Alright, so looks like I lied yesterday about it being my last post for a while. Once you get into a rhythm working with Sibelius, you get pretty quick at inputting things and might as well keep going! This is definitely it for at least a week or so... I gotta practice this stuff!!!
Not You Again is a John Scofield contra-fact over the changes of There Will Never Be Another You. It can be heard on the 2000 album, Works For Me. My ensemble director back in my first year of undergrad (2003), Jamie Clark, had us playing this tune and urged us to check out the album and its "dream band": John Scofield, Kenny Garrett, Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride & the late Billy Higgins. Jamie, you were onto something!
Listen to Brad's solo
Click here to view WITH chord symbols (my interpretation) over his LH superimposed chords
Click here to view WITHOUT chord symbols over his LH superimposed chords
As you can see from the date stamp, I first transcribed this YEARS ago (stayed up all night doing it, much to the annoyance of my parents). Tinkered around with it to make my ego feel good that I had worked out something "hip", although I never really studied it properly - I was 18 at the time and terrified of what I was hearing. I decided to take another look at it today so I could clean it up (my LH chords in the 2nd chorus were way off), put it through Sibelius and post it on this blog. 6.5 years on, and it still scares me... although thankfully not as much! I still don't really know what's going on in the 2nd chorus, but at least I'm now in a better position to try and work it out! :-)
I tried to transcribe McBride's bass line too, but didn't get very far (hard to hear the pitches clearly, especially when he sometimes gets lost in the mix with the drums). From what I can hear overall, he mostly sticks to the changes as written.
Anyway, enjoy this one. If anyone can shed some light on what sort of "concept" Brad is using to reharmonise the 2nd chorus, leave me a comment. Cheers!
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ReplyDeleteHey man, first off, thanks for the transcription! Second,if you want an explanation of the chords he uses, here you go!
ReplyDeleteHis technique is based on using a maj7 chord to represent other harmonies. What I mean is that Cmaj7 could also represent chords like Amin7, D7, Fmaj7(#11), B phrygian, etc. because of it being an upper structure of those chords.
In the course of this solo, he mainly uses the relationships of Cmaj7 = D7 and Cmaj7 = Amin7. Some examples of these are in measuers 5-8 of the second chorus. He first uses Ebmaj7 to represent Cmin7, then Amaj7 to represent B7 (the tritone substitution of F7), and then Gmaj7 to represent Emin7 and A7 (the tritone subs of Bbmin7 and Eb7).
This solo uses only these relationships (with the exception of in a few instances using alternate cadences like bIII-bII-I), but sometimes in much more disguised ways. I'd recommend analyzing this solo using that sort of lens, but if you want my full analysis, give me your email and I'll send it your way.
Please, i really want your full analysis. Already thank you for this small explanation that gave a light. But if you can give the pleasure to learn more from you about this solo analysis, here is my email avieiramev@hotmail.com thanks
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