Wendell Brunious
LADY BE GOOD
Trumpeter Wendell Brunious is a homegrown New Orleans talent and comes from a family with deep traditional jazz roots. His tone is broad and refined, a product of a career that has spanned over six decades. A fixture in the Preservation Hall Jazz band, this solo was taken from their 2007 recording, Preservation Hall 4 with Duke Dejan. While just one chorus, Wendell offers an excellent example of how to create variations to a theme with subtlety and create a satisfying arc.
Brunious offers a valuable lesson into playing V7 chords faithfully without resorting to default ii-V patterns. Here he treats the C7 chords exactly like a C7, whereas many bebop players would resort to their favorite G-7 phrase first without giving second thought:
DIG DEEPER - all keys
This phrase is so melodic. I love how it starts and ends on the Major 7th of the tonic F major. Learn this in all keys and experiment how it can fit over changes outside of this progression:
