D Natural Blues

Welcome back to Tea with Liya! Today, I'm playing a jazz song called "D Natural Blues." The composer of this song, Wes Montgomery, decided to write the song in D, because that would work better for him as a guitar player. Maybe learning about how a song was written can increase our perspective on different instruments. I hope you like listening to it!


Listen to the song here
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Sometimes the best way to get better at playing a song is actually to change something about it.

That might not make sense, but here's an example. Let's say there was only one sentence you knew how to say, "It's time to fill your teacup."

You probably would have spent time memorizing how to fit the words together. In fact, you'd know exactly how to pronounce "teacup." But what happens when you need to say something else? You'd have to spend as much time memorizing how to say that.

So, what if you changed the sentence to, "It's time to fill your shoe?" It's still the same sentence, but a little bit different, so you can put your practice with filling teacups to use. You're also going to have a lot of sand in your shoes.

Now, when you need to learn a sentence with a shoe in it, you'll already know how to say that, so it doesn't take you as much time to learn the sentence. You'll also be a lot more comfortable with filling your teacup, since you're familiar with how the sentence is put together.

Image by Michael Schwarzenberger from Pixabay

In the same way, a blues is often written in the key of B flat, reflecting the saxophone players who were writing a lot of jazz music. However, this song is in the key of D. It's still the same type of song, but it's a little bit different. If musicians get practice with playing a blues in D, it'll then be easier for them to change their playing in other ways, for example if they were given a song in yet another key.

This could also give the musician perspective on songs that are written for different instruments, because if they wanted to compose a song to be played on a guitar, they'd know already that D would be a good key to choose. 

Here's another sentence that I have for you to say, because maybe you don't want to spend your whole day filling teacups: "It's time to get all that sand out of your shoes!" You see, now that you remember sentences with shoes in them, it's easier to say this one.

But maybe you've forgotten about those shoes already, and you've decided to...

...keep filling your teacup with music!

~Liya