Exploring "E Todova la Quiero" by Joe Henderson

We're now going to look at a beautiful tune by the sax player Joe Henderson, one of my favourite sax players, in fact. This is called E Todova la quiero, and it features just three chords:

• F sharp
• E
• D

The thing is, there's no key that contains those three triads, which gives this piece a slightly ambiguous sense of tonality. We're not quite sure which of those keys is one, but it doesn't really matter. I'll show you how to improvise over them in a second.

The Bass Line

First of all, let's look at the bass line, which is the real crux of the piece.

• It starts with root 5, root on F sharp.
• The F sharp remains the same all the way through, and we go down to root five.
• Then down to D, root five, ten if you like, or three.

This creates quite an open sound in the bass.

Playing the Rhythm

You could play it like this, with the second note on the beat, exactly the same timing as in Major Triad Workout. You may find this an easier rhythm than one that's actually written in the piece.

Here we go. I'll play it with the metronome, so just the third note is pushed.

However, you'll notice when we play the melody, in order to fit in with the melody, the second note will be pushed as well. So that's be more like this:

• Now the second note, the middle note is on the two.
• Instead of being on the three.

When you play the intro, you can play either of those bass lines. When you improvise, either of them will work fine as long as you keep time.

Looking at the Intro

Overall, let's look at the intro before we start. This uses just these notes, so you can mess around with that.

Feel free to play around with the timing of the right hand chords if you like. It doesn't have to be exactly the same every time, but that leads us, because you've just heard how those notes work across all three chords.

Improvisation Ideas

One way of improvising around them is to use just those four notes. You could call that horizontal improvisation.

Because we're just changing, we're not changing the notes to fit the chords; we're just playing the same four notes across all three chords.

It's not really a scale, but if you want, you can think of it as a four-note scale.