Sheryl Bailey

June 15, 2013: Sheryl Bailey Master Class

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Many thanks to the stellar Sheryl Bailey for some great tuition in this master class. To start the session, Sheryl performed a couple of numbers with Jon and Pete on drums and bass:

“Mr P.C.” by John Coltrane
“Blue Bossa” by Kenny Dorham

Mr P.C. Apologies for the quality of the video – I was finding a reasonable position for the camera at the time:

Blue Bossa – wow!:

In an interesting session Sheryl answered questions posed by Mickey which were along the lines of “what can we do to improve”. Some of her answers were: learn your inversions, learn your arpeggios and learn melodic embellishments. Here’s Sheryl talking about arpeggios:

And the use of melodic embellishments (enclosures):

The rest of the session was taken with Sheryl’s extension of the bebop scale called “Microcosmic Bebop Line”. Here is a clip where she demonstrates it and shows a couple of its applications:

Check out her Bebop flow lessons at Mike’s Master Classes for more on that and other topics. You might also want to checkout her Bebop Dojo: Essentials course at truefire.

We closed with a group performance of “On Green Dolphin Street”.

Many thanks to Sheryl for an inspiring session which along with the morning session should give us a few decades of work!

June 15, 2013: Sheryl Bailey

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Many thanks to the amazing Sheryl Bailey for this week’s session in which we covered the following compositions:

“Sonnymoon for Two” by Sonny Rollins.
“All The Things You Are” by Jerome Kern.

The session started with a run through of “Sonnymoon for Two” with the co-op members taking a couple of choruses each. Here’s a clip towards the end with Derek’s solo on vibes (who knew? we thought he was merely a great drummer) followed by Sheryl closing the song:

During our solos Sheryl had been listening and picked up on some good playing especially by Giulio and Mickey and also spotted areas where there could be improvements (surely not!). Here are a few of her observations, hints and tips; plenty to consider:

After a short break, we turned to “All The Things You Are”. Here we are again, towards the end with Giulio on bass followed by Derek on vibes and then finally Sheryl closing it down:

Sheryl applied tritone subs at every point possible to give the following changes:
ATTYA small
To get these changes consider a ii-V-I in C major

| Dm7 | G7 | CMaj7 | // |

We can apply a tritone Db7 substitution for the G7 to give

| Dm7 | Db7 | CMaj7 | // |

then whenever we see a ii chord we can add its related V and wherever we see a V chord we can add its related ii to convert them to a ii-V, giving the following:

| Dm7 G7 | Abm7 Db7 | CMaj7 | // |

Here’s Sheryl plugging a ii-V lick into the resulting changes:

If members of the Cambridge Jazz Co-op should take anything away from this session it would be the idea that “I don’t need to comp“:

Well, that was epic. Many thanks to Sheryl for coming to Cambridge and being so generous with her time and comments to the members of the Cambridge Jazz Co-op.