IN TABLATURE AND STANDARD NOTATION

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SUMMERTIME (By George Gershwin) is a transcendent artistic peak in American music. It was composed by George Gershwin in 1934 as an aria for the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. The song has since become a popular and much-recorded jazz standard.  Gershwin’s highly evocative writing brilliantly mixed elements of jazz with African American song styles of the early twentieth century.

My arrangement features a mix of single notes and harmonized chord melody. While the first chorus stays true to the song’s melody, the second chorus uses passing chords that highlight the unique tonality of the B11th tuning.  The arrangement ends with a B minor  arpeggio played via artificial harmonics, but these could easily be played as conventional barred notes instead.

The top four open strings are identical to the A6th tuning. However, B11th’s lower register, allows beautiful voicings of B dominant 7th, 9th and 11th chords. The six-string version of the tuning commonly uses either a B note or a C# on string six.

B11th Tuning

STRING # 6 5 4 3 2 1

NOTES: B D# F# A C# E 

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