Bass log, star date January 31st 2006.
Last night I jammed with Paul on Benny Golson's "I Remember Clifford" and John Lewis' "Django" Both very pretty and somewhat angular ballads. Not your typical I love you, you are the best girl (or guy) type ballad. They are dedications to great musicians namely, Clifford Brown and Django Rheinhardt, respectively.
After that I played freely in front of the TV, not the best way to go but a good way to force myself to focus on playing while disregarding the crudely constructed mumbo jumbo TV nonsense. Afterward I felt nice and relaxed although I need to pay attention to my posture so my back does not hurt. Hopefully all of this will fulfill the requirements of my homework :)

Bass log, star date January 30th 2006
Earlier in the day I did a study of what David Baker calls Coltrane's "Countdown Changes". "Countdown" is a tune by John Coltrane based on the Miles Davis song "Tune Up". Originally consisting of some simple ii-V-I changes in major keys Coltrane uses those chord changes as a launching point for his new (circa early 1960's) harmonic method for saxophone and small jazz ensemble. Coltrane was known for coming up with somewhat radical and challenging chord substitutions for songs or standard chord changes. "Countdown Changes" is based on the ubiquitous ii-V-I turnaround but offers a new method of traveling over the same path. Basically the tune consists of four, 4 bar sections and in these sections are mixed standard and non standard intervals that outline a chord progression outside of the diatonic system. The intervals are: half-step, Perfect 4th, minor 3rd, Perfect 4th, minor 3rd, Perfect 4th. For example bars 4 thru 8 go like this: Dmin7, Eb7, Ab7, B7, E7, G7, Cmaj7 ///.
In my free play I tried to come up with little patterns to meander thru these changes and made some astounding discoveries, like the roots and 3rds of each chord in sequence are physically close to each other on the 5 string electric bass. I have found that free play for just 30 minutes leads to discovering, as Kai puts it new "friends". If a C Maj scale is an old friend, then "Countdown Changes" are exciting new friends who get along very well with the old. How about that...