Silent Night: Christmas Carol for Jazz Guitar

A Jazz Guitar Arrangement of the classic Christmas Carol Silent Night

Silent Night is, along with "The First Noel", amongst the few Christmas tunes that I learned to cope with over the years.I'm not sure exactly why but, this year (2011), I felt drawn to arranging and playing Silent Night on stage. By the same token, I wanted to make it available to you, my dear visitors. You can take this one as my little Christmas gift to you! (-:

Soooo ... here's the PDFs with the basic leadsheet (melody + chords) in the first staff and a rather simple chord melody arrangement in TABS.

I didn't proceed like all other standards on JazzGuitarLessons.net ... it's not a "jazz standard", right?! So, feel free to modify the chord melody style arrangement I'm providing you with, there's plenty of space for interpretation. You can even go nuts and change the chords... as long as the melody is audible.

VIDEO : Actually only Audio (sorry!)

The video above contains 2 very distinct sections:

• The arrangement played by yours truly (solo guitar) on a nylon string, classical instrument.
• The same tune recorded "live" with my trio on December 11th 2011 in Montreal. The band is Marc Beland (drums) and Marcin Garbulinski (bass). What a great night of playing!

You'll notice on the 2nd part (live) of the video, there's a guitar solo, a bass solo ... and there's plenty of "space". I really like to play like that, especially on simple Christmas tunes!

Sheet Music: Leadsheet (chords + melody) AND Chord Melody Arrangements (in TABS)

Click Here for the PDF – Silent Night – Arranged for Jazz Guitar

Everything is fairly straight forward here, no funny business. I think I may have played it slightly differently on the nylon string (I didn't notice it while playing ... so blame it on the Christmas spirit!) Nevertheless, this constitutes a great place to start if you want to play Silent Night for solo guitar or in a jazz combo.

Please, let me know if you have any questions and...

Happy Holidays!