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The 10 Jazz Guitarists That You Need To Know

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Listen To Jazz!

Listening to jazz is an important part of learning jazz and also one of the things that can speed up that process. It’s essential to check out the right people. In this video, I’ll give you a list of some of the jazz guitarists that I think you really need to be familiar with. I’ll go over some of their famous albums and, if sometimes that’s not my favorite, I’ll talk about why and give you an alternative as well. Let’s hope that doesn’t offend anybody.

#1 The Underdog of Jazz Guitar

I’m going to start with somebody who I think is sometimes a little bit overlooked and underrated very often and then move on to one that I accidentally skipped the first time around, but I’ll get to that later. Jim Hall, I think, is actually sometimes a little bit overlooked, and that’s a pity because he is an amazing jazz guitarist and also somebody that I’m still transcribing to this day. You can learn so much from his inventive melodies and his fantastic iron-strong rhythm and timing.

The Jim Hall album that I recommend you check out is his debut album, simply titled Jazz Guitar.

It’s in a trio with bass, piano, and guitar. His playing on this is super solid, very traditional, but at the same time also kind of giving us hints at what’s to come because he really invented modern jazz guitar. A funny side note about his debut album is that it was, of course, released without drums, but then later, because of the success of people like Kenny Burrell and Wes Montgomery (who will appear later in the video), they actually overdubbed drums on it and re-released it later. Now I’ve never heard that version, that might be better, but I am kind of curious how that sounded.

Playing In Taiwan

As you can see, I’m in Taiwan. I’m performing at the Taichung Jazz Festival this Saturday with Nick Javier and his band,

and I thought it would be fun to try and shoot a video here, even if I’m shooting on location. So that’s not something I’m used to, I’m learning, and maybe the quality is not what you hope, but at least you get to see a little bit of some of the parks in Taiwan. And I thought this was a great place to shoot because I’m, of course, sitting next to a colleague, and he’s getting the attention that he deserves.

#2 The One I Didn’t Know About

With the internet, it’s becoming super easy, barely an inconvenience to check out any album or track. Look it up on Spotify or on YouTube and listen to it, and that wasn’t the case when I was starting out. I was really depending on the recommendations of my teachers and the people that I played with. Even then, if I knew who it was, I still had to find a physical copy, so a CD or an album to listen to, and that’s the reason why I didn’t really check out Grant Green in the beginning. Nobody talked about him, so I wasn’t aware that he existed, which is really a pity because he is a great place to start if you want to learn jazz.

 

If you listen to him, you will hear clear, playable, strong bebop executed in a way that you can actually fairly easily check it out on guitar and learn from it, something that we don’t have a ton of examples of. I’ve talked about in other videos how I don’t really like Grant Green’s tone on those earlier albums, so my favorite album is a little bit later in his career. It’s one of the Blue Note albums, it’s solid,

but that’s also with Joe Henderson and McCoy Tyner. There’s just so much great music on that album, definitely worth checking out. If I were to recommend an earlier album, probably Grant’s First Stand is a good one.

It’s pretty early, it’s in ’61, I think, but that’s Grant Green in an organ trio. That’s really also an album with some fairly famous Grant Green solos that you want to check out, even if I think that the guitar tone has maybe a bit much pick attack and way too much spring reverb.

#3 I Wanted To Be Him When I Grow Up

Joe Pass is a huge influence on my playing. I really check out a lot of his stuff and also some of his books. I’ve made a video about his guitar-style book, which I think is a great method for learning jazz vocabulary.

But his most famous album is probably Virtuoso, which is a solo jazz guitar album.

And to be honest, that’s not my favorite album. I don’t actually like that album that much. I don’t listen a ton to solo jazz guitar. I tend to be much more focused on jazz where it’s about playing together in a group.

So my favorite Joe Pass album is Intercontinental,

which I think is a great example of his playing. I’m pretty sure they didn’t rehearse anything and they’re just going into the studio and recording some standards, but the result is amazing.

I have another video where I’m breaking down a jazz blues off that album and you definitely want to check out that album. It’s Joe Pass at his very best.

