Tritone Blues

This is a blues which sounds a bit off-key, but where I stay within the harmonies. It has been performed for several times. Here you can listen to a recording I made at home with a guitarist and a bass trombone player. I played the soprano saxophone. Bass and drums came from Band in a Box, i.e. from the computer.

Where does the name come from? The tritone is a dissonant interval consisting of three whole steps. For improvisation you should play the third and the seventh. However, between the major third and the minor seventh, there is the tritone. Take, as an example, the chord C7. The third is E and the seventh Bb. There are mainly dominant seventh chords in the blues. Thus I could compose a blues with many tritones.

You can find the lead sheets here:

TritoneBlues_C   TritoneBlues_Bb   TritoneBlues_Eb

 

Japanese Bossa

This piece was performed during the Xmas Session 2015 at Jazz Institute Darmstadt by the Jürgen Wuchner Workshop Band.

You find the lead sheets here:

JapaneseBossa_C   JapaneseBossa_Bb   JapaneseBossa_Eb

I would like to add some remarks on the harmonic background. The melody consists of a Japanese pentatonic. This can be built by a major pentatonic where the major third is substituted by a minor third and the second note becomes the root. I give an example:

D major pentatonic: D E F# A B

Major third is substituted by minor third: D E F A B

Second note becomes root: E F A B D

When I harmonised the melody, I did not do the last step. To stay within the example, I kept D as the root.