Many thanks to star bassist Matt Ridley for braving the snow and providing us with a challenging session where we attempted the following compositions:
“Slam” by Jim Hall
“One Near Miss” by Matt Ridley
The first composition “Slam” didn’t have any chords to it, although it had a bluesy type feel and consisted of 36 bars in 4/4 through which short phrases were interspersed. The co-op played these sometimes abstract phrases whilst each member soloed filling up the gaps in a type of call and response.
The second composition provided a much sterner challenge to reading skills and also to improvisation over some tricky changes. “One Near Miss Once” was penned by Matt and is a contrafact to the Kenny Wheeler composition “Onmo” from the album “Angel Song” and consists of two 16 bar sections in 4/4; the first section had five note groupings involving triplets giving a sort of 12/8 feel; the second section contained the same notes but presented in quavers. Matt spent quite some time teaching each of the co-op members the melody individually; even so, I think that most people struggled. Luckily out youngest member (Jonah) showed us how it was done through his excellent reading skills! I think that everyone found the soloing challenging too with Kenny Wheeler’s hatred of standard chord sequences and liberal usage of slash chords.
Thanks again to Matt for a challenging session.
