Jamey Aebersold Jazz, Volume 7: Miles Davis: Book & Online Audio

Eight Miles Davis originals presented in a pedagogically intelligent way, most tunes get two recordings so students can work at a comfortable tempo before tackling the standard performance speed. The chord changes and harmonic movement in these tunes teach functional harmony in context, and because these pieces appear in working musicians' repertoires, your students are learning songs they'll actually need to know.

The modal space and blues-inflected changes of these Miles Davis compositions feel grounded and direct. There's elegance in the melodies without unnecessary ornamentation, and the harmonic movement encourages your ear to sit in interesting places. This is the sound of bebop relaxing into itself, conversational and exploratory.

Intermediate to advanced jazz students ready to engage with bebop and post-bebop harmonic language, and musicians who play any instrument and want to build a jazz vocabulary through historically significant originals. Combo leaders and jazz ensemble directors will find this essential for repertoire study and ensemble rehearsal.

• Start with the slower tempo tracks to map out the form and hear the melody cleanly before working on improvisation.
• Pay attention to the bridge structure in pieces like Four; understanding how Miles shifts harmonic color in the bridge informs your own solo architecture.
• Use the rhythm section as a reference for comping vocabulary and phrasing rather than just timekeeping; Allee's piano voicings model upper-structure harmony.
• Loop individual choruses while transcribing the original melody so the changes sink into your ear before you improvise over them.

Use these arrangements as the core of a jazz ensemble's repertoire study unit, or assign specific tunes to small combos during a semester devoted to the hard bop era. For jazz history courses, pair the recordings with transcription work so students internalize how these pieces functioned as real vehicles for improvisation, not museum pieces.

• Improvising over bebop and post-bebop chord progressions
• Reading and interpreting altered bridges
• Understanding modal melody writing
• Transcribing and learning original melody lines by ear
• Building solo structure over blues and standard 32-bar forms
• Listening to and internalizing professional rhythm section comping
• Harmonic analysis of functional chord movement in context