Is the chord at the beginning of the bridge really Am7b5? I've always wondered about that with this recording anyway, and studying the bass makes it even more questionable. In almost every case (bars "19", "51", "83", "115", "147", "179") the bass plays it as a D chord, I think D7, and the one time he starts the bridge with an A (bar "211"), the second half of the bar is a D, strongly implying that he's treating it as a D chord starting on the 5th (which he does on other chords elsewhere in the song). As an addendum, I’m tempted to think that’s an F# on beat 3 of bar “51”, treating it as some kind of D Major as he does elsewhere.

Yea, I wondered about this too. I was not sure, so I went with just the traditional chord changes. I guess I will have to listen to the piano part more and find out what is going on. If I can get a clear line on what the piano is playing I will change it to match that.

Originally Posted by steve9000gi

3) It seems strange to me that he never smooths that tritone root progression from EbM7 to Am7b5 (e.g, bars "14" - "15") by playing a line on EbM7 that ends up on the 5 of the chord on beat 4, i.e., Bb, and then, on beat 1 of the next bar, drops down a half step onto the root of the Am7b5, and the Bb is a chord tone to boot. No criticism -- it's a superb bass line -- but it seems to me like it would be an unavoidable choice, at least sometimes. Wonder what I’m not getting.

Maybe he was just going for that jarring jump as an effect? It is a big milestone through the tune each time, it really jumps out. Sounds like you got it to me

4) Yeah, it is interesting how he plays the E natural on beat 2 of the Cm. It makes me think about theoretical discussions where it's said you're more free in your note choices on the "weak" beats, i.e., 2 and 4, but, as you say, he's not necessarily using it as a half step approach note into the F7 (although he does in bar "23").

5) Final picky point: You've done everything else so well, why not put in the final note?

Woops. I will add that.

How about “One for Daddy-o” off the same record?

Hehe, right now I am doing the trumpet solo from Autumn Leaves and putting it in bass clef, and maybe I will do the alto solo, although, it is pretty crazy for a bass. But I will put that one on the list! Its a blues if I recall?

Thanks again for all the feedback, my hope was that these were useable and readable by someone else and were not just written out in a way that only the person who wrote them could understand them. I have found a few on the net like that...

There are more in the pipeline, just gotta get through them and bang them out!

[steve9000gi]

Yeah, "One for Daddy-o" is a classic smoky, late-night, chitlin' circuit blues, simple enough, but there are some harmonic ambiguities (as in this "Autumn Leaves") that a bass transcription might illuminate. Like, what precisely are they playing for the turnaround? Is it a V-V, a ii-V, or what?

Miles' solo on "Autumn Leaves" would be wonderful to have transcribed. I've usually found Miles fairly accessible for writing down his licks, obviously because he's so spare. Cannonball, or Coltrane when he's around: those guys are another story.

The numbering: I think it just put in the actual number of bars you wrote out. So that one-bar lick played 23x at the beginning is down as bar one, and the next bar (actually 24) with the quarter note) is "2". Not sure if the software will let you manually reset the bar numbers.

Thanks again for your great work on this tune.

-Steve

[Throckmorten]

Economy and understatement IMO the soul of the best music.
I've always liked Sam Jones playing but have not taken time to analyze. Thank you very much for this.
I'm headed for the woodshed to simplify my lines.

[monroe55]

Hey Intenzity,
Ive been enjoying your blog for the last few weeks. I appreciate all the info you put in, for free!. However, I'm seeking my reward for reading/guessing the "Sheriff" bass line this morning.
I was wondering if you could do a blog about Giant Steps. I was wondering if you could suggest any links that discuss it or I like the way you explain things and would be interested to read how you would break that tune down. How the bass line functions, how to solo over it, why people say Giant Steps is so tricky to improvise over, etc.
Keep up the blog, great stuff.

-Generalisimo

[Intenzity]

AHA!

You have been exposed!

Well, congrats, you now have the Fraternal Order of Grande Ridiculoso bestowed upon thee. Officially. A suitable-for-framing high-quality laser printed certificate to that effect may be available at some point in the future.

Soooo Giant Steps huh. Well..

It would take me a bit to get something on that worked up, but in the mean time I will point you at some resources. Luckily, that tune is one of the most analyzed and examined tunes of the 20th century, so there is no shortage of info on it. Lots of guys much wiser and with even more Ridiculoso than I have been explaining it for years.