#4 The One I Ignored

The first time I heard Barney Kessel’s playing, I was actually everything but impressed, but that was just because I was listening to the wrong stuff. The albums that you want to check out from Barney Kessel are the Poll Winners albums. They’re actually sort of the first jazz guitar trio albums that are out there.

I think there are three of them and they’re with Shelly Mann, Ray Brown, and Barney Kessel. They’re amazing albums. It’s actually kind of hard to screw it up if you’re in that company, but that’s where you want to start if you want to hear some truly great Barney Kessel.

#5 The One I Studied

I didn’t think about this when I was preparing the video, but actually, I’m recommending really a lot of debut albums. And this is another one. When it comes to Pat Martino, the album that you definitely have to check out is El Hombre, his first album.

He’s also coming out of the organ trio tradition. The whole band is sort of built around an organ trio, but he’s adding a flute player. He’s also adding some percussion. So in that way, it’s not completely just organ trio, but that’s the basic sound. It’s an amazing album from, I think he’s 22 at the time.


You need to check it out.

#6 Check Out The Old Stuff

George Benson is probably the jazz guitar player that I think has the best phrasing. It is really amazing how good he sounds most of the time, even if maybe some of the later stuff where he’s like focusing more on being a vocalist than a guitar player is not really to my taste. And don’t get me wrong, I think it’s perfectly fine. You should do whatever he wants. Those are just not gonna be my favorite albums.

So my favorite albums from him would probably be Cookbook,

which is really just a sort of a picture of where he came from, the organ trio and those groups playing in a quartet, which is like an organ trio with a saxophone player. That is an amazing album. Everybody is playing really solid solos. Another one that’s really great to check out that I also want to mention is Giblet Gravy,

where he’s actually playing with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Billy Cobham. That’s where the famous version of Billy’s Bounce is found, which I’ve talked about many, many times and also made an entire video on.

There Are More People To Check Out

For this video, then I kind of ended up just going with the classic guitar player. So really the people that are active in the ’50s, ’60s. And of course, there’s a lot happening on jazz guitar afterwards. And actually jazz guitar becomes really an important instrument from the ’70s on and maybe it’s not as much an important instrument in the ’60s. Let me know if you want another video where I talk about sort of more of the modern guys. So Schofield, Metheny, Rosenwinkel, Gilead Hickselman, Jonathan Kreisberg, all these guys. There are a ton of amazing guitar players out there.

#7 Skipped This One By Accident

Another guitar player that I wasn’t really checking out because nobody recommended that I listen to him and nobody told me that he existed is Kenny Burrell. And that’s really a pity because he’s of course also really an amazing jazz guitar player to check out. His most famous albums are probably the one with Coltrane and then also the Midnight Blue album.

Now, both of those are not my favorite albums. I’ve listened really a lot to this Jimmy Smith album

where he is actually just a sideman, but he’s of course featured really a lot and he’s playing on this is so amazing.

#8 The King Of Jazz Guitar

I think we can all agree that Wes Montgomery is the most important and the most influential jazz guitarist that we have. So it’s kind of difficult to sort of pick a favorite, but if I have to pick a favorite, my choice is actually pretty cliché because I’m gonna go with Smoking at the Half Note.

That’s the album with the Wynton Kelly Trio and with that combination Wes and Wynton Kelly Trio, it just can’t go wrong and it certainly doesn’t. It’s an amazing album. They all play great, but especially Wes is really playing some amazing solos and I’ve learned a ton from checking out a lot of solos of that album. If I was to recommend another album, then I think you can kind of check out a different side of Wes’s playing by listening to an album like Boss Guitar because there you hear him playing in an organ trio which is actually different.

It’s also a little bit earlier. Still an amazing album with a lot of great solos to check out.

One thing that I do want to point out is that to me, what makes Wes great is not that he’s playing with his thumb or that he’s playing a lot of octaves or chord solos. That’s technique. He’s great. He sounds amazing. It’s not about that, but I think what really makes his solo so amazing is the clarity of the music that’s in there. So he often plays simpler phrases, but he will then have that one phrase is followed by a phrase that is either a response or a development of what he just plays. And that really connects the whole thing. And that’s actually fairly rare with guitarists or with jazz musicians in general. And that is what makes Wes a genius to me.

