Combo Projects! "Charles Mingus - More Than a Fake Book"

My Saturday adult combo class has finally finished our latest long-term project: playing through all 55 tunes in the collection, Charles Mingus - More Than a Fake Book. We started in December 2014, and read through one (sometimes two) tunes each Saturday. Some tunes had to be carried over for a second week for us to come close to dealing with them. We missed a few weeks due to vacations. Now, in May 2016, some 70 weeks later, we can say we at least "attempted" all 55 tunes.

I can enthusiastically recommend the Mingus book. The vast majority of the tunes are interesting, fun to jam on, and (mostly) playable by reasonably experienced players. They range from simple to complex. The charts are nicely done - with only a few exceptions, they are clear, without too many typos. Each composition is accompanied by informative text: first recordings, personnel, assorted anecdotes. Only a few of these tunes have made it into the more mainstream fakebooks, and many of them deserve to be more widely known and played.

BTW, if you've ever wondered about the correct changes to "Goodbye Porkpie Hat," you'll find them here.

We're still cycling through the jazz standards "list of shame," now expanded to 150 must-know tunes. In addition Mike, our guitarist, has made up a list of must-know ballads for us to work through.

For our next project, I'll be bringing in some of my favorite bossas and sambas, that are not among the 10 or 15 overplayed ones that you find in American fakebooks. We're starting with a few Roberto Menescal tunes (check this website). I don't think we'll undertake the complete works of Jobim or Menescal or Ary Barroso; that would be a bit much for us. I'll just bring in 20 or so less-known classics, and we'll work on our bossa/samba groove, one tune per week. That should keep us busy for a while.

Combo Projects! "Thelonious Monk Fake Book," "Just Gershwin Real Book," "Charles Mingus - More Than a Fake Book"

I've been coaching a jazz combo class on Saturday mornings for longer than I can remember - at least 25 years. The personnel have stayed pretty constant. Every five years or so, a bass player will move away or something, but we have some great continuity. Two of our current members were also founding members (Ralph on trumpet, Bob on bari).

We've had a few long-term projects. The first was my "List of Shame," a list of tunes that no self-respecting adult jazz improviser should ever have to read again (e.g., Take the A Train, All of Me, etc.). That list turned into my list of 100 Must-Know Jazz Tunes. Currently, every Saturday I will call two of these tunes, with reading strongly discouraged.

A couple of years ago we took on another project: playing through every tune in the Thelonious Monk Fake Book. The "Monk Book" is a collection of 70 Monk tunes, published by Hal Leonard. At the rate of one or two tunes per Saturday, this took us some while. We eventually completed the project, and had a lot of fun doing it. We played some tunes better than others, but we did check them all out. "Brilliant Corners" and "Trinkle Tinkle" were particularly challenging, but we gave them our best effort.

I can recommend the Thelonious Monk Fake Book as a well-researched collection of most of Monk's compositions. Chord changes are clean and jazz-friendly.

With that project finished, we then took on the Just Gershwin Real Book (Alfred Publishing). This book has charts for over 100 George Gershwin compositions, including the great tunes we all know, as well as a very large number of lesser, obscure ones. At two tunes per week, we are about a week or two away from finishing that project.

I can recommend the Just Gershwin Real Book as an extensive collection that will give you a sense of Gershwin's writing and the nature of his output, with a few hidden gems that you may not have known, along with many that are not exactly George and Ira's ticket to everlasting glory. The chord changes are not always clearly stated - the editors seem to have followed the path of omitting the original piano arrangements, but nevertheless trying to replicate the piano arrangements with chord symbols. This quite often results in charts that are cluttered with extraneous and non-functional chords. We got a lot of practice in editing charts on the fly - figuring out which changes to disregard, while sight-reading. It's a great collection, but not completely jazz-friendly.

It looks like our next project will be Charles Mingus - More Than a Fake Book, a collection of 55 Mingus pieces. This is a great product. Transcriptions are excellent; former Mingus sidemen were involved in the project. Lots of informative notes and Mingus lore are included.

This should keep us busy through 2015.