Stella By Starlight Tutorial
Stella by Starlight is one of the most famous songs in the jazz repertoire and any serious jazz musician will know the chords and the changes to this important tune.
It’s certainly a difficult jazz standard for beginners as it’s packed full of altered harmony and challenging chord changes which can be tricky both to voice and play over.
The form of the tune is A — B — C — A2 which is quite unusual in itself and it’s most commonly played in the key of Bb Major.
The melody has quite a haunting and sombre tone and it moves largely in steps but with some bigger jumps and leaps in the B and C sections.
Stella can be played as a ballad and also at faster tempos so we’re going start off playing through the form with left hand voicings so that you can get a good grasp of the melodic and harmonic movement.
We then revisit the entire form, voicing the chords over two hands and adding in lots of upper structure triads and also some interesting chord substitutions and reharmonisations.
Related Lessons
In this lesson we are going to look at some alternative ways to voice minor 251s with our left hand. We introduce the -11b5 chord and its inversions.
Minor harmony is much more complex than major harmony and so the minor 251 progression takes much more time and patience to master.
Rootless voicings sound more professional than root based 7th chords and they voice lead much more smoothly in a 251 progression.
I have been working on Stella for last few weeks. It’s really challenging but I’m making progress. How did you come up with substitutions for B-flat major and F major in bars 10 and 14. Also,any other subs you would recommend. I have been watching,listening to different artists and I notice some subs in last 4 bars. Thanks
Thanks. I’ll experiment. This is great song to study. I have found a lot of interesting analysis on you tube. Piano groove is great because of your patience and well thought out teaching method. I look forward to more of your lessons that use Stella. Thx again
Thanks Michael and yes I’ll be sure to cover this tune again in future lessons. Cheers!
Hi Michael, yes it’s a lovely tune… so much to explore within the form here… Don’t be disheartened… it is very challenging to play!!
Something you should understand with reharmonisation…
I find that the easiest way to reharmonise a melody is to think the following:
“what chords do I know that have that melody note on top?”
Then simply try some chords, major, minor, dominant, anything. Experiment with the sounds. If you can make them into a progression, or a cycle (like the dominant chords moving in 5ths that you highlighted) then even better.
Try this out and have patience with it. It’s a discovery process.
It sounds like you are very much on the right track… keep listening to as many arrangements as possible, draw inspiration from everything you can. If you’re struggling to transcribe something, post it in the forum and we can all have a go at it 🙂
I often play this tune as a ballad and then I use the last 4 bars to set up a swing feel. I’m planning a lesson on transitioning from ballad to swing feel and this will be a great example to use.
Hope this helps,
Hayden
Hi Hayden! I am wondering if you ever made a lesson about transitioning from ballad to swing feel….or if there are lessons you would recommend to make that transition.
I have been learning most of the ballads in the beginner&intermediate jazz sections but have not attempting doing anything more uptempto swing yet. Any ideas on how to start this would be great. Thank you!
Hi Thomas,
Yes I can certainly recommend some medium/up-tempo tunes.
Check out our jazz standard index page here: https://www.pianogroove.com/jazz-standards/ and see the “Medium/Up Tempo” section where there are 8 up-tempo tutorials.
Many of the tunes we cover as ballads can also be interpreted at faster tempos. In the lessons referenced above, we specifically create faster arrangements so that would be a good place to start.
Autumn Leaves is a nice one to start with. You can also check out the new transcription exercise in the forum where we cover the Bill Evans recording of Autumn Leaves: https://www.pianogroove.com/community/t/bill-evans-transcription-exercises/3739/
Transcription is the most time effective way to learn improvisation. If you haven’t yet started with transcription, this would be the perfect opportunity to start.
Hope the above helps and if I can be of further assistance just let me know.
Cheers,
Hayden
I “learned”this song, memorized the ballad WITHOUT learning the LH voicings, chords, progression……and of course that doesn’t work…… cuz when I get lost, it’s over….. So I decided to start over. watch the lesson again, then in the process of listening to other versions of the song, I stumbled across this guy who plays Stella by Starlight ….
….for a whole HOUR!!! I think – how is this possible?
After about ten minutes of listening, I realized I probably don’t really know most of the tunes that I play…
I think I will return to the R-3-7 on everything for a while…..