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Showing posts from June, 2014

Sonny Rollins on "I Know That You Know"

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Sonny Rollins's stop-time solo on "I Know That You Know" seems to be one of those touchstone tenor solos—a benchmark in the mainstream tenor tradition like Hawk's "Body and Soul" or Lester's "Shoeshine Boy." I'd transcribed this solo some time ago, but had been sitting on it; somehow, I managed  continually  to procrastinate learning this one, but I finally got around to it this week. I've never heard anybody call this tune on a session, and I also noticed that's not so easy to track down a leadsheet via Real Books; is it just me, or did this tune end of slipping through the cracks over time? This piece on the twin recording sessions, Duets  and Sonny Side Up , refers to "a classic 1928 recording by Jimmie Noonie" of "I Know That You Know," which is easily accessible thanks to YouTube: After playing "Tea for Two" at a session the other day, my friend, the pianist, blogger, and super-nerd Marti

Compositions and Rooms

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Yawning blankness (Wikimedia Commons) A few days ago I visited a friend I hadn't seen in nearly a year at his studio apartment in Manhattan. I mentioned to him how I'd like to furnish a place of my own in the future like his: stacks of books, some CDs, a stereo, a desk, and a bed. He replied, "Yeah, most of this furniture is my mom's," which was when I realized we were talking about two different things: the functional, essential trappings of a place, and the contents of a place that you bring to it to define a space. In college, I remember having my mind mildly blown—puffed?—when a graduate English student shared this factoid, which I haven't verified but like to believe is true: that stanza  in the Italian means "room." It's one of those nice, evocative factoids that resonates on its own: that moving through a poem is like moving through a series of distinct but connected spaces. There are single-unit poems, like studio apartments,