Tag Archives: bluesy

Making Jazz Chords sound Bluesy

Making your jazz comp sound more blues can be a great way to vary how you interpret songs. There are several jazz standards that are great to interpret with a blues feel.

In this lesson I am going to take a part of a progression from a jazz standard and give some examples of how you can play the chords so that it sounds and feels like blues.

The Blues is a huge part of Jazz, and it is a useful if not essential skill to be able to integrate this feel into your comping. This lesson is going to give you three approaches to make comp ideas sound more bluesy. I am going to demonstrate it using the first part of the standard “There is no greater love”

Some chord voicings

To make the examples we need some chords. In example 1 I have written out 5 voicings for the first 4 bars of “There is no greater love”

Making Jazz Chords sound Bluesy ex 1

You should notice that for both the Eb7 and the Ab7 I am using a #11, so they are Lydian dominants since that is what fits best in this key.

Bluesy Riffs

Blues is very riff based music. You probably already know a lot of the standard blues and boogie riffs on guitar that I play in the videos.

To add this to a progression like There’s No Greater Lover you need to make short melodies that you can repeat through the changes and the melodies need to be very rhythmical in the sense that they convey the groove of the tune. We are trying to communicate the feel not creating rhythmical tension on top of the rhythm section.

Making Jazz Chords sound Bluesy ex 2

The melody in example is a 4 note quarter note melody, so it states the groove of the song and I have chosen a melody that is quite easy to move around the changes in a natural way. Mainly because it is the same melody for two chords and then again for the next two chords.

Since the comping approach is more about being a part of the rhythm section groove than being colour on top I also make a variation in the 4th bar. This is because that helps conveying the form of the song, this is similar to how you will hear drums set up the transition to the next part of the song form.

Riffs with repeating chords

In example 3 you will find a riff that is repeating the same chord and once in a while changing the melody note. This riff doesn’t really have a melody, but since the comping is pretty full and a lot of the subdivisions are played it is a great way to really make it clear that it is a for example a shuffle feel.

Making Jazz Chords sound Bluesy ex 3

The melody is really simple since it is only two notes and then I am playing most of the 8th notes so that it is very clear what the feel of the song is.

Chromatic slides

Another thing that is part of the blues is the leading notes and the blue notes. Since we are not playing an actual 12 bar blues it is difficult to really emphasize the blue notes. We can however use leading notes or leading chords as blue notes that we then resolve. One way to do this that also uses a bluesy phrasing is to slide from a leading chord up to it’s resolution.

In the example I am sliding up from a half step under the chord.

Making Jazz Chords sound Bluesy ex 4

The construction of the riff is really basic, for each chord I am also using the same voicing a half step under it and slide it up to resolve.

Putting the approaches together

As a small etude I have used these ideas together in example 5.

Making Jazz Chords sound Bluesy ex 5

That was some ideas on how to make comping sound more bluesy. I hope you can use it in you own playing and that you can transfer the ideas to the songs where you need them.

You should check out my lesson on making Jazz lines sound more bluesy if you want to investigate further: Making Jazz Lines Bluesy

And you can of course also check out the Blues comping lesson in my webstore: F Blues Comping Etude #1

If you want to study the examples away from the video or article you can download a pdf here:

Making Jazz Chords sound Bluesy

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions for topics or how I can make the lessons better then please feel free to leave on the video or  send me an e-mail. That is the best way for me to improve my lessons and make them fit what you want to hear.

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel and feel free to connect with me via Instagram,Twitter Google+ or Facebook to keep up to date with new lessons, concerts and releases.

Making Jazz lines sound bluesy

For most people diving into jazz improvisation the focus is first on harmony and note choices, and much less on how you phrase the melodies you make. Since blues is a part of the roots of jazz and is used very frequently by jazz players it is a good place to start to add some variation in phrasing.

In this lesson I am going to go over how you can use some techniques and melodic ideas to give basic jazz lines a more bluesy flavour.

 

Jazz Guitars and phrasing

Since I am approaching this from a jazz point of view I chose to use techniques and concepts that are easy to execute with heavier strings, since that is standard on most jazz guitars. That means that I am not concerning myself with vibrato or bending, but trying to go over the sort blues of phrasing you’d come across in a George Benson or Kenny Burrell solo.

