5 Kenny Garrett Concepts on Night and Day

By Eric • Jazz Musicians • Jazz Standards • PRO • Advanced

Learning a jazz standard or solo transcription can be a tricky process for any musician. But what many players forget is that you don’t have to tackle the entire piece of music at once…

1. Introduction
2. Cole Porter’s Night & Day
3. Kenny Garrett Phrases
4. Mirror the Melody
5. Quote a Melody
6. Utilizing Patterns
7. Play Over the Tonic
8. Phrase #5: A Triadic Sequence
9. Take It One Step at a Time

Top Tunes This Lesson Applies To:

Night and Day

The truth is, taking one small section of a tune and studying how your favorite players approach it in a solo is actually a much more effective path to take in the practice room.

And today we’re going to show you how to do exactly this over the tune Night and Day with one of the best improvisers out there…Kenny Garrett.

By examining how he approaches one section of a standard, you can easily isolate and absorb the specific musical concepts that he developed over time and add them to your own playing.

If you wanna play jazz, you have to study the music. The bebop, the ragtime, you have to study all those styles…and at least get a foundation…Because everything is coming from that energy. If you listen to my music, you will hear the root of Coltrane, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Freddie Hubbard, because that’s what I came through.
~ Kenny Garrett

Below we’ll take a look at how Kenny Garrett plays the ‘A’ section of a classic tune and the powerful musical concepts that are hidden inside of each phrase.

Let’s get started…

Cole Porter’s Night & Day

The jazz standard we’ll focus on today is Cole Porter’s 1932 classic Night and Day, in particular the ‘A’ section or opening 8 bars of the tune:

Screen Shot 2022 11 27 at 11.35.49 AM

In this progression, Porter takes a unique approach by starting on the bVI chord:

Screen Shot 2022 11 27 at 11.38.46 AM

The bVI (B) resolves by half-step to the V7 (Bb7) and eventually to the I chord – a novel substitution of the typical ii-V-I progression.

A variation that is commonly used on this tune is playing a iiø chord in the first bar and resolving to V7:

Screen Shot 2022 11 27 at 12.13.13 PM

The bVI and iiø chords both share the B natural and Eb (D#) chord tones that resolve down to the Bb7 chord.

The version we’ll listen to today comes from Kenny Garrett’s 1995 album Triology with Charnett Moffett on bass and Brian Blade on drums:

On this recording the group approaches the A section as a diatonic ii-V-I…

Screen Shot 2022 11 27 at 12.20.08 PM

Because they are playing in a trio format without a chordal instrument and just a bass note, there is more freedom to imply different chords.

*Make sure you learn the tune in its original form, along with the variations. For our purposes here, we’ll focus on Kenny Garrett’s version utilizing the ii-V-I.

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