Very cool video. Random: you may know this, but the Matisse print on your wall is a study for a giant ceramic installation at the Toledo Museum of Art. It’s so cool.

Man I am on a back to basics thing and this was just the concept I needed to mess with today ….
 and I LOVE Ornithology ! I’ve been playing it for 30 + years on guitar and it’s been buried in slop and layers for a long while  .
Fun to dig down on bass and get it all straight again .
I recently got a 5 string mm and have been getting my bass chops cleaned up  .
The loss of rich harmonic  complexity in the ‘standard ‘ music of the day is a bummer .
Slipping off the page playing ( now ancient ) ‘standards’ is still my # 1 way to fly !!
Very nicely done !! Thanks sir .

You play beautifully but are you sure C.P. took phrases from How High The Moon and messed around with it? It‘s a bold assumption. To me it sounds more like Bird had his own unique ideas and ways to navigate the changes. Of course in those changes are melodies embedded, also the ones from How High The Moon so they cross eachother.

Sweet sound. What strings?

It's great to see your thoughtful instructional videos again. Thank you and take care.

The Bebop melody captures the disappointment of trying to score heroin before a gig.

In musicology, *contrafactum* (plural: *contrafacta*) refers to a compositional technique and genre that involves substituting the original text of a vocal piece with a new one, while preserving the pre-existing musical framework.
Historically, this practice acquired significant prominence during the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. Under the theological guidance of Martin Luther, secular vocal works—most notably the German *Lied*—were systematically adapted into the sacred repertoire. By replacing secular, vernacular verses with Protestant doctrinal texts, the Reformers utilized melodies already familiar to the laity to facilitate congregation-wide participation, memorization, and theological instruction during the liturgy.

Imagine if jazz instruction taught improvisation from the melody instead of always going back to harmony and exotic scales. I think the phrase "play the changes" misled many a jazz student. Why is it that we can go to college to learn tomes of harmony, and yet melody is left to chance? Shit, why do we seldom study the relationship between melody and rhythm? Scales, technique, and harmony are important--but they are still building blocks, raw material. Rhythm organizes raw material and transforms it all into actual music. Rhythm transforms raw material into melody. Cole Davis, great lesson--we needed this melody reminder in improvisation 101 all the way up to 401!

Great video and explanation! Hey I have a question for you. When you are playing how high the moon and ornithology I keep hearing the melody from “All the things you are” are the melodies or chord structures related or am I way “off bass” there? 😅

Apparently artists borrow from each other, and make it their own. Borrow-fact.
Wow are you sight reading that?

Did Berklee kick you out or what?