Am I blue? How about you?

Last night's piano lesson was a lot different than the previous week's. Without much of anywhere to go, we started with the blues and finished with the blues. The only song I worked on last week was Blue Monk, so that was what we played. I bragged about having learned all twelve blues scales and played a few riffs from, I think, an A-flat blues scale. My instructor goes, oh, I like that song. What is that? And rather demurely I had to answer, I just made it up. So, he was somewhat impressed that I'd gone from zero to sixty in just one week, and that made me satisfied.

For some reason though, Blue Monk gave me fits when we tried to play it. I just couldn't keep the rhythm straight. We put the metronome on, and that helped a little, but still didn't get me back to the head when I should have been there. We attempted to solo, but that went nowhere and I had to stop that after one pass. But I'd played and shown enough that my instructor was able to point out some things and suggest no less than five songs to practice in the coming week to get my blues playing sounding more like jazz and less like rock. (He said the blues I was playing was good, and it was blues, but it wasn't "jazz blues", which again, is something I have to work on.)

So my song list for the coming week looks like this:
-Blue Monk (get the rhythm right)
-Donna Lee ("it's time to play a Parker head")
-Don't Get Around Much Anymore (work on oblique motion, which I understood integrally but encountered musically for the first time last night)
-All Blues (because you can't get too much of Miles Davis, and, it's blues)
-Blues for Alice (maybe a little easier Parker head...)

Next week's lesson is important because I already know I'm going to miss the following week's lesson. Hopefully I can get my taxes done here in the next few days and have enough time to work on these songs over the weekend.