Anthony Jackson – Contrabass Guitar

You can’t have too much AJ. This one contains a very rare but welcome Anthony Jackson solo! Jackson is renowned for never soloing but there are a few incredible moments out there in which he constructs astonishingly fresh and original statements that are in no way beholden to any of the other major stylists. Jackson is always pure Jackson. Solo apart, this is not a massively challenging part by Jackson’s normal standards but there there are some challenges in the transcribing. Often when you transcribe ‘Jazz’ solos, the tradition is to write triplet eighths as straight eighths with a note at the start saying something like ‘swing triplets’. The trouble with this performance is that the eighths are sometimes swung and sometimes play straight so, in order to make the transcription work for me, I had to be specific. I thought a note saying ‘swing triplets sometimes’ may do more harm that good!

This is the tune ‘Spirit’ from the 2014 Hiromi Trio Project album, ‘Alive’.