What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life Part 1
Michel Legrand’s ‘What are you doing the rest of your life’ is a delightful jazz ballad written in the key of C major. This is a challenging tune to learn and contains some difficult to navigate chord changes – particularly in the bridge.
In this lesson we start by playing the melody with left hand voicings to get a good idea of the movement of the chords and the melody. We then add some bigger sounding voicings and more interesting root movements to add interest and dynamics to the arrangement.
We also cover some other interesting voicings options such as sus chords resolving to altered dominant chords . This delays the sense of resolution creates movement and interest when the harmony and melody is stationary.
Related Lessons
We explore the voicing options for major chords under each note of the Lydian Mode which is a common scale to play over major chords.
We explore voicings for each note of the dorian mode. Watch this and never again get stuck on what to play for minor chords!
Learning and memorising all of the upper structure triads is a daunting task! This lesson introduces the upper structure cheat sheet.
Practice Tips
The Bill Evans recordings of this tune are definitely worth checking out. He plays the tune with such depth and maturity and there is a lot of emotion in his arrangement.
Hi Hayden, i would be VERY interested in a harmony notation in roman numerals for What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life. This piece of music is what originally got me interested in jazz piano years ago and it is very difficult which is why i’m curious how to make it easier to memorize. Knowing the roman numeral notation might help with that. This song is absolutely beautifully taught. Thanks for all you do!
Hey Lonnie, sure thing, I am actually almost done notating that one… i’ll have it done for the next lesson i send out. I also love this tune… it’s always been a favourite of mine. Check out these Bill Evans versions… i love the way he plays it:
This is from his album “From Left To Right” where he is playing a Steinway and a Fender Rhodes at the same time:
– it has a nice ballad feel.
This is with his trio and starts off as a very emotive ballad. They then inject an enormous amount of swing into the tune on the second time through (~2:38)…
It’s a hard tune to memorise so stick with it. I’ll get the transcription done for you asap.
Cheers,
Hayden
ps. I haven’t forgot about the A/B Loop video we spoke about… I have found an alternate way to display the A/B loop which will slightly change how it looks and also make it more accurate… it’s a little clunky at the minute!