#9 The 1st Secret Recommendation

Because I was depending on recommendations from my teachers and the people that I played with, not the internet, then there are a few guitarists that I listen to really a lot that are maybe not as famous, but there are some really great albums that I definitely think you want to check out. The first one I want to mention just shortly is Lorne Lofsky and his debut album, another debut album, which is It Could Happen to You.

That is such an amazing album. He’s always great, but that album is definitely worth checking out. And I’ve listened to that so much.

#10 Another Secret Recommendation

Another album that you want to listen to is a Victorious album that right now I can’t remember the name of, but I’ll put the cover on screen so you can check it out.

The way he plays here is so beautiful, especially that first standard, I Heard You Cry Last Night is such an amazing song the way he plays it. And it’s such a beautiful feel. You definitely want to check that out.

But besides listening to the music, then you of course also want to start to find solos that you can learn by ear. That’s the best way to really develop your phrasing, your swing feel and your timing. But you also have to make sure that you’re not starting with something that’s too difficult, that you’ll just break your neck or that you will get demotivated by. So to help you with that, check out this video, which goes over a few solos that are pretty easy to learn and not too long and definitely will help you develop your playing

5 Easy Solos to Learn By Ear and Boost Your Jazz Guitar Skills

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Jazz Chord Secrets Every Jazz Beginner Should Learn

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You know how this feels: You are playing a song and then the chords look like completely insane (Db7(b9,b13,no5)

and your brain is thinking (picture of hand knot on the fretboard), and that is just one chord, because they keep on coming all the time. But we can’t all be like BB King and just hire somebody to play chords while we say “I am horrible With Chords” And the main reason for that is that you will have a lot of fun playing chords and you can make great music with them, you just need to know how!

In this video, I am going over the 3 I’s as a way of dealing with chords and making it easier to deal with chord progressions,

 

hearing, understanding, and turning them into music. It should not be complicated to play music, so first you want to make the whole thing a bit simpler.

#1 Ignore

When you look at a chord like C7(#11,b9) then that is a lot of information, and you don’t want to spend too much energy on it while playing. Figuring out what those notes are, or trying to remember a grip that works like this C7(#11,b9) but is far away from the Gm7 I was playing or doesn’t really fit with where the music is or where it is going is not going to be useful. But you can actually also just ignore all of that and just play a C7, especially if you are a beginner, that is probably the best way to go, but you do need to play the right type of simple C7, as I will show you, and later in the video I’ll show you how to be much more strategic and flexible with the chords, and not a slave to some numbers and letters, because numbers and letters are not music.

This is about not getting stuck with thinking about each chord so to begin with then a m7 chord will work if it is just a m7 chord and a dominant works if you play it without extensions as well.

Start by just playing the simple harmony.

As Joe Pass says:

“you must think of the chords in their simplest form….”

In the beginning, if you just ignore all the extensions and alterations you can easily play the chords as shell voicings, and as you probably know, a shell voicing is a voicing consisting of root, 3rd and 7th,

so it doesn’t clash with any b9s, #11 or b13s that might also be in the music. For a II V I then you could have these chords:

But you can also reduce those to something like this:

Or the other position:

And using shell voicings you can clearly spell out the harmony:

And there is still a lot of room for adding rhythm to the music:

With chords like that, you can pretty much play any progression and get it to sound tight, you can be rhythmical and you hear how the chords move, so you still get the essential flow of the harmony. It is important that you remember that, in Jazz, the chords are not isolated islands. They are a part of a progression and you want to think of them as words, not get stuck spelling the letters, which is exactly where you get stuck if you think too much about the extensions of one chord and not on how the chords flow together.

Which is the next thing to learn.

#2 Interpret

When you read the chord and start to analyze the extensions and alterations, then you are thinking about something that isn’t music, it is numbers and letters, and in the moment it is not helping you play any better. I came across this interview with Joe Diorio where he talks about asking Wes about this, and Wes’ answer is so spot on:

“What do you think when you see Dm7 G7 Cmaj7? – It is a Sound!”

