From the course: Jazz Piano: 4 Tunes & Practice Routines

"Tune up"

From the course: Jazz Piano: 4 Tunes & Practice Routines

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"Tune up"

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- Playing the classic Miles Davis tune, Tune Up. We've heard Miles play this in any number of different ways, as, kind of, a slower piece, as a really bright up-tempo piece. He got into doing that, kind of, in the early 60s with a lot of his standard repertoire. I'm going to play it really, really slow, so that I can think about what I'm doing. And a couple notes on this. You'll see that the first thing's there's a pdf chart of this right here, on this page, I'll link to it, you'll see that the first three things that we're doing are very simple two fives, two one. We got a two five (piano music) to D. (piano music) Two five to C. (piano music) Two five to B flat. Then, we've got a little quick two five again. (piano music) Then, we've got this. (piano music) The only new information there would be getting from the A seven to the B flat. (piano music) And once again, an approach pattern to the rescue. (piano music) Or maybe. (piano music) Possibly. (piano music) There's a bunch of different ways to hook into that. Let's play it on our slow Tune Up play-a-long track, and make some things happen. Right now, I'm restricting it to only the bop scales and the approach patterns. We're going to discuss the pentatonics next, and add them into this mix. We'll start throwing in some of our upper structure triads as arpeggiated. (piano music) So, let's play this and see what happens. (percussion music) ("Tune Up" by Miles Davis) There was our little approach pattern there, for the hinge. ("Tune Up" by Miles Davis) An arpeggiated A triad there. ("Tune Up" by Miles Davis) A little approach pattern right there, to the flat on the C minor. ("Tune Up" by Miles Davis) Left hand. ("Tune Up" by Miles Davis) A little approach pattern right there. ("Tune Up" by Miles Davis) Another little arpeggiated triad in there. ("Tune Up" by Miles Davis) Little approach pattern sequence there. ("Tune Up" by Miles Davis) You can hear in there. (piano music) The approach patterns are all over in there, connecting one thing to the next. As I put it, it's like they're the connective tissue here. They give you a way to pivot your line, which is really the great thing about them. And from there on, you can either play a shape that you've found, you can play some of the scales that we've learned, you can go on ahead and go (piano music) into our arpeggiated triads. There's a number of different places you can go. Getting your line turned around in a coherent way, though, is a really great aspect to our playing. That's what the approach patterns are about. We are playing on Tune Up, and I will see you for the next lesson.

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