Lil Darlin’ (Snooky Young)
This one was a little bit tricky to get right. The individual notes and harmony weren’t too bad, but the laid-back rhythmic feel at this slow of a tempo made it difficult to square the emotive and bluesy playing into the neat and orderly grid of western notation. A transcription can never capture the what truly makes a solo special—it can maybe get you 75 percent of the way there. The hope is that by transcribing you can focus more on that last 25 percent.
A PDF of this solo is available here. The rhythms and chords have been updated slightly from what’s in the video to better reflect the solo (like I said, transcription is an imperfect science).