House Of The Rising Sun [Jazzy]

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Any chance of a lesson arrangement of House Of The Rising Sun [Harmonize melody & improv different levels] ?

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Hey @niall

Thanks for the suggestion - I will try to incorporate this into one of my upcoming seminars.

I have received a number of requests recently on popular songs and how to arrange, reharmonise, and create solos over them. Depending on the song, sometimes the harmony works better than others for creating jazz/blues style arrangements.

I focus mainly on jazz standards and so I’m more experienced with jazz-based repertoire than harmonising/reharmonising pop songs.

Finding a jazz cover of a pop song that you really like and transcribing it - particularly from a melodic/improv standpoint - is one of the best approaches here.

When arranging a song or jazz standard, I typically compile a long list a recordings that I like and study each one and try to incorporate elements of each to then create something uniquely my own. One of the challenges with arranging pop songs is that sometimes there are very few jazz/blues recordings of the song from which to draw inspiration. This can make the process of creating an arrangement much more challenging.

All that being said, I think it would be great to host a session where we dip into a handful of pop songs and I try to give some general tips and advice for arranging them and enhancing the harmony.

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Thanks for considering looking at the tune Hayden.

[1]If you were to look at it, regards left hand accompaniment if playing solo,other than octaves, I wondered about arppegiating the chords, left hand , seem’s more a classical technique ,something I have no experience in.

[2] using chords in the tune as a vehicle for Jazz-style improv [i.e like the F Jazz Blues chord tone soloing course] Something that will serve us both in Jazz & Pop tunes. Hope the Jazz-ers don’t gang up against me for suggesting a crappy pop tune [lol]:upside_down_face:

Failing all the above, this Hardbop Minor swing track vibe [Kenny Drew, Tina Brooks] I’d be very interested looking at, bassline ,chords ,improv anything at all :
[Kenny Drew piano @ 6" 13 secs]

thanks again.

Niall.

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