But how do you turn chords into sounds and what does that have to do with reading chord symbols? For most people, the easiest way to do that is by connecting chords to songs, so learning how they sound in one song and then using that to hear the chords in the next song,and you do that not by thinking of a single chord but by learning to recognize the building blocks that make up the song.

That’s also why there are 2 billion lessons on II V I tricks, it is the most common building block for Jazz songs, but far from the only one, and whenever you learn a song, it pays off to think about the building blocks in there!

Let me show you how this helps you deal with complicated chord symbols in a more musical way. Because, if you ignore the extensions and then look at what the chord is a part of, then you can treat it as a piece of music and use the vocabulary you already have.

Let’s say that the music you are reading says D7(b9b13)

If you only look at the chord then that is all the information you have, but if you ignore the extensions and zoom out a bit and see that it is part of a minor II V I: Aø D7 Gm6

then you have a way of playing it where you are worrying about playing a specific chord, but you are working on playing a passage in the music that has melody and rhythm, not numbers and symbols,

and that context will also tell you what extensions and alterations might be a part of the sound because instead of trying to calculate what the b13 of D is and how to play that, then you are playing a D7 resolving to Gm. Adding that context to a chord is much closer to a sound and also easier to hear.

The important thing here is that you start to look at songs as having chunks that are smaller chord progressions and recognize how they are similar and when something sounds similar,

it does take time to build a vocabulary of chord progressions and get them into your ear, but it is worth it! Then you know what you can do with the chord, what notes you can add, and which melodies might work. You need that because Jazz is about improvising, also when it comes to chords.

#3 Improvise

One of the great things about playing Jazz is that soloing and playing chords is really pretty much the same thing, you are taking the chords and improvising to turn them into music, but in one case you create a melody and in the other, you are creating a background for somebody else’s melody. So the point of playing chords is mostly to improvise and to connect the chords with voice-leading, rhythm, and melody. But one of the problems here is that a chord symbol is a static thing, and not really something you can improvise with., so instead of thinking of D7(b9b13) then thinking of it as D7 resolving to Gm is going to give you a lot more options that you can make melodies with and turn progression into a piece of music, and check out how this example uses a b13 but it isn’t there all the time

So you want to learn to see a chord symbol not as a single grip or a few grips, but instead, you zoom out a bit and see it as a lot of options that you can put together as a piece of music, and depending on the context, then if it says D7(b9) you don’t have to play the b9, and you can often add a b13 that will sound great because those two notes are both a part of the sound of that chord, whether they are written in the chord symbol or not.

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The Biggest Misunderstanding About Jazz Chords And How To Quickly Fix It

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The way you think about Jazz chords is most likely wrong, and that is because you have been taught to think about chords in the wrong way from probably the first guitar lesson you ever had.

When it comes to playing Jazz then you should take the advice of Joe Pass:

“You must think about the chords in the most simple possible form”   

As you will see, that way you will avoid a lot of problems. This is probably connected to what made you interested in Jazz chords  in the first place:

When I first started to learn about Jazz chords then I heard all these incredibly beautiful sustained chords with a lot of colors, and I loved how they sounded.

And that is how most of us start out thinking about chords: as separate grips and each with its own name that tells you exactly what extensions and alterations are used.

The problem with that is that it is impossible to remember all those different chords, and when you are playing Jazz then it is as important that you can get from one chord to the next, which doesn’t get easier if you have to fit together thousands of different chords

Instead,  you should work on a way to think of groups of chords, Which will make it easier to play music because:

#1 It’s Visual And Easy To Remember

#2 You can improvise and Connect Chords

#3 Makes it Simple To Add Chromatic Chords

And as you will see later in the video, it is also a direct and incredibly effective shortcut to playing Chord Solos, something that is quantum physics if you have to think about each chord separately! In fact, I will clear up 3 misunderstandings about Jazz chords along the way because there is a lot of bad information out there.

Making Jazz Chords Simple!

But we are not going to start with the chord solos and chromatic passing chords. Let’s start with this C7(13). It is a fairly common voicing, but what can you do with it?

