Jazz leadsheets

All tunes I completed so far, in reverse chronological order.

Everything is licensed under CC-BY unless otherwise specified, you can freely arrange and record them and do anything you want with the recordings, as long as you credit me as the composer.

If you do record them, I'll be glad if you share the recording with me, even though you don't have to.

Keys are mentioned just for context, I place no particular importance on them (definitely not the “Eb major is the key of love and devotion” kind of importance), usually it's just where my fingers fall.

The original files were created in MuseScore. MuseScore is free software, you can install it from your distro's repositories (sometimes the package is called mscore rather than musescore) or download Windows/OS X installers from musescore.org. For impro-visor leadsheets you'll need, well impro-visor, which is also free software.

Innocence

Written for a certain saxophonist, the tune name is a pun on her name... and her age, for that matter.

Last Sunny Day of the Autumn

The idea was to make a sequence of major ii V I's where each I switches its quality to minor and becomes the ii of the next ii V I. Like in Miles Davis' “Tune Up”, except I went for returning to the original key through the subdominant of the last ii V I, which is a semitone below the original ii.

Frankly, I have little experience with unprepared modulations, and I find improvising over this piece very challenging.

Some More Blues

In a conversation with my friend we came to conclusion that the opposite of “No More Blues” (“Chega de Saudade”) should be a 12 bar blues with latin timefeel, and that it should be named “Some More Blues”. Then the only thing left to do was to actually write it.

The melodic idea didn't quite work with the “normal” (major) blues, but worked mostly fine with minor blues, so my old idea to make a minor blues unexpectedly came to life.

I have to admit I transposed it to D minor for the sake of having a tune in a new key and practicing playing in a less familiar key, I probably would be happier playing it in C minor instead.

Cranefly

Vaguely inspired by Duke Jordan's Jordu, which I quote shamelessly.

The rhythm, especially in the B section is a rather crude approximation of how I actually imagine it, but I failed to make a good compromise between precision and readability. Well, at least it has all correct chords and pitches.

Harmonically, I wanted to try tritone substitutions in practice, which seems to have worked fairly well.

Silly Dream

I've had an idea to make something with repeated minor VI I motion. Then I wrote this melody independently of that idea and realized that it mostly fits, except it features the dominant over the I prominetly, which I found fun.

The rest has been padded with minor ii V I's and the “industry standard” major ii V I and minor ii V I connected through IV move. The V7alt of the original minor key at the end of A section that makes the transition to the B section's relative major sound better was kindly suggested by Mike Holstein, I doubt I'd come up with it myself.

You can think that the title refers to the dream to become a better composer/improvisor.

Indirect Kiss

This tune turned out quite silly, and was given a matching name.

Pretty standard I vi ii V I progression, slightly spiced up with IV's and some Bbmaj7 chords whose function in C major context I can't determine, but I like how they sound there.

I quite like the C to Bb motion that appears throughout, though I was not very successful at exploring it in my solos so far.

Thanks to Stefaan Himpe for suggestions regarding the harmony.

Hiding The Obvious

Twelve bar blues, slightly reharmonized, with excessive amount of flat 6ths. Dedicated to certain girl with great ears and amazing musical memory.

Mojito Bay

This was my first attempt to write anything after a very long break from music. Needless to say, it's showing here.

The idea was to see if I can make anything remotely listenable from a minor ii V I alone (it worked for the A sections of “I've got you under my skin”, right). Prominent B natural over the altered V is probably the only funny find in the whole thing.

I've had no idea what to name it and asked Mike Holstein to suggest something, and he invented this title. The fun part is that I have little idea what that mojito thing is, I quit drinking altogether long ago.


If you are curious what my handwriting is like, here's one example, or another. I warn you it's pretty horrible.

This page was last modified: