Autumn Leaves, Nuages, and Swing 39 videos

Jon · February 2015

Hi Everyone,

I've been screwing around some more with video production at home, and while working out how to make a solid white background, I recorded these tunes - I hope you like them. Comments etc more than welcome

Les Feuilles Mortes

Nuages

Swing 39

Stringswinger · February 2015

Jon,

Beautiful playing! You should release an album of solo jazz guitar on your Favino. Nuages and Autumn Leaves worked very well. To my ears, Swing 39 needs either a second guitar or bass to fill out the sound properly. It sounds too empty at times. Perhaps you could overdub a second guitar track to fill it out? (I have a solo jazz guitar album by Larry Coryell and he does a second guitar overdub on two of the tunes)

I do a solo jazz guitar gig every week and choose tunes that work well without another instrument. Lots of ballads, bossas and swing standards (that I can do a lot of chord melody on) are my stock in trade on that gig. Watching your videos may compel me to try that gig with one of my Duponts. You have inspired me.

Let's hear some more! Keep it up and thanks.

Cheers,

Marc
www.hotclubpacific.com

Jon · February 2015

Hey Mark @Stringswinger ,

Thanks so much for listening and your comments! I know what you mean about Swing 39 - normally on a jazz guitar I'd put a lot more chords in supporting the solo line, but I feel like doing this makes it sound very not-gypsy jazz for me (don't want to just play regular jazz on a french guitar, if you know what I mean). Also, I don't want to do the overdub thing, as I think there's something disingenuous about it - like I couldn't do it on a gig, if you know what I mean. I think the aim of solo playing - or at least solo improvising - should be to be self sufficient. Nothing necessarily against people who do the looping/overdubbing thing, but it's not what I'm after.

Still trying to work out how to make this work, as the texture, as you say, does drop out a lot at medium-up tempos. I've not found many, or any good examples of this around the place - mostly gypsy jazz guitarists just play ballads solo.

The one example that I like is Tchavolo playing Arc en ciel (attached below) in the cafe in the movie Swing, where he plays at quite a fast tempo and supports the line through lots of chordal interjections, but never really plays "chord melody" per se. The other thing that makes it difficult is not using right hand fingers, even hybrid picking - which again is something I wouldn't avoid if I were playing jazz, but don't want to do here because I've somehow become a masochistic ultra-traditionalist in this style (ha!), even though Django did it at times (like all traditionalist, I'm a mess of contradictions).

Anyway, still working on that one

Thanks again so much for listening and for your thoughts - very much appreciated!

Jon · February 2015

Actually, listening to that again, he doesn't play very many chord interjections, but he does at the very end really get going on the chord "comping-solo", which introduces some textural/orchestration variety which my stuff above definitely lacks, and provides at least a bit of the tune where he really fills things out a lot. I'm going to work on building things texturally throughout the solo a bit more. Thanks for making me revisit that and have a think. Got something to practice now. Hooray for constructive criticism!

Thanks @Stringswinger