First, you want to boil it down to a simple more flexible form, similar to what Joe Pass said, because that is something you can improvise with. Instead of using this 4-note chord voicing then maybe look at what is the core of it: The 3rd and 7th, which in this case are on the middle strings, are what you want to focus on.

These are the important notes that get the sound of the chord across. The fact that it is a C7 is more important than the 13th, that note is just an extension and one of many options. The bass-note you can leave to the bass player, that way you don’t get in the way of him or her and you have one more finger to do something interesting with the chord.

When it comes to remembering chords then we get very used to navigating chords using the 5th and 6th strings as reference points because that is where we play the root.  Now, what you want to make a habit, is to be able to play the chord and see it on the neck as a C7 with that root, but you are not playing it.

So if you played a II V I in F major then you think or visualize the root but just play the top part

As you can hear from the II V I example then you can reduce all chords like this, and for now, then you can keep the 3rd and 7th on the middle string set, because then you have room above for melody and extensions and below for bass notes, depending on what you need to play.

Now that you are getting rid of one Jazz chord misunderstanding and have a way to think about simple chords then you might as well kill another one and then we can get into a hack for chromatic passing chords so that they are incredibly simple! (voiceover?)

Adding Melody Not Extensions

In Music, and certainly, in Jazz, context is everything! And the idea that chords are these isolated and static things and not really a part of a piece of music is completely misguided, that is in fact the 2nd misunderstanding I want to clear up. Most of the time, Jazz is all about connecting those chords and making the transition beautiful and creative.

Instead of thinking of chords like that then you want to think of a chord as something much more flexible, almost like a scale where you play the sound of the chord but you can add notes if you want to and you should also think about it as something that has movement built into it, a Chord is not just a chord it is in a context.. Peter Bernstein says it nicely here:

 

The most important part of that movement is melody, but

adding the melody is not that difficult now that you already reduced the chord to two notes.

I’ll first show how to find notes that work and then talk a bit about how to create melodies.

It is a little bit like taking the chord

and the scale that goes with it, and then seeing what notes are available on the top strings that also fit with the sound of the chord.v

In this case, with the C7 you get all of these options:

And you can see a C7 not as a C7(13) or a C7(9) but as a place where you can play a melody using these notes, and notice how I just call all of them C7

Now, my point with writing C7 doesn’t mean that you should not know what the extensions are, it is just to make it clear that when you see C7 like this then you can use a C7(13) or a C7(9). It’s a little bit like most languages have words that contain letters that we don’t pronounce anymore but we do know how to spell it and use all the letters in writing.

You can do the same thing for Gm7 and Fmaj7 and add notes over the 3rd and 7th of those. Notice that I am leaving out the Bb over Fmaj7 because that doesn’t really work in that chord, but you probably already know that.

Making Chords Into Music

Now you can start working on making melodies. This example is possibly a bit busy, but it is also a bit to show you what is possible:

You can go over a progression like this one or a song and then explore how you can improvise melodies.

For now, this is for comping behind a soloist so make sure to:

#1 Play mostly stepwise melodies

#2 Don’t play too many notes and chords

#3 Make sure to once in a while clearly lay down a long chord on a heavy beat.

Misunderstanding #3: Never Play Chords On The Downbeat

The last one is the 3rd misunderstanding, and it is something that I sometimes see in comments online: “You should never play chords on the downbeat”

Which is of course pretty insane and not what you hear on any recording of any Jazz musician, you of course want to learn to play off beats but you are supporting the music and the soloist and that means that you once in a while need to lay down the groove with clarity and give the soloist something to work with. There is really no reason to be afraid of playing a clear chord on the one or on the three so that you are really connecting to the song. Your off-beats only make sense when they are in balance with your downbeats, it is like trying to cook but only use pepper and no salt.

Let’s move on to a visual hack for chromatic passing chords and get into some chord soloing!

Chromatic Chords – Melodic And Visual

With this approach then you can see how the chords are turned into a core set of notes and then a lot of notes that you are free to improvise with, and what you play is more about hearing a melody than thinking a lot of complicated chord formulas.

