Paul Chambers & Charlie Haden — two legendary solos, transcribed, free.
The two ends of the soloing spectrum: Chambers putting Charlie Parker's bebop on the bass, and Haden making a solo sing like a song. Every note written out.
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I once handed my teacher 200 pages of transcriptions. He said, "none of this is yours."
I'd written out solo after solo, note for note, and filled a whole binder. I was proud of it. He flipped through the thing and told me none of it was mine, because I'd copied it off the page. I never pulled a single note off the record with my own ears.
So he gave me one assignment: eight bars of Ray Brown on "Long Ago and Far Away," figured out by ear, no paper. When I finally got it, he was right. That eight bars felt like mine in a way the 200 pages never did.
That's the whole idea behind Better Bass Lessons. I play in New York, I studied with Ron Carter, and I've spent my life around people who think in this language instead of reading it off a chart. What I do is hand you the record and the thinking behind the notes, so you stop copying dots and start hearing.
So use the notation in these two solos to check yourself. But play along with the recordings until the lines are in your ears, because that's the version you actually get to keep. Paul Chambers puts bebop on the bass. Charlie Haden makes a solo sound like a song. Learn to live between those two and you can play over almost anything.