Hi Will. I can hear some improvements since the last time I heard you in the clarity of some of your lines on "Miss Jones". To take it a step further, I think you've gotten some good advice so far: Nail down the changes at first (including the "A-" in bar 5), and try not to be tentative about it. I feel like I can almost hear you wondering if your line is hip enough at times. Remember that "hip" encompasses a lot of terrain, and if you aren't playing hip notes, make it feel great (which is also "hip") with simpler notes.
In the head, the pianist is trying to insert the standard half step Ab- Db7 turnaround right before the G- C7 turnaround at the end of the first A section and again at the end of the bridge. It doesn't matter whether you both decide to play it or not, as long as you agree on it aurally. Either way, it's a good thing to know that it might happen at any time and to be prepared to either dig in and say (musically speaking, and with a smile) "I'd rather not", or "OK, we can go there if that's what you want". A lot of this depends on the musical personalities involved, but on the technical side, if you know what the options are it's easier to make an informed choice.
On the sax solo, he's playing pretty straight ahead, so this would be a good place to lay it down. One of the greatest lessons I've ever learned is that when you lay the changes and feel down with authority in an "inside" kind of way, the other players will be quicker to accept your more harmonically "stretching" or "outside' playing. It also helps the tune progress, as this one does. In the next solo, the piano player is subbing all kinds of chromatic/suspended reharms, indicating that he sees the A sections of the tune as basically harmonically static (which, as long turnarounds, they definitely are or can be). When this happens, as damon suggests, you can either keep laying it down if you aren't sure what to play, or you can make room for that stuff to work by taking the same approach. One nice thing to practice for this is to practice what I call "floating" the changes; instead of outlining each change of the harmony that's technically supposed to be there at each bar, practice outlining less - say every 2 or 4 bars - and simply trying to create a melody in between (inside or outside the changes) that leads to where you're going in the big picture. If you were doing this on the first A, for instance, while the piano player was going out harmonically, you would get something like:
F???/????/G-???/????/A-???/????/G-???/????/F (every 2 bars)
or
F???/????/????/????/A-???/????/????/????/F (every 4 bars)
leaving you a lot of space to create melodic ideas that aren't so bound by the harmonic rhythm. On the bridge, it's good to be more definitive, but one possibility would be to open up the changes a little bit from the denser harmonic rhythm, something like:
Bb???/Db7???/Gb???/A7???/D???/Db7???/Gb???/C7???/F (Coltrane-ish in a "Giant Steps" kind of way)
or
Bb???/Ab-???/Gb???/E-???/D???/Ab-???/Gb???/C7???/F (Coltrane-ish in a "But Not For Me" kind of way)
Keep in mind that when you think this way, the soloist gets more freedom to superimpose (which he was asking for on the recording), and you get more room to create melodies a bit less bound to a short harmonic rhythm.
Keep up the good work!