But Jazz melodies have chromatic notes as well,  and you can incorporate that very easily into your comping like this:

The simple way to look at chromatic passing notes in Jazz lines is that they are there as an outside tension that is resolved by moving up or down a half-step. Like this Ab between A and G:

If you have this melody over a C7 then the first chord is clearly a C7(13), and the last one will be a C7, and you can use the last one as a way to come up with a chord for the Ab because you just play the same chord and move the entire thing down a half step:

And in the same way, you could get another passing chord moving up from C to D with a C# leading note, here you have a B7 moving up to C7:

This is both easy to figure out and easy to play, since you just think of the resolution and use that, there is no need to think about the passing chord.

And that means that you can play something like this:

It Is Already A Chord Solo!

And improvising while you are comping in fact means that you are learning to play chord solos. You are already working on making phrases and melodies with the material so you just need to start using it as a solo and not as a way of comping.

Let’s say that instead of the II V I in F then it is a Blues in C. For the first 4 bars, you only need an F7 to play a solo statement, so  with a basic F7 like this

then you reduce it to these two notes

and a practical set of notes could be:

And with that, you can play something like this, and notice how I am repeating riffs on the C7 and also using call-response to tie together the melodies:

This very practical way of approaching Chord Solos is something you will also find great examples of in the playing of Joe Pass. If you check out this video you can see my breakdown of chord solo phrases and some amazing Jazz Blues from a true master!

This Jazz Blues Solo is Perfect And Nobody Is Talking About It

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Save Your Chord Melody Playing With These 3 Tactics!

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Chord Melody like you hear it with Joe Pass or  Barney Kessel is a beautiful part of playing Jazz guitar, and it is a lot of fun to play a piece as a complete arrangement of a song. But is also difficult, and when you play then you are busy with the chords, extensions, and keeping the thing going.

There are a few things that can ruin your chord melody and some things that you can add to make it sound better and become easier to play,  so let’s have a look at some of my chord melody secrets (that everybody else also uses)

Getting Started With The Arrangement

The basic way to get started playing a song as a chord melody arrangement is to get the melody on the top strings, mostly the two top strings, B and E,  and occasionally you can go to the G string.

From there you can add chords under the notes and here shell-voicings are a very useful tool since they have a bass note on the low E or A strings and the chord part, 7th and 3rd on the middle strings G and D.

You basically add chords when you can, and mostly on beats 1 & 3 to make the sound of the chords and the time clear.

There is one thing that you ALWAYS need to get right otherwise your chord melody won’t make any sense, and there are a lot of things you can add. Let’s start by avoiding that pitfall!

Melody Is King!

This is something that I say to students very often if I give feedback on Chord melody arrangements: The melody is not clear enough.

It simply doesn’t work if you play the but nobody can hear what song it is…

Luckily, this is not incredibly difficult to fix. The first step is to realize that it is a problem, and there is an app for that! It’s the camera in your phone, so that you can record yourself playing, and then listen while you pay attention to whether you clearly hear the melody, and actually also how it is phrased, but in the beginning, just make sure that it is clear.

You can also practice playing chords where the top note is louder than the rest, something that is also very useful for comping., just to develop that technique.

So like this Dm7, and just try and play it slowly, maybe try to play the melody alone, and then when you play it you want to hear it as a melody note with a bit of chord under it.

Ideally, you want to really let the melody sing, and for some guitarists then that is more important than the chords, which is clear if you listen to more modern guys like Bill Frisell or John Scofield.

They are both only adding chords here and there and really focusing on getting the melody across.

And if you start using your chords like this then that can be a lot easier!

Don’t play the complete chord all the time

We call it chord melody, which almost suggests that the chord is more important than the melody but you just heard how that is not the case.

The way the basic recipe works then you will get chords on the heavy beats and especially when the chords change,

but it can actually be a lot more interesting if you open that up for a few reasons:

#1 Phrasing

Playing the chord and the melody at the same time actually makes it more difficult to really phrase the melody, so if you separate the melody and add the chord later then it is often easier to really get the melody to stand out and have the right dynamics

#2 Variation & Flow

The next situation where this is really useful is if you have a long note on that chord because this is pretty boring: Stella first note (with metronome at tempo 50? drinking coffee)

And I am playing the same chords, but this is still a lot more interesting:

 

So even without changing the notes in the chord you can still make the melody stand out, avoid long boring sustained chords and keep the time and the groove flowing.

