Red Clay is an incredible tune by Freddie Hubbard that uses the opening 4 bars of Sunny for its solo section, however, these chords have been transposed to the key of C minor. The head of the tune also has different changes.

Jazz Changes: A-7 | Gm7 C7 | Fmaj7 | Bm7b5 E7 |

Red Clay: C-7 | Bbm7 Eb7 | Abmaj7 | Dm7b5 G7 |

Learning Red Clay can further help our understanding of this chord progression as well as give us more musical examples to inspire our melodic choices when improvising. There have certainly been a lot of great Red Clay recordings that we can harvest source material from through transcribing.

First, have a listen to the original recording here …

Now lets check out some more guitar oriented recordings…

and

Red Clay was even samples by A Tribe Called Quest, this track is something completely different but could still be an influence for you…

Here’s a backing track for you to play over which also has the chords written out. It plays through the changes for the head, so you might want to skip straight to the solo section for the Sunny Changes.

Have fun!

Hopefully, you now have a deeper appreciation and understanding for Sunny and are ready to get started on improvising over it and telling your own stories with it. Good luck and have fun jamming!