The approach I will go over here is a good way to further what I already covered in many of the lessons on improvising with arpeggios like this one:  How to start soloing over a II V I with arpeggios. This approach should help you get another sound out of the same lines by applying fairly basic phrasing ideas.

The progression I am using for this lesson is this II V I in C major:

Making Jazz lines sound bluesy ex 1

Since I really wanted to demonstrate how powerful phrasing is as a tool I chose to make lines only using arpeggios. The arpeggios I am using on the progression are found in example 2:

Making Jazz lines sound bluesy ex 2

Notice that I decided to keep the arpeggios in the same position and in the same range, even though that means that the G7 does not have a low root. This is mostly because it is important to have all the material covering the same range and to keep the arpeggios compact and not too many notes.

Phrasing techniques

The three techniques I am going to cover in this lesson are all shown in example 3, one bar for each one.

The first idea is to create a dynamic difference with legato. Most of the time when we work onn legato we try to make the notes equal in volume, but since they naturally have a difference in volume you can also use that aspect to add dynamic contrasts within an improvised line. This is utilized in blues phrasing in this lesson but is a fairly standard part of jazz guitar phrasing in general.

The second idea is to slide up to a note. The sliding sound is probably a sort if substitute or emulation of bending (which is an emulation of bottleneck playing). In this case it is not important (or even really audible) where you slide from but just that the slide is easy to hear.

I often get remarks from students who think of the slides as chromatic leading notes. I don’t really consider them as such mostly because they are played as grace notes and you can’t really hear what pitch they are. This is shown in the second bar of example 3.

The third concept is more melodic than technical in nature since it is the use of repeated notes. Repeated notes are somewhat taboo in mainstream bop phrasing but since Blues is a style that often is centered around a smaller pool of notes it is much more common to repeat notes, and doing so in a jazz line can also be a wat to invoke a blues feeling. This is of course also depending on how you do it, One Note Samba does not sound like a blues…

Making Jazz lines sound bluesy ex 3

Examples of Bluesified arpeggio lines

The examples I made are all using arpeggios and are examples of how you can make a very “jazzy” approach in note choice sound more bluesy.

The first example is starting off with the root on the Dm7. Blues phrases are mostly not really up in the extensions and are a bit more living near the basic triad of the chord. Something which you will see in the different examples. From there the line is utilizing both pull offs and slides before it via the 7th(C) oof Dm7 moves to G7.

The G7 line is fairly straight forward with only a slide to the 3rd on beat 1. On the C I also use the slide to the 3rd and add an extra two note tag to the line.

Making Jazz lines sound bluesy ex 4

In the 2nd example I am using two very characteristic blues ideas on the Dm7: Both repeating notes and groups of three notes, in this case the 3 note group starts with a slide to the 5th(A) and then repeating the 7th(C). I blues you find groupings like this often but almost never used to create a polyrhythmic effect like anoter meter on top of the one being played.

The G7 line starts off with a triad bases pattern that is then moved up to the upperstructure of the G7.  The line finally resolves to the 3rd(E) of C maj7. On the tonic it continues with a melody descending down the arpeggio and adding a slide to the 7th(B).

Making Jazz lines sound bluesy ex 5

The third example is using the pull offs on the Dm7 and then moving on to the 3rd(B) of G7 which is played with a slide. It continues on the G7 with a triplet rhythm that has a repeating note. This to me is really a typical blues phrase to my ears, The triplet is used to create melodic tension that is resolved to the 3rd(E) of C which is approachedd with a slide. On the Cmaj7 the line continues with a skip from the root to the 3rd. This 6th interval is also often something you would find in a blues phrase.

Making Jazz lines sound bluesy ex 6

I hope you can use some of these ideas and strategies to work on your own phrasing skills and that it can help you create more variation in your solos by using a sound that you probably already have a feel for.

If you want to study the examples away from the video or article you can download a pdf here:

Making Jazz lines sound bluesy

You can also check out my Bb blues solo lesson with a 4 chorus transcription + lesson:

Bb Jazz Blues Lesson 1

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions for topics or how I can make the lessons better then please feel free to leave on the video or  send me an e-mail. That is the best way for me to improve my lessons and make thme fit what you want to hear.

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