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Armando’s Rhumba – a tribute to Chick Corea – Bass Practice Diary 146

Armando’s Rhumba – a tribute to Chick Corea – Bass Practice Diary – 16th February 2021

Armando’s Rhumba wasn’t the first Chick Corea composition that I heard. But it was probably the tune that really got me listening to him in a big way. His real first name is Armando, but that’s also his father’s name. I have a feeling that the piece is named for his father, but I might be mis-remembering that.

We’ve lost many great musicians in the last 12 months, but none hit me harder than the news of Chick Corea’s passing this week. I have been an avid follower of his work for over 20 years and he has influenced me musically more than just about any other artist. The first time I saw him play live was in 2004. Since that day I’ve made a point of going to see him play whenever he came to London. I was fortunate enough to meet him once after a gig and I was more star struck than I’ve ever been. He was extremely nice to me. He made the effort to make conversation with me, even when I was struggling to put two words together.

Chick Corea 1941-2021

His death, from a rare form of cancer, came as a shock to me. I didn’t know he was ill. He may have been 79 years old, but anyone who has seen him recently will know that he seemed to have a lot of life in him. He did not look, talk, move or play music like an older man.

I woke up on Thursday morning, and as soon as I checked social media, my heart sank. I saw image after image of Chick Corea from posts from so many musicians that I follow. Tragically, that only usually means one thing, and my fears were realised.

I had a ticket to see him play live at the Barbican last year in March with a wonderful trio including bassist Christian McBride and drummer Brian Blade. The concert was cancelled with less than 48 hours notice due to the first COVID lockdown.

I’ve been trying to bring to mind all of the times I’ve seen him live. I was trying to count them and I got into double figures, but I’m sure I’ve missed some. I’ve never paid to see any other musician play live that many times. I think the reason that I kept going back to watch him play again and again is because it was never the same twice. There are other wonderful artists that I have seen four or five times and thought “I don’t need to see them again, I’ve seen it”. I’ve never thought that about Chick Corea. Even when I’ve seen him with the same band twice, it was never the same. He truly was a musical genius.

This isn’t the first time I’ve featured a Chick Corea composition in my Bass Practice Diary. You can find my version of Spain here.

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Spain on Fretless Bass & Nylon String Guitar – Bass Practice Diary 94

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Spain on 6-string Fretless Bass and Nylon String Guitar – Bass Practice Diary – 4th February 2020

Chick Corea’s composition Spain is one of the most iconic jazz tunes written in the 20th Century. Last week I was using some of the chord changes for the solo section of Spain to demonstrate how to use major triad pairs to solo on jazz chord changes. After shooting that video I was practicing playing the tune as a duet with myself. I was using my Godin ACS nylon string guitar and my fretless Warwick Thumb SC.

Bass and Nylon String Guitar

Some combinations of instruments just work really well, even though you rarely hear them used. I think that the combination of bass guitar and nylon string or classical guitar is a great combination. I keep meaning to write more musical arrangements using this combination and I hope I will in the future. Another great combination is bass and flute, think about Jaco Pastorius’ tune (Used to be a) Cha Cha.

This is my first video of an arrangement using just bass and nylon string guitar. To be honest, I haven’t done much arranging, I pretty much just played the tune and improvised a solo on bass.

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Jazz Waltz by Tim Pettingale – Bass Practice Diary 74

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Johnny Cox and Tim Pettingale playing Tim’s Jazz Waltz – Bass Practice Diary – 17th September 2019

A couple of weeks ago Tim Pettingale came over to visit me in my new studio. And we had a bit of a play over this idea that Tim had for a jazz waltz. I previously released another video from this session of us playing over Rhythm Changes. Tim is the author of two brilliant jazz guitar books Jazz Bebop Blues Guitar and Rhythm Changes for Jazz Guitar.

Jazz Waltz and Variations

A jazz waltz is something that I don’t practice that often. So it was really interesting when Tim came to me with this idea for an original composition. He wrote it in three sections, A, B and C, which gave us some scope to come up with some interesting rhythmic variations. On the B and C sections.

The A section is the main melody, which we played with a standard jazz waltz feel. I initially played it on my fretless bass and then Tim played it on guitar after that.

A jazz waltz is written in 3/4 but it’s probably more accurate to call it 9/8. Because you have three beats in each bar and each beat is subdivided into triplets. Which is what gives you a swing feel. So there are effectively nine 1/8th notes in each bar, hence 9/8. It’s useful to understand this because it means that you can superimpose grooves in 9/8 onto a jazz waltz without needing to change the beat or sub-division. That’s exactly what we did in the bass solo which is the C section of the composition and starts at 1:41 in the video.

A simpler approach to playing 3/4 is to play using straight 1/8th notes. Which creates six 1/8th notes in each bar instead of nine. So, a straight 3/4 can also be thought of as being interchangeable with 6/8. This is the feel that we explored in the B section which starts at 0:58 in the video. I’ve explored many of these same rhythmic ideas in my upcoming book for Fundamental Changes which I hope will be released before the end of this year.