When I first went to the Eastman School of Music summer session in 1976, I was exposed to the existence of Bill Dobbins, a professor of Jazz Piano and Improvisation, or something. I was in the summer program for high school students but we had some interaction with the people in the college program. Bill Dobbins was a transcribing machine! I got my hands on some of his transcriptions as Xerox copies and made copies of them, but alas, they were faint. So back in Buffalo in high school, I used to bring them to school and in class I would be tracing the faint notation with pencil to make it darker, so it would be usable to read from. I did this for a few complete transcriptions, maybe 20 pages or a little more? Here is one such page:
This is the Herbie Hancock piano solo on My Funny Valentine (title track of the album) by Miles Davis. This is the Miles Davis Quintet of 1964-66 (?) which usually had George Coleman on tenor and recorded some live albums, mostly playing standards. I had been exposed to this band, and straight-ahead jazz in general, that summer, having been listening mostly to more fusion-y stuff previously.
I thought that transcribing and studying jazz would help me become a good jazz player. I set out to do some transcriptions of my own - one of the first ones was "Flamenco Sketches" from Kind of Blue. This is the first page of it:
I had better handwriting then - I think penciling in the Dobbins transcriptions was good for my music-writing abilities. I got bogged down with a Cannonball Adderly solo on "Straight, No Chaser" live at Newport from the album "Miles and Monk at Newport" - that may be packaged differently now. I destroyed a tape recorder using it to play the solo at half speed. Not sure where that transcription is at this point.
As I remember it, I would be working away on the Dobbins transcriptions in the social studies lectures (they were trying to make it like a college course). I had zero interest in school at that point. The teacher (I forget her name) would call out "John Holland, put away that music!"
I didn't do anything else like that after high school for some time, in about 2009 I made a transcription of "Song of Her" which I've already made a page about (songofher.html). In high school I was pretty oriented towards written music, which I've experimented with getting away from more later. I still have the notebook my Dad gave me to put these in back in high school, and got it out a little while ago. It caught my eye and I thought I would produce this page.