Con Alma - Dizzy Gillespie

Dizzy Gillespie

Great compositions contain lots of subtleties - these intricacies are what make the compositions great. It is easy to gloss over the subtleties because they're,....well....subtle.  I have a couple previous posts on this topic setting the record straight on a couple jazz-standard compositions (Duke Ellington's Don't Get Around Much Anymore and Jerome Kern's All The Things You Are) but this post is about Dizzy Gillespie's brilliant composition Con Alma, certainly one of the great all-time jazz standards).

    Referencing a number of Dizzy Gillespie recordings I can confirm that the version in Real Book-I needs some correction.   On the B-section move the highlighted notes up a half-step and everything's good.
    The so-called "Real Book" was published in the mid 70's by a group of Berklee School of Music students and the title was meant to be a humorous play on words with the earlier "Fake Books" that were published illegally  in the 40's and 50's.  ( These are amazing books, by the way if you can find some -- there are several editions.   Especially with the resurgence of Gypsy-Django style jazz, they are a terrific resource for tunes)  The early fake books had bare-bones chord symbols and rhythmically basic melodies and required a certain amount of harmonic understanding to interpret them musically. Often diminished 7 chords were labeled just "dim" over the note,  and min7(b5) chords were avoided altogether in favor of their relative m6 chord.  ( e.g. Fm7(b5) would be called Abm6 and the bass player would be expected to play an appropriate note, which often would be neither the F or the Ab and would require some understanding of how the chords connect to each other)
    There were no chord extensions above 7 and usually the 7th was not even included at all, except on dominant 7th chords. It was just understood that musicians would add these kinds of color tones and internal moving tones at their own discretion and that they had the skills to do that -- the books, after all, were intended for professional musicians.  I remember going into a music store, my father slipping the guy $10 and he would pull out a hidden book from a stack under the counter.    Go ahead, arrest me -- it's a little late now.

 Back to Con Alma, the Real Book version, notice the awkward notation in bar 3 with Ab, Gb and Fb played against an F#m7 chord which probably should have been called Gbm7 instead.  But the glaring problem is the wrong notes.....
   

excerpt from Real Book 1 from Con Alma, Dizzy Gillespie ( move highlighted notes up a half step)