#1 Make The Melody Stand Out

#2 Avoid Long Boring Chords

#3 Keep The Groove Flowing

Let’s look at another way to add movement to your chord melody arrangement, this time using more chords.

More Movement and More chords

The problem you saw in that first example with Stella by Starlight was that there was a long note in the melody and nothing was happening. When you harmonize Jazz Standards, that is actually pretty common:

But very often you can easily add a passing chord or two to make things flow a little easier.

If you have All The Things You Are then a basic version would sound like this, though I did add a tritone II V in there because I really like that sound in this song:

But you can also add some tritone substitutions as passing chords like a B7 to go to Bbm7 and an E7 to take us to the Em7 and A7:

And these are just dominants and tritone subs that resolve into the next part of the progression, that s a great first place to look: chords that resolve as dominants or down a half step, and still fit the melody, but there are more options like this diatonic Eø passing chord (and a dominant on Days of Wine And Roses:

Diminished chords can also be really effective and easy to work with, especially the dominant diminished chords like the C# and F# dim I am adding here on Polkadots and moonbeams:

But there are more ways to keep things moving along besides using passing chords.

More Movement and More Notes

Here’s a fairly basic example with a fill going from Eø to A7 and really ending in the A7 chord, which is always a smooth transition:

But you can also play fills that mix single notes and chords like this example on Body and Soul, and try to notice the B7 that is used as a suspension that delays the Bb7:

It is mostly a matter of really knowing the song and then taking a spot out to come up with some options using arpeggiation, passing chords, and fills.

A Beautiful Different Take On Chord Melody

One of my favorites when it comes to Chord Melody is Bill Frisell, who somehow manages to really mix traditional chord melody that you might hear with Joe Pass with a more modern approach borrowing from Bluegrass and Blues but also more modern harmony like Bill Evans, and it is magical that he can get all of that to melt together and become incredibly beautiful music. Check out this video on how he works with Days Of Wine And Roses

Amazing Chord Melody Without Any Chords? So Beautiful That Nobody Cares

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How Joe Pass Makes Jazz Chords Simple & Easy

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Joe Pass: “First of all, I’ll tell you, If I have a II V, Forget the II.”

So this isn’t exactly how I think chord progressions but I sort of agree with him, and as you will see, the way he breaks down a Jazz standard really is practical and makes it a lot easier to learn the song. I am sure you recognize how difficult it is when you are looking at a song and get completely lost in all the different chords and extensions and alterations which maybe isn’t really how you should think about it anyway.

As you probably already know then Joe Pass is one of my favorite Jazz guitarists. He was a walking library of Jazz standards, he knew all the songs, and I have been told that most of the virtuoso sessions were just the producer, Noman Granz, asking Joe Pass to play a song and then they just recorded that with no rehearsal, which is pretty mind-blowing. That is also why I thought it was exciting to come across this video where he describes how he thinks about chord progressions in songs.

II V is just V

Let’s first look at this II V thing in isolation and then branch out to how this all fits together in songs and how it works with some other chords.

The basic concept is if you have a II V then you can just use the V chord. Joe Pass explains it like this:

“Why are you playing the II what is it? like”

“If you play the V, that got the II!”

“here’s a scale for the V, It’s a G7”


“here’s a scale for the II
it’s the same scale different notes”

The idea of ignoring the II chord and just seeing the whole thing as a V chord is certainly not unique to Joe Pass, I would mostly associate it with how Barry Harris teaches and it is a part of Bebop since it is also fairly easy to spot in Charlie Parker solos. here’s an example from Blues For Alice where he is playing the C# on beat 1 of the Em7 A7 bar, which means that he is not thinking Em7 there at all, just A7.

