Arrangements For Guitar

NEW!

This collection of 14 songs includes standard notation for guitar coupled with tablature.

Django * When You Wish Upon A Star * Duke Ellington's Sound Of Love * For All We Know * Everything Happens To Me * Betcha By Golly Wow * In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning * Maxine * Spring Is Here * Sophisticated Lady * Never Let Me Go * This Nearly Was Mine * We'll Be Together Again * Bess You Is My Woman

When I decided to release my first book of arrangements for solo guitar a few years ago, I spent time collecting and revising a lot of work I had done over 30 years earlier, as a student of my one great guitar teacher, the late Harry Leahey. Back when I was studying with him, each week, with an ever increasing line of students waiting outside his music room, Harry would spend more and more extra time with me, clearly enjoying our little discoveries as we’d compare notes in our mutual love for the challenges and rewards of arranging music for solo jazz guitar.

Putting that first book together renewed my appetite for this style of guitar arranging and playing, and I found myself inspired to do more. This second volume is the result of that inspiration.

ARRANGEMENTS FOR GUITAR
JON HERINGTON

This collection of 18 songs includes standard notation for guitar coupled with tablature.

I Wish I Knew * Angel Eyes * ‘Round Midnight * Love Theme From Spartacus * Both Sides Now * The Shadow Of Your Smile * Prelude To A Kiss * Happy Days Are Here Again * Autumn Leaves * Invitation * My Funny Valentine * When Sunny Gets Blue * Young And Foolish * Lover Man (Oh, Where Could You Be?) * Over The Rainbow * The Summer Knows * If * Here’s That Rainy Day

click here to download addendum for
Arrangements For Guitar

For those of you who are interested in more, masters of this style include:

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George Van Epps	Tuck Andress	Barney Kessel	Bucky Pizzarelli
Ed Bickert	Lenny Breau	Russell Malone	Martin Taylor
Jack Wilkins	Peter Mazza	Billy Bauer	Al Viola
Cal Collins	Howard Morgen	Kenny Poole	Joe Diorio
Peter Bernstein	Jimmy Wyble	Eddie Duran	Jaco Pastorius

CHORDAL MELODY GUITAR

I’m very excited to have recently released a second book of arrangements for solo guitar. When I was choosing songs and getting the arrangements together, I found inspiration listening to the many great players of this style of “chord melody” guitar arranging and playing. The guitar isn’t particularly friendly to this kind of approach, and I played for many years before I knew anything about it at all. But soon after I began to take guitar lessons with the late, great Harry Leahey, probably around 1973, a new world opened up, and I was captivated and driven to learn all I could about it.

I thought I’d share some clips of some of some of the greats in this style. Some of these will be pure solo pieces, some also with small groups, and some will be entirely worked out as written arrangements while others include some improvising as well, but they all showcase at some point the kind of thing I fell in love with when Harry patiently walked me through creating my first arrangement of this type.

1. HARRY LEAHEY : NUAGES I learned so much from Harry over the years that it feels only fitting to start with a tune I remember him playing frequently - a Django Reinhardt classic called “Nuages.”

2. JOHNNY SMITH - AUTUMN NOCTURNE Harry Leahey, my first guitar teacher, had studied with two notable teachers/players, Johnny Smith and Dennis Sandole. I remember Harry telling me about studying with Johnny Smith and looking exhausted just remembering the work it took to re-learn all of his scales and chords with a low D, which Johnny insisted on him doing.

I went on to study with Dennis, a highly gifted, eccentric teacher, famous for having taught John Coltrane and many others, and from whom Harry gleaned a lot of his lesson plan.

Here’s Johnny playing one of his signature arrangements: Autumn Nocturne. The low D makes the guitar sound huge. It’s always fascinating to me to hear Johnny’s influence on Harry, sonically, technically, and note choice-wise, which is so very clear in this tune.

3. WES MONTGOMERY - WHILE WE'RE YOUNG Though his technical approach to the guitar, playing with his thumb, was idiosyncratic and unique, Wes Montgomery climbed higher than everyone else and sits at the peak of jazz guitar for me. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, then, he also crafted two of my favorite arrangements for solo guitar. These were clearly arranged, not improvised, but delivered with a sweet restraint, a clarity, and the setting of a mood that only Wes could create, with his seemingly happy confidence and that huge, warm guitar tone.

4. WES MONTGOMERY- I'VE GROWN ACCUSTOMED TO HER FACE

5. GEORGE BENSON - DANNY BOY The successor to Wes’s throne has to be the phenomenal George Benson. Clearly absorbing everything “Wes,” George went on to unbelievable mastery with the plectrum as well as his thumb, to say nothing of his astounding vocal talents and accomplishments. Here he is, having fun with the classic “Danny Boy.”

6. TED GREENE - DANNY BOY When I was preparing the first of my two books of arrangements for solo guitar, I stopped in at the Jazz Record Mart in Chicago and bought every solo guitar CD they had that I didn’t already own (They had a lot!). I did a lot of listening, and without a doubt, the record that just stood out as having the most incredibly accomplished solo playing and (often spontaneously improvised) arranging was “Solo Guitar” by the incomparable Ted Greene.

7. KENNY BURRELL - SPRING CAN REALLY HANG YOU UP THE MOST Chords, chords, chords! Kenny Burrell seemed to know all the great ones… check him out (playing live!) on the unusual standard “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.”

8. JIM HALL - IN A SENTIMENTAL MOOD Here’s a clip of the always adventurous Jim Hall, clear master of the melody and chord world of the jazz guitar. Listen to how he throws in a snippet of “Prelude to a Kiss” (another Ellington ballad) between the first two “A” sections of Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood.”

9. JOE PASS - AIN'T MISBEHAVIN' Here’s an amazing solo performance of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” by the great Joe Pass, which includes not only beautiful spontaneous, rubato chord-melody arranging of the Fats Waller standard, but becomes an amazing, swinging, improvised invention with chords and lines galore…