ICYMI - I stumbled across this wonderful rendition of Autumn Leaves - obviously the improv is incredible, and its worth watching for that alone, but I always find it very instructive to see how guitar players comp for others, and there are times here when Martin Taylor is playing just straight 4 beats to the bar chord stabs. Don’t be put off by the run time of 18 minutes, the performance is about half that, the rest is chit-chat. https://youtu.be/8ge8lbxGytA?si=X_8EfHhBRSWoCqTn

Been a while. Maybe 11 months? Thought I'd post proof of life. Nothing special. Simple take on Fly me to the Moon. Trying to find a way to work the music back in to my days. Long story short - I've been pulled from University teaching into a more active government role. Hope to resurface in November. In the meantime.... https://youtu.be/y-shB9DYKbY

https://youtu.be/1usoxryzB5Y There's so much wrong with this recording, I just wasn't feeling it. But, I'm really tired of this tune and I've got to get past it, so I'm posting it and moving on. All I was really trying to do was learn to resolve to targets, mostly always thirds here, and in any way I could get there. Tasteful it's not, but I think I met my goal.

Next tune with staple chords, improv limited to approaches to the third. First steps with hybrid picking.

I thought it would be fun to take my comping video for the song and try to improvise over it. I was curious how well it would work - the original comping study is here https://www.skool.com/jazz-guitar/there-will-never-be-another-you-comping-study - would I get in my own way? In the end, I wasn't sure - there are times where my comping is going higher and might conflict with the improv. I also was pretty wrapped up in playing against the changes and I don't think I was reacting to the comping. I probably should have used different guitars to get some contrast - but maybe next time. Against the head, the rhythm part only used two note guide tones but in a rhytmic way. I thought the spare sound worked against the basic lead sheet. Sometimes less is more! On the improv front, I knew that I would be up the neck for the end of the song, so I wanted to make sure I started in a lower register and gradually worked up. Other than that, there is a section where it goes from Abmaj7 to Abm7 (or Db9) and then to Ebmaj7 which gave a lot of nice chromatic moves down - either from the C to B to Bb, or from G to Gb to F that I worked in whenever I could. https://youtu.be/fOGgCbngsNQ