I’ll date myself a little here.
I grew up in the Napster era. Following all of the lawsuits around Napster, opportunities to legally buy online downloads of music started to pop up.
One site I subscribed to (one of the early subscription models, although it wasn’t called that), was EMusic. I think–or some name like that.
For $10 a month, you could download as much music as you wanted. And EMusic had a treasure trove of jazz. As a hungry young jazz musician, I would select a bunch of downloads, and then go to sleep. Over the whole night, my computer would work hard on downloading my jazz tunes. (Only years later did I realize many of the downloads would time out, leaving me with a whole lot of partially downloaded albums, LOL).
EMusic had a ton of Blue Mitchell albums. A defining album for me was “Blue Soul”. It’s an outstanding album from 1959 which features Blue in a quartet and sextet setting. The band is phenomenal, with Wynton Kelly on piano, Sam Jones on bass, Philly Joe Jones on drums, Jimmy Heath on tenor, and Curtis Fuller on trombone. Benny Golson was the arranger for the sextet numbers.
The whole album is worth a close (and repeated!) listen. For your listening pleasure, I transcribed Mitchell’s solo on the title track, a Bb blues that swings hard. Check out the video with embedded Bb sheet music. You can also find free downloads for the Bb, C, Eb, and Bass Clef below the video.
Some highlights from the solo in no particular order:
- Blue’s resolution on bar 6 to bar 7 (arppegiating up concert Eb7, then landing on concert C going down to concert A) is the most elegant way I’ve heard someone move from the IV chord to the I in a blues. Outstanding.
- Bars 23 and 24 are a lick worth transposing into all 12 keys.
- Bars 27 and 28 pay homage to Charlie Parker’s famous blues solos, but with Mitchell’s unique feel. Bar 27 is fantastic–try listening to it at 50% speed.
- Bars 31 through 37 highlight Mitchell’s underrated technique and his rock solid time. Mitchell’s notes in the fast lines are all big and fat.
- Bars 40 through 44 highlight a rhythm you absolutely should play if Wynton Kelly is your pianist. Listen to the call and response action between Kelly and Mitchell, with Philly Joe chiming in on the snare. Jazz nirvana!
- Bar 48 features a lick that Roy Hargrove uses quite frequently — check out my transcription of Roy playing Confirmation, where he plays almost this exact phrase at the fourth bar of many of the A sections of his solo.
Trumpet Madness 