Three-day weekend practice sessions

Or what I'm working on right now.

Surrey with a Fringe on the Top. Still trying to get it going. The chords are tightly spaced and the tune moves quickly and just playing that one repeated note for most of the bars gets irritating pretty quick. I'm trying to do more like Tyner's version, playing triplets and throwing in an E-flat to brighten it up a little. Still, the chords are giving me trouble. When I've had enough of that, I go to

You Took Advantage of Me. This one I'm having even more trouble with, mainly because the chords are so dense and I often have to stop and think about them (at this stage). Eventually, it will smooth out, but I'm using this song as my stride exercise, taking advantage of the chromatically moving bass line. This is one of my major weaknesses, and it will take more than a few minutes to work out of it. So when I get tired of sounding completely bad, I go to something just a little easier, like

The Blue Room. I play this like the Ella Fitzgerald version, with no chords on the first and fourth beats, with the chord changes coming on beats two and three, like a horn section punching in. When I played it at my lesson on Wednesday, my instructor, who'd never suggested I play that song or heard me play it, said it was the most "complete" sounding thing he'd ever heard me play (in nine months of lessons). Which is good, because it is. Of course, he cautioned me not to get too attached to that one style and to not overdo it, but he said that because he knows I get lazy and tend to stay where I'm at, once I reach some degree of facility and decent sound.

Today and tomorrow, while working on those tunes, I'm also going to pull the drill books out, especially the stride book. I bought some Bud Powell CD's today, but it will take a while for them to get here, so my aim is to work on the stride method and then hopefully be able to try some of the (easier) things that I will no doubt find on the CD's once they arrive. I just continue on, baby.

Tomorrow, I'll also make some additions to the Yoity Tot list, I think.