The tune certainly has this mystical reputation as being an arse kicking tune, but it's not really that the tune is so difficult, it is just that it is different than a lot of the tunes you are probably used to playing, thats all. But once you get how it is different, you will probably say, "wait, thats it?". You probably play a tune now that has two chords per bar, right, at least for a section? So its not that Giant Steps' harmonic motion is hard or unique in that regard, (tempo not withstanding, if some music school smarty pants counts it off at 300 bpm, well anything is gonna be hard then) you just have to do a little prep work on what is going on.

Here are a couple of books to check out that lay out the whole tune and what makes it different, soup to nuts, all of it. Where the tune came from (Coltrane did not make the idea up, believe it or not), what the deal is with the progression, and how to Coltrane-ify any song or solo you want using the progression technique from Giant Steps (and Countdown and his other tunes that use the same idea).

1. Raymond Rickers - Coltrane A Players Guide To His Harmony - A sax player walks through it. Now in any case, you should have your ii-v's together and know your way around a few standards and already know how to analyze a tune for key centers before you jump into this or else it is gonna be confusing. Not a good first tune to start with. But if you have all that, this is a great book. There is also a companion Aebersold book that has chunks of the progression to work on at a time.
2. Joe Diorio - Giant Steps - Same dealy-o, just from a guitar player. He also breaks it down and talks about the idea behind the progression and what makes it different and then goes into ways to play on it. He gets in the digital patterns/change running/sequence aspect of it specifically for guitar, so there are some similar fingerings for us.

Both those books are really great, and lay it all out. Mark Levine's Jazz Theory book talks about it too, I am pretty sure.

If you have to know NOW - this egghead literally wrote his doctoral thesis in part on the tune, and while the pdf is kinda, uh, dense, he does describe what makes the progression different in that pdf. Somewhere. He also shows a lot of the places the idea came from before Coltrane used it.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sourc...b7pHHlZYHxQ7sg

And here is one more from a great saxophonists blog, http://davidvaldez.blogspot.com/

http://valdez.dumarsengraving.com/PD...ranecycles.PDF

But don't let the reputation of the tune intimidate you, in some ways it is actually an easier tune to play on, (like I said, tempo not withstanding) because there are a lot of choices that are made for you by the nature of the progression and the fact that you only have 2 beats to do anything with the chord in a lot of places. It's a lot easier on an instrument like an electric bass than you might think to do what Coltrane did in parts of his solo, (play the same specific pattern of notes for each chord) because we have these finger patterns we get to just slide around, and ta-da, once we have the pattern we just move it where we want. I am not saying it is easy, just that understanding what makes this tune so different is pretty straightforward.

Check out those books, and don't let any of the theory talk get to you, the core idea is surprising easy to get, but like a lot concepts, its easy to get, but takes time and effort to master and really get sounding well. Even Doirio says in his book, it is different and so you have to spend some time working through it. So if I guy like him had to work out a few things for that tune, then..well, it means there is gonna be some serious homework for normal humans like us.

[monroe55]

Awesome! Thanks for that response and the links. Ill get started.
I definately have a grasp on theory and I've been playing "the standard standards" for a while. I like to listen to Giant Steps a lot. Ive always heard people mention learning to play Giant Steps as a milestone so I was curious as to why. Id like to find a good video/recording of a bass player playing GS and taking a solo. Anyone have any links?
Thanks again Intenzity!

[Intenzity]

You do know about this thing called "google" right?

And "YouTube" ?

Methenys version as a sorta-bossa kinda
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nSXTMCZ3ac

Patatucci demolishing it at north of 200bpm on six string
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyyXCsKdnyI

Matt Garrison being a smart ass and playing it in 7/8. Showoff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LdqAfZ-Dhg

[monroe55]

Originally Posted by Intenzity

You do know about this thing called "google" right?

And "YouTube" ?

Methenys version as a sorta-bossa kinda
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nSXTMCZ3ac

Patatucci demolishing it at north of 200bpm on six string
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyyXCsKdnyI

Matt Garrison being a smart ass and playing it in 7/8. Showoff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LdqAfZ-Dhg

Lol. I know about google and youtube> I just wanted you to show me. I figured you might have a specific video that stands out in your memory. Besides, I like your website, its as funny to read as it is informative. Thanks man.