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Harmonica Lessons: Jazz Tune In 3rd Position: "Softly As In a Morning Sunrise"

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[MUSIC]
So we're gonna play this tune in C minor.

[SOUND] It's called softly
as in a morning sunrise.

It's a very simple jazz tune, but

it was played by a lot of the greatest
jazz musicians in history.

John Coltrane played it,
all sorts of other people played it.

It's a very old song
probably from the 1920s.

It sounds like this.

[MUSIC]
It's just

the scale of C minor.

[MUSIC]
And then it goes into a bridge in E flat,

which is called the relative major.

[MUSIC]

If I do it

in the second

octave.

[MUSIC]
We don't have that note yet.

[MUSIC]
This is

where we run into

trouble because

we need notes that

we don't have

from bending.

[MUSIC]
That's what I call

the stepping stones method

of playing harmonica.

You skip over the notes that are wrong and
just play the ones that are right.

[MUSIC]
until you learn how to do the over blows

[MUSIC]

and so

this is what a minor key
jazz tune sounds like.

[MUSIC]

I was

playing

some

[MUSIC].

That's some Dorian modes that use modal
patterns that use a lot of force.

They are a lot like the pentatonic scale
[MUSIC]

but they have a few more notes in them.

If I were playing
[MUSIC]

so, that would be pentatonic,

minor pentatonic.

So I was playing a lot of scales.

[MUSIC]
Kinda like the exercise I

gave you of playing it C.

Except that in C you don't
have to do any note bending or

anything like that to get those scales.

Here, you have to know some music theory.

You have to know that to
get the harmonic minor,

you need the major seventh,
which means you have to bend

the fourth hole down
[MUSIC].

Melodic minor,

you have to bend also the sixth down in
the Dorian mode to get the harmonic minor.

[MUSIC]
To get the melodic minor you don't.

[MUSIC]
This is some music theory.

So, to play certain jazz things
you can just do it by feel.

Other ones you really have
to have some information.

On the other hand, if I wanted to,

I could just play blues licks
over a lot of this stuff.

[MUSIC]
The whole A section

of the tune just has

a few chords in it, and

they're minor, and

they're very bluesy.

So that certain types of jazz tunes,
you can really get away with just

using blues licks on quite a bit of it,
until you get to the bridge [LAUGH].

And then another thing happens.

You all of a sudden feel like,
help, where am I?

But I just wanted to show you that, and
also to introduce you to the B flat

harmonica, which is a great
sounding instrument and

very useful and that we'll use later for
playing a lot of jazz.

[MUSIC]

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Harmonica Lessons: Jazz Tune In 3rd Position: "Softly As In a Morning Sunrise"

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