"One Night Only (The March)" - Trombone Shorty

“One Night Only” (PDF) from the Trombone Shorty album, Backatown.

I don't really have much to add to this tune.  One thing I've learned from the music of Trombone Shorty is that the tunes don't have to be over-complex.  There's a beauty in simplicity.

The overall harmony is a minor V7-i progression.  What's nice about this progression is its ability to resolve.  Compare that to a ii-V7 progression that relies on unresolved tension, the V7-i progression has a feeling of finality to it.

However, Shorty's solo appears to disregard this harmony, and he seems to be playing in the C mixolydian, or bebop, scale.  I suppose that one could even argue that he's building a half-diminished scale on the G of the C mixolydian, which would help play into the shifting third-degrees of both chords, to blur the line between major and minor tonalities, but let's leave that discussion for someone who actually writes a blog about this kind of stuff...  Anyway, try experimenting with diminished scales on this tune.

SPECIAL THANKS to dpolitzer for the comments!

Here a YouTube video of Trombone Shorty’s performance on The Late Show with David Letterman:

Recommended Reading: The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut.  Published by Dell Publishing.