Help: How many notes is Monty playing?

[Jazz+]

At 5:46 Monty Alexander does his trademark chromatic moving diminished chord soloing pattern. I hear the left hand playing two notes, a harmonic -3rd. I'm not so sure if he's playing 3 notes or 2 notes in the right hand harmony.

 

An example spelled from the bottom up would be:

 

Left hand plays A3 C4(as a harmonic interval)

Right hand plays Eb4 A4 C5 or maybe it's simply Eb4 C5 or even A4 C5 ?

 

[video:youtube]

 

In my transcription it starts in Bar 8 here:

[Rodan88]

Jazz+ -

 

It's hard to definitively say exactly what Monty's playing, even when using the lowest playback speed on YouTube (.25).

 

Two things, though:

 

1) It sounds like sometimes at the beginning of the passage, Monty is only playing a single note in the left hand, as he does in the first 7 bars of your transcription. (At a slow speed, the single pitches really jump out and they form a counter melody-line, as they naturally would when one is playing hammer-like fast repetitions. The minor 3rds are eventually added; or, they might be there all along, but buried under a prominent top left hand note.)

 

2) To get that "complete" diminished 7th chord sound, it's crucial to have all chord tones represented. None of your proposed right hand voicings include the Gb. To leave that note out, you're really missing the characteristic stacked tritones sound of the chord.

 

So, for example, if I was banging out a strong single note "A" in my left hand, I'd play (from the bottom up) Eb, Gb and C in my right hand, and so forth. Both hands would then be spelling out a full diminished chord (as a nice drop-2 voicing), with no missing chord tones.

 

Of course, playing minor 3rds in the left hand throughout would sound fine. It's all about the rapid-fire rhythmic excitement created by the alternating hands!

 

Monty Alexander - great pianist, and a really great guy. Turns out he was at one of my gigs here in NYC a couple of years back - thankfully, I didn't know it until after the set. He was very complimentary to me, and we talked for quite a while. He told me a funny story:

 

I was asking him about the recording of "That's The Way It Is," a Milt Jackson record featuring Ray Brown, with a very young Monty on piano. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That%27s_the_Way_It_Is_(Milt_Jackson_album)

 

SWINGING record, trust me! Check it out, kids!

 

It was the first time I had ever heard Monty, and I always had loved his playing on that record. And, it was a record I listened to a LOT, so I was very familiar with the tunes, Monty's solos, etc.

 

Monty was amazed that I knew the record (though it's not obscure), and was really touched.

 

He went on to tell me that Jimmy Rowles was supposed to do the record but was, ahem, "not in any shape" to do it. (Jimmy was known to hit the sauce in a big way.)

 

I think that Monty was hanging around (or they rustled him up quickly) - but, that's how Monty ended up on the record!

 

Straight from the horse's mouth!

[Josh Paxton]

I'm hearing two notes in the left (a minor third), and three in the right (minor third on bottom, tritone on top).

 

Example:

Left Eb Gb

Right A C Gb

 

Every once in a while it sounds like he hits a full four-note diminished chord in the right hand, but I think the three-note voicing is the general pattern he's going for.