Equinox - John Coltrane

[GregH3000]

The existing chart leaves much to be desired as it only contains the solo section, and the chords are dull. Plus it is not even in the right style. No intro, A section or coda. It's a joke.

That being said, this song presented some tough challenges to even get in the ballpark. The intro is a N.C. deal, and unfortunately, irp will not let you use the root bass notes by themselves; maybe in a future version, the programmers can add a slash to N.C. so we can do simple bass ostinato stuff.

Next, both intro and A section are syncopated, and in 4/4, you can't accent upbeats. As a work around, I notated all the syncopated parts as 3/8 to 5/8 time signatures; it's not perfect, but at least it sounds somewhat like Coltrane intended.

The second (comparatively minor) problem was Sher notated the I chord C#m as being C#m13 which irp doesn't recognize. I noticed from playing this chord on my guitar that it was actually an E major 9 with C# in the bass, so I went with that.

Last problem which I could not totally solve was with the coda. This song has a D.S al coda, and if you only ask the player to do one run through, it will go to the coda immediately and skip the solo (B) section. I had to set the repeat control at 2 to get it to continue from the A section to the B section. This is not, unfortunately, how the original recording goes, so if someone could fix that problem, we can close the book on Equinox.

Equinox - SM - John Coltrane


(Sorry I forgot the tags; you can't edit those in apparently.)