'Have You
Met Miss Jones' is a song written by Richard Rogers & Lorenz
Hart in 1937 and has become an important song in the jazz standard
repertoire.
It's a fun song to play but the bridge can be tricky and you will
need to spend some time with it. As much as I can, I always like
to deconstruct the chord changes. I like to simplify things so
I can concentrate on playing music rather than thinking about
what notes are going to work. So let's talk about how we can think
of getting around these chords in the simplest way.
The first four bars could be considered a 1-6-2-5 chord progression.
The chord in bar two is F#dim7 which is a substitute for a dominant
7th flat 9 chord, so you could think of this as Fmajor7 going
to D7b9 going to Gm7 going to C7 and back to F. Whenever you see
the sequence F to F#dim to Gm7, you can think of that F# diminished
chord as the five chord of Gm7. I like to think of diminished
chords as related to dominant chords whenever I can as for some
reason it helps me visualize where the notes are. This is a great
sequence to practice your b9 resolutions, this kind of thing:
or this perhaps:
So the first 8 bars of the song could be looked at as a series
of 2-5 chords. Quite often I will think of the first F chord as
an Am7 chord when I am soloing as it's all part of the same chord
family and the notes are indigenous to our F scale chords. When
we think of the first chord as Am7, the sequence simply moves
from Am7 to D7 to Gm7 to C7 and repeated. This can definitely
keep things simple and easy to pull off your 2-5 licks. But the
bridge gets a little more complicated.
There is a 2-5-1 progression that takes us nicely into the key
of Bb at the top of the bridge and the next 8 bars are simply
2-5-1s again in different keys but it gets tricky as the chords
move by twice as fast, so when this happens we only get four notes
to play on a chord. This is when simply playing chord tones works
quite well but the challenge becomes 'how do we make inspired
music out of those 4 notes per chord?' The answer is to have
a good number of things worked out so they can become part of
your library of ideas. You can work up any number of 2-5-1 lines
where there are only 2 chords per bar. This kind of thing:
Try
experimenting also with playing on the 2 chord for the whole bar.
In this case we wouldn't play on the 5 chord at all. Something
like this G minor pentatonic thing:
In
the same way you might also try playing only on the 5 chord, so
we would leave out the Gm7 chord in our phrase. Like this:
Experiment,
experiment. OK let's look at my solo of 'Have You Met Miss Jones'.
Have fun with it. Steal what you can!
