[BrahmsWasAGreatMelodist]

And it perfectly illustrates what I dislike about this kind of overly-flowery overly-showy playing. The original tune is perfectly lovely, as it was written. It doesn't NEED twice as many notes. "Gilding the lily" and all that.

I don't think it was Hiromi's intent to improve on the original tune, just sayin

 

[mikeh375]

Yes of course, that's a beautiful recording. She probably got the ostinato pedal point G from Brad Mehldau, but her take is purely her own.

@mikeh375 I also get annoyed by the frequent enharmonic misspellings in transcriptions, but this one looks pretty good - actually, very good. A couple of things I might notate differently*, but it's clear that whoever is doing this has a pretty good grasp on theory and functional harmony.

*These are:

• The piece is in the key of G, but there is no F# in the key signature. However the transcriber explained this mistake - he just forgot to change the key after importing to the master score. Anyway, classical music has this all the time, where a passage will be written in the "wrong" key signature. I don't consider it a big deal.
• the Db in measure 9 - change to C#
• same issue: the D-flats at the end of m. 65 change to C#'s - there must be a reason (s)he did it this way - despite notating a C# in the LH
• the E-flat on beat 2 in measure 79 I can see respelled to a D#, but IMO this is a very minor point and can go either way
• m. 118 beat 3 - the A-flat should probably be G#, but again - not egregious. Maybe the author viewed it as an ii dim or vii dim 7 / C resolving deceptively
• m. 142 same deal - this time the E in the left hand kinda consolidates my case

Are there any others that you think are mistakes or are confused about? I think this was a very well-done transcription, honestly.

Yeah, this one is ok, I wasn't referring to this in my beef. I've played through 'Blackbird' a few times and love the improv and feel.
If by m9 you mean m12 then yeah, the d flat is unneccesary. At m65, well that's a classic case of impractical spelling imv. m79 is ok for me as it is after all a blue note. The a flats you mention are classic bad spelling for me although I can hazard a guess as to why it was written as such, probably simply to avoid a natural cancellation on the Am7 resolve (the G natural). It's obvious that chord is dominant in function resolving to a minor seventh and should be a g sharp all day long irrespective of the resolution. Yep, that annoys me.

I was reading a full transcription of Bill Evans' take on 'Here's That Rainy Day' from his 'Alone' album this morning and got tripped up by a spelling of an F major dom13th where the 7th was spelt as a D sharp in the LH and the 13th, an octave higher was spelt as a D natural. It put me off just for an instant as my brain couldn't immediately grasp a simple 13th chord because it was complicated by the wrong spelling. Even so, I could see why it was spelt that way because there are D sharps either side of the 7th, so maybe it was deemed the best spelling in situ because of that. However at at b19, the 13 th chord is almost spelt correctly (the flattened 9th is an f sharp and not a g flat, but that's ok, it is the tune) and I had no problem instantly reading it. B19 is the best spelling solution and it would be way too pedantic, even for me, to write the one f sharp of the tune as a G flat...I mean that's theoretical sado musochism if you get my drift.


EDIT....
You can see that F13 here if you use the Amazon 'look inside' function. It's the 2nd beat in b3.

Bill Evans: Alone - Artist Transcriptions (Artist Transcriptions Piano) : Bill Evans: Amazon.co.uk: Books