Beginning the Project - First Meeting with Kenny.

After a length Christmas break, I'm back at work.  Kenny has been assigned as my supervisor, so I'll be having weekly meetings with him.  Some updates from the past month:

Most of the work I've done up until now has been listening.  Listening to styles, taking away snippets and common chord sequences, taking away reharmonizations themselves, and applying it all to existing tunes.

I had a meeting with Kenny last week, and I told him that having listened to the styles I was keen to emulate and thought about it, I decided that it would be better if I were to stick to two genres instead of three - smooth jazz and funk.  The omission of Gospel was due to the fact that Gospel has many sub-genres and styles within it; writing a "gospel" ruleset would lead to very vague results.  Funk and smooth jazz have more deliberate harmonies, so I decided to stick doing a better job of those two rather than a have baked attempt at the whole three.

In my meeting with Kenny however, he challenged me to go a step further: work purely on the smooth jazz based ruleset.  I liked the idea.  It means I can concentrate my efforts on a single a style and create a refined ruleset through an in depth and thorough study of it.

Through listening to live and recorded players playing tunes, I've recorded two brief snippets of a reharmonized line; One from the hymn "Amazing Grace" and another from the jazz standard "Autumn Leaves".  I'll post the snippets and their analysis in the next post.
The reharmonisation I made for Autumn Leaves was based on altered harmony more akin to the funk style, but Kenny told me that it's still good to look at various styles, even if they don't necessarily work in the smooth jazz style.  It's important for me to recognise key smooth jazz traits and general reharmonisation techniques in order for me to create a well thought out and effective ruleset.

One more thing Kenny has got me to think about: What makes a reharmonisation "good"? This is a troubling question as it is very difficult to answer.  Over the coming weeks I'll be looking to answer it in an acceptable way, if such a thing is even possible...

J