I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving weekend. Good people, good food, good music. Hey, that sounds like the jam we had yesterday!

Our next jam is Dec 15th and Tony Barber will be back as our saxophonist/educator. He’ll be joined by Johannes Wallmann on piano, Brad Townsend on bass, and Keith Lienert on drums. That’s about as good as it gets!

Tony selected “Body and Soul” as the tune-of-the-week. Ballads aren’t called much at jams and may be partly why the art of ballad playing is often neglected. This session will be an opportunity to develop ballad playing skills. Learning to uniquely interpret the melody is one of these skills so it wouldn’t surprise me if Tony divides the melody among the soloists. That means it will pay to really learn the melody and variations.

You can find a “Body and Soul” playalong and chord sheet here. That site also has a good sampling of artists putting their spin on this classic. Listen closely to as many as you can.