This afternoon I did a quick transcription of Kenny Garrett’s solo on “Solid”, a blues in Bb written by Sonny Rollins. The transcription is from Woody Shaw’s album of the same name, which features Kenny Garrett on alto along with Peter Leitch, Kenny Barron, Neil Swainson and Victor Jones.

 Here’s a link to the PDF. The MP3 is here.

Kenny was only about 26 on this date, but he already had his own sound and conception. He has always been a master of building intensity, and this solo is no exception. The first chorus is relatively spare and he leaves lots of space between ideas. By the third chorus, he is furiously double timing. Kenny likes to lean on altered notes of the Bb7, especially at the end of each chorus. He uses a straight up F harmonic minor scale over the Bb7 going to Eb7, this isn’t something I’ve heard often and I found it very interesting. Another interesting substitution he uses is Abm7-Db7 instead of Dm7-G7 leading into the Cm7 chord at the end. He plays a Dm7 arpeggio directly before the Am7, which makes it sound especially striking. The strangest phrase from a notation perspective was the descending blues scale starting in bar 41. He crams in 4 notes before the downbeat of 42, yet clearly doesn’t start his phrase until after beat 3. Since the meter of his phrase is roughly eighth notes, I notated it a 16th note off, but in playing this phrase, I hear it as starting on beat 3 and just lay far behind the beat.

There’s a few things the transcription doesn’t reflect. The first is accurate chord changes; It’s a Bb blues, and the chord symbols in the PDF are basically just standard jazz blues changes. Kenny Barron does some great comping throughout, none of the intricacies are reflected in my chord symbols. The second thing I don’t attempt to get 100% accuracy on is rhythmic feel; Kenny is a master of laying back and pushing the beat. The way I learn rhythmic intricacies is by playing along with the soloist. While I think it can be useful to have them in the notation, you can only go so far.

Anyways, enjoy, and please let me know if you spot any mistakes.

I haven’t really blogged in a long time, mainly because I’ve been really busy and I don’t think anyone reads this anyways. however, I am going to try and start writing more about music, composition, and hopefully posting some transcriptions I’ve done recently. I am also working on some interesting non-work software stuff, which hopefully I will post about also. I am not going to blog about my workouts anymore because it is inconvenient to search my history, which is really the only reason I started doing that in the first place. so if you had subscribed to my feed and were too lazy to unsubscribe and had to read my workouts every day, I apologize. I’ll try to post more interesting stuff going forward.