In addition to demonstrating how well Anthony Jackson was able to lock in on Steve Ferrone's drumming, "All Night's All Right" also provides another fine example of AJ's ass-kickin' groove and musical awareness.
Typically, AJ chooses not to play along with all of Ferrone's bass drum notes during the intro, instead creating rhythmic interest by adopting a 6/4 pattern (which he in effect starts on the fifth beat in bar 1) for his low Eb bursts prior to the start of the main Db riff. (The same pattern is employed from bars 59 through 74.)
Here, AJ again utilizes a dropped tuning to enable those rumbling low D flat - and occasional low Cs - that provide this track with its formidable foundation.
The main riff from bars 9-15 cycles the same pattern over the Db9sus and the Db7 chords, cleverly avoiding the 3rd in the sus voicing and concentrating instead on the root, 5th and 7th, common to both chords.
There's an inspired bit of harmonic juggling in the one-bar section first seen in bar 24. The chords Gb/Db, Db, Ab/C, Eb, Bb, Eb7#9 first heard in bar 20 become Gb/Eb (Ebmin7), Db/Gb, (Gbmaj9) etc. merely by dint of the rising bass run employed by AJ; i.e., the chords are the same as in bar 20, but the bass reharmonizes the chords.
At first I thought this nifty shift in perspective was solely AJ's doing, but then realized that the guitar was also playing the same line, which makes me think it was probably an Arif Mardin idea, or perhaps even part of the arrangement of the original song.
AJ's use of ghost notes on this track is also noteworthy, as they add a subtle impetus to the bass part as a whole.
By the way, the lined staccato marks in bar 20, 28, etc, are mezzo-staccato articulations, theoretically longer than a normal staccato indication - which is normally considered to represent half a note's written value - by one half again, thus making a mezzo-staccato mark about three-quarters of the value indicated. And yes, I know this is transcription overkill! ;-)
Transcription © Stevie Glasgow 2008 |
