You know what a blues lick is and you are making your own jazz licks. But, there is also this great mix of the two: Jazz Blues, with bluesy licks for Jazz songs or sophisticated licks for a Blues solo. That is what this Jazz Blues Lesson is going to show you.
In this video, I am going to show you some of the things that you can add to your playing to get a great mix of these two sounds.
So I am going to cover some really effective phrasing and Melody tricks that are actually really easy to use and you probably already know but just never thought about, and this can really add a completely new dimension to your playing. When it comes to blues but also when it comes to playing on Jazz Standards where this also sound great.
Really this is about getting the notes and the melodies to sound bluesy.
Two Scales and a Chord
In this video, I am going to use a Bb7 chord and these two scales to mix Jazz and Blues
The Mighty (but short) Grace notes
A great phrasing technique for getting a blues sound in Jazz is using grace notes. In Jazz, that is the way we simulate string bends. When Jazz was invented then the guitars had thick strings, and little sustain especially because of the amps. There fore actually bending strings was not that effective and pretty hard.
An example of a lick with this could be this:
When you use grace notes as a a way of getting Jazz blues phrasing then usually the emphasis is on the chord tones, so an exercise like this one can be useful:
Another more blues sounding phrase with sliding grace notes could be something like this:
Blues Scale and Jazz Arpeggios
The grace notes work with any material you use, but you can also work with mixing the two different scale sounds. The example below starts with a “Jazz” approach using a Dø arpeggio, and then transitions into using the blues scale to end the phrase.
This example starts with the blues-scale and ends with arpeggio notes:
Good triplet rhythm & simple blues scale chord tone ending with a nice interval skip at the end and that is the next thing to talk about.
Bluesy Intervals!
Both regular Blues and Jazz Blues vocabulary are based on using shorter phrases and both have a similar way of using larger intervals in the lines.
The example here below is similar to the way you will find Wes Montgomery or Kenny Burrell might use larger intervals.
In this case the 3rd and the 7th of the chord.
ne of my biggest influences when it comes to blues was Stevie Ray Vaughan and I was always fascinated with how he used large intervals in his playing so well. In fact Wes Montgomery does as well.
Double stops –
The next concept is also one of my favorites from SRV but I am going to apply it more in a Jazz way similar to what Wes and Kenny Burrell do.
Pedal points like you hear in the example above are often chord tones, but Wes also used other notes in his solos (like No blues)
Another example of how you can use an interval as an easy chord to use for chord soloing. This is an example of a lot of double stops and also how you can use some chromaticism with them.
Really Digging into Jazz Blues
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