Voice Leading on "Freight Trane"
I just picked up Kenny Burrell & John Coltrane (1958) from Princeton Record Exchange today during a brief post-Banff splurge-fest, and on the car ride home noticed Tommy Flanagan playing a slick little voice-leading line behind Trane's last chorus. It had never occurred to me before that this kind of a symmetrical ascending-descending voice-leading line existed on a "bird blues," but it does, and it's pretty cool (although probably old news to a plenty of people)! Also the dominant in bar 2 is just the tritone substitution of the dominant in bar 6 — I never noticed that, either. Check it out: Also, Tommy Flanagan wrote "Freight Trane." Maybe that explains why he was aware of such a brilliant little detail—that, or because he was just really killing (I'll put my money on the latter).