Composing a Dream Solo on "Autumn Leaves" 

The set up…. It’s always a bit of a mystery how to teach improvisation, exercises or pre planned licks aren’t it, but the key phrase here for me was when you said “using my musical instinct” and I think that’s exactly what smart exercises like this, transcription, attentive listening, Barry Harris type exercises do. Develop one’s musical instinct for jazz language so improvisation becomes as normal as talking. Then we can focus on if we can say something people might want to listen to. Great lesson.

Thank you Jeremy - I love how this sets up my fall learning

Amazing lesson, super interesting

This is an amazing tutorial. Many theory books talk about beat 1, 2 and 4. This showed me how beat 3 can be part of the following beat 1. I just loved it and will working on my own arrangements for weeks to come. Thanks for explaining. This is really useful.

Thank you - I learned a lot! I will be trying to set up my own version of Autumn Leaves.

Hi Jeremy, thank you, thank you, thank you. I know I'll need to re-watch this video at least four or five times over the course of the next few months...trial and error, exploration and expansion. In this language of music, I am trying to learn to speak bebop. Thanks again.

Thank you Jeremy for sharing 🎶🎵🙏

This has definitely set me up in having a go at creating my own dream solo!! Great video as always!

Jeremy I stuck with you as you set things up and definitely learned a lot! If you don't know where you are going it's going to be tough to get there. Thanks for leading the way.

Vey informative and helpful. Thank you.

One stupid question from someone who studied Classical music only; if I never heard Autumn Leaves song in my life, how can I compose anything around it if at least "rough" melody notes are not mentioned in the score? Or the lyrics? (Let's forget tempo and measure for a moment too). Because the same chords mentioned above the staves (Cm7, F7, etc), in the same succession, can host hundreds of different melodies that are not Autumn Leaves. Thank you.

Hi Jeremy, it was fun watching your process on this. I know that you said that you have your students do this. Are they eventually expected to devise an improvisation off the cuff? Do professional pianists still write out their solos before they perform them or are they always off the cuff? Thank you!

This is very useful stuff!

This is great

Jeremy, do you think that Phineas Newborn’s album “Here is Phineas” was composed? It is note perfect. Every solo is perfection as if crafted in advance.

I noticed you didn’t talk about the left hand in this lesson. I’ve been playing jazz at home for years, just as a solo pianist, without anybody, playing, bass or drums with me. However, my technique is to play rootless voicings in the left-hand, as if I had a bass and drums, because it’s easy to comp that way by stabbing at rootless chords to help make your solo swing. It seems to me that if one has a strong enough improv where the right hand creates good phrases as you have just shown, one could get away with just playing the rootless voicings in the left hand as I do. Do you think this is okay, or do you suggest a different type of cord voicing in the left hand if one were to play this lesson as a solo pianist in front of an audience? It does not look like you were playing rootles in the left hand, so can you explain what you were doing? Again, from a technical point of view, it’s a bit difficult for me to jump around from chord to chord in the left-hand that have a bass note at the bottom, as it is much easier to smoothly flow from rootless voicings to rootless voicings so I can concentrate on the improvisation in the right-hand but I don’t know if this is acceptable, as without a base and drummer playing with me as it can sound kind of thin. Nevertheless, it has been demonstrated to me by some of my teachers that, once again, it can work quite well if your right-hand improv is strong enough.

Yo bro, for a while there this solo tutorial was on the verge of disappearing forevermore into my forgotten “file 13” … that is, until you composed that “slick” G minor blues line on “the bridge” (perfect tension and release point there), whereupon your tutorial was expedited to my “Essential Blues Lines” file -- right up front.

What are you using to write music - what software?

😅😅😅 love you forever

Positive comment. Yea.

you're trying but..I think you need to not think about explaining.