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Mr Beaumont,
I like your style!
I find that at 60, I can still learn a song fairly quickly (about a week) and in a month or so can internalize it..
However, now my memory serves as a "LIFO" (Last-in-first-out) where if I want to internalize one, another
will escape my grasp and I'll have to pull out the dreaded sheet...
When I played classical guitar, I had a stockpile of Choro's and Bossa-nova songs that would last ~1 hour...
15 songs or so, but now, as a a "seasoned citizen" I can hold about 5-6 chord-melodies of Jazz standards...
The song "Stardust" to my ears is one of the most beautiful imaginable, I first heard it through my folks who
were "Big-Band" fanatics, so we mostly heard the spectacular Glenn Miller version. If I hear this version
out and about, by accident, I will surely get goose-bumps, and may actually shed a tear or two.
I ordered (recently) the sheet from Rick Seversen (Guitar College) and it looks like quite a
"Knuckle-buster" to play the chord-melody. I used to play the melody on my Mandolin from
the "Frank and Joe Show" CD, but now you have inspired me to take on this monster whilst
screaming out the Greg Kihn lyric "They don't write 'em like that anymore"
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01-19-2017 02:56 PM
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I can empathize with the feeling of Stardust being a "lost" tune, as in underperformed.
A couple of thoughts spring to mind, primarily that due to the static nature of some points of the chord progresion, it's not really a blowing tune, also Hoagy Carmichael utilized some really unusual poetic/rhythmic meter in his tunes, I'm also thinking of "I Get Along Without You Very Well" as being another similar case in point.
I believe for this reason, "Stardust" and also "Lush Life" are more effective as "set pieces" rather than vehicles for improvisation. (Purely based on personal/subjective opinion).
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Ralph Patt's "Vanilla chords" has it in C. I was always taught to consult the Ralph Patt website, to get a sense where the tune originally started at, before all the mods/subs did their tricks.
In fact, here are the Ralph Patt changes to Stardust:
STARDUST
Key of C 4/4
Pickup | C7 |
[ F | F | Fm maj7 | Bb7 |
| C | Em7 A7 | Dm A7 | Dm |
| G7 Gdim G7 / | Dm7 G7 | C | C |
| D7 | D7 | G7 | G7 C7 |
|| F | F | Fm maj7 | Bb7 |
| C | A7 | Dm A7 | Dm |
| F | Fm | C | B7 E7+ |
| F A7 | Dm7 G7 | C | C |
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I came up with a few guitarist performances of "Stardust" but, compared to something like "All the Things You Are," it's under-played.
Charlie Christian, both with the Benny Goodman sextet and the open jam sessions at Mintons
Herb Ellis and Remo Palmier, Windflower
Joe Pass with Jimmy Rowles, Checkmate
Joe Pass, solo, Unforgettable
Jim Hall and Ron Carter, Telephone
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Tony Mottola did a nice version, included the verse ,too and played it in "C." I have it in my iTunes library, but have no idea how to post it here, I'm sorry to admit !
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The first recording of Star Dust in 1927 for Gennett Records had Carmichael backed by horn players. Will Friedwald in his book, Stardust Memories: The Biography of Twelve of America's Most Popular Songs writes "the arrangement is in D natural (two sharps), which, as [Richard] Sudhalter observes, must have been the key Carmichael felt best suited his piano solo. He certainly wasn't doing the horns any favors by throwing them into "sharp-infested waters.""
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I once asked Jonathan Kreisberg about his own practise program for learning chord types and their inversions. He said he wrote out all the possibilities, stuck them on the wall and removed each one only after he had them truly under his fingers in every position and key.
Regarding tunes, as long as you break things down and shake them up in an imaginative way, your approach should work fine. Where things usually come unstuck is having a long-term goal without any specific steps or strategies to get there. There's a statement I read years ago from Howard Roberts (can't find the source) that discouraged students to tell themselves things like "I want to be a great jazz guitarist in two years time" as it confined them to mediocrity in the interim. Deep!
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I don't know why Joe Pass' photo is thereLast edited by medblues; 01-19-2017 at 07:15 PM.
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Tunes that start on IVmaj7
Stardust
Just Friends
After You've Gone
I Can't Believe You Are in Love With Me
Any more for any more?
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The distinctive thing about all those is that they all move to ivm before resolving to I (unlike say, Blueberry Hill that bypasses the intermediate change). There are also tunes where the ii is acting as a kind of disguised IV. For an example that's closer to the IVmaj7-iv6 songs you cited, the opening chords to As Time Goes By are sometimes played as Fm7 Bb7 | Fm7b5 Bb7 | Eb6 but they could be equally well expressed as Abmaj7 | Abm6 | Eb6.
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Hoagy Carmichael wrote it in C, right? Because it sounds like the Goodman Sextet (w/ Christian) played it in Db. Then again, I am rarely right when it comes to this stuff!
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Horn players like it too...
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I once read an article by a Musicologist who said that "Stardust" was the most original song written in the last 200 years (FWIW)...
Sublime Gypsy Jazzer Fapy Lafertin plays this tune on a regular basis. Here is a representative version:
Developing an Individual Style
Yesterday, 07:54 PM in Everything Else