Peace - Horace Silver

[jason_sioco]

[chopinlover01]

Glad you picked up this one! I just started learning it myself. Beautiful (and hard!) song, with a beautiful melody and gorgeous harmony underneath.

Looks like you're still working out the harmony a bit, which is totally understandable. The harmony is pretty advanced here, and figuring out how to do the voice leading can be hard! I'd recommend checking out the original recording and try to sing the inner voice movements that you can hear both in the tenor saxophone line and in Horace's comping. Tommy Flanagan does a great version of this, too.

Try singing the melody while snapping on 2 and 4, away from the piano. Or, just play roots on downbeats if you prefer to have that. Ultimately, the goal is to bring out what you hear and play it, so singing is the best tool for that (as you can't sing a note w/o hearing it first).

Once you've got that, then consider how the harmony moves under the melody - your rubato feel leaves just a little bit desired because it's currently unrelated to the push and pull of the harmony. As one example, your movement from the G minor chord (which is a release point) to the C7alt to the Bmaj7 didn't feel "convincing" to me; try using the dominant chords and especially altered dominant chords (sounds with more tension in them) as places to create movement.

I really like that you're adding your own harmonic ideas in the "bridge" (if you can call it that, since it's a 10 bar form) - nice ideas! And also it's very much worth noting and applauding that you aren't playing from music. The more you can do that, the better - when you get the song deeply ingrained in your ear (which you're well on your way to doing), you're able to interpret exponentially better than if you were reading. This is ultimately what memorization is, both in classical and jazz, so I'm glad to see you're doing well with that!

Hope some of that is helpful; take care and keep going! I'm happy to talk more if you'd like.

Harrison