hi my name is John Goldsby you're about to watch a video from my discover double bass course tell
your story creating a jazz bass solo I hope you enjoy it Scott LaFaro was one of the greatest jazz
bass soloists and he burst on the scene in the late 50s he played with Stan Getz, Victor Feldman
and this record uh is called the Arrival of Victor Feldman from 1958 with Stan Levy on drums,
Scott LaFaro on bass and they play an arrangement of No Greater Love, I encourage you to check out
the original but i've transcribed the bass line which is really interesting
and has a little solo break at the end of the bass line plus LaFaro's solo so you'll get
to practice that as well so let's look at the baseline to start it's kind of a medium tempo
one two one two three four one
so you see what they did is they played uh the melody in c major but then they put a little inner
interlude at the end of the melody where LaFaro plays up into the stratosphere and then they
modulate to the key of G for the solos now Victor Feldman was a piano player and a vibes player
so he played the melody on piano and the solo on vibes which was kind of slick
let's look at the solo break that Scotty plays in measure 31 yeah
through the end of the chorus they land on a flat 13 chord and he plays
so that's pretty slick
i think he plays those last few notes with a little left hand pull off here
then in bar 33 he plays up the neck which is typical Lafaro he plays
that starts walking the uh the thing i like about that little lick that he plays uh
it reminds me of the Jimmy Blanton solo on pitter-patter panther
from 1940 with Duke Ellington Blanton on that recording he plays
so way back then in the 40s Blanton was playing
and here we have LaFaro playing you know the similar thing i don't know if LaFaro ever really
checked out Blanton but i'm sure he checked out Ray Brown a lot because Ray Brown was a top cat on
the jazz scene in the 50s and uh no bass player could uh ignore ray brown at that time period
so yeah work out that solo break very slowly you'll get a chance to play it in a minute
now let's look at LaFaro's solo on the original recording this starts at 2 minutes and 10 seconds
I encourage you to check that out uh but the solo sounds like this one two three four one
then they're back in the head back to the top of the melody so there's
a lot to unpack in that la faro solo you can hear uh in his later solos with Bill
Evans he often played up and down the neck and he was very young when he recorded this but uh
his technique was already sort of burning you can hear oh he's really practiced his scales
so like at letter a so the second section of the tune he plays
but much faster than that so yeah i'd encourage you to take these uh licks measure for measure
work them out very slow we'll play a version of this up up to tempo at the regular tempo
and yeah work it out on your own and then play it with a play-along track okay let's
go to the trio and play this i'm looking forward to this one two three four one
thanks for watching if you want to learn more about the course the links are provided below