Pros and Cons of Reducing Chord Progressions

There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to this approach.  The obvious advantage is that there are less chords, for example if you look at Confirmation:

where there are suddenly a lot less chords to remember.

Becomes:

Another advantage with reducing II V’s is that the strongest movement in a II V I is the resolution from V to I, and that is still there, so you keep the essence of what is going on, which means that the reduced progression will often still make sense as a chord progression.

Joe Pass demonstrates that they are the same by pointing out that the notes in the scales are the same,  one explanation that I got from a teacher a long time ago was that the II chord is really just a suspension of the V chord, so Dm7 is just a G7sus4 that got out of hand and turned into a m7 chord.

Bebop: More Chords! (but also less chords)

Ironically, Bebop is probably the period in Jazz where it became normal to turn V chords and (a lot of other chords) into II V progressions when harmonizing standards, but that probably also has to do with how Bebop is very much about moving harmony, and if you have a II V I then there is more movement than just the V I.

At the same, they probably thought about a lot of those “extra chords” as embellishments and extra sounds and not than really a description of the actual harmony of the song. An good example of this could be the first two bars of  “Have You Met Miss Jones”:

Fmaj7 Bb7 Am7 D7 Gm7 – Fmaj7 F#dim Gm7

Where the 1st example has a nice flow and a lot of movement and the 2nd one is what is really happening in the harmony of the song, so to speak.

Here you might often solo on the 2nd progression while the comping plays the first.

But you are free to do what ever you want, and it is also nice to sometimes just nail all those changes, even if the comping doesn’t.

Shoot a version without “even if the comping doesn’t”?

Joe Pass: Just 3 Chords!

Joe Pass reduces the progression to essentially 3 chord types:

“I mean a major minor or dominant you must
look at chord changes
really in the simplest form way you can”

And that works really well for reducing the amount of chords in a progression and often will also make it easier to understand how the harmony is flowing, but not always, and maybe tying your understanding to specific chords is not explaining how to improvise or even comp over the song. Making things very simple also sometimes means leaving out useful information, and while your ears and the melody of the song often will help with that,  it can get a bit confusing. And while you think of the simple chords then you still play all the chords when you are comping, so you do need to know what they are.

But it does really resonate with me that you want to keep the chords simple, also in terms of extensions and interpretations of them, which is also why I very often don’t write extensions on the chords at all even though I might be playing that in chord voicing. There is a lot of freedom in how you interpret a chord, and it doesn’t make sense to force a certain sound on it. Instead you want to understand the chord in the context of the song (and the context or band you are playing in) and use that to decide what colors should be added. Extensions can become a distraction from what is actually happening in the song.

Stella is a good example here, and Joe Pass actually reduces this in that video, where the way he interprets the last way back to Bb is what really resonated with me. Here are the most common set of changes:

“You know like if I play Stella By Starlight in the key of Bb the first chord is A7
the second chord is F7
the third chord is B flat seventh
next chord is Eb next chord is Eb minor, Bb”

I’ll get to how Ab7 is Ebm in a bit, but let’s first look at the different dominants.

F7 is clearly the dominant in the key, which is Bb major, and you just hear that sound with a 9th and 13th in the song, even if the original arrangement has a b13 if I remember correctly.

This makes a ton of sense and reducing Cm7 F7 to F7 also works really well, but if you look at the A7 at the beginning of the song then that is not A7 as you would find it in D major. There are a few things that give that away: The II chord in this case is an Eø, and there is a Bb in the melody over the A7. So that chord is more like an A7 in Dm with a b9 and a b13. You should probably not treat the F7 and the A7 the same if you start soloing, and you in general you will quickly come across different types of dominant chords that you want to be able to handle.

In fact, the A7 or Eø A7 is a reharmonization and the chord is originally a diminished chord, what I usually describe as a #IV diminished,

but as you may or may not know I tend to reduce chord progressions to functions rather than chords because that also tells me how I have to play the chords or solo over the progression, the one thing that is clearly not included when you just throw away the II chord.

Barry Harris Approach

WIth that type of dominant sound, Barry Harris has another explanation with the exercise that tells you to play down the “C7 scale to the 3rd of A”

Essentially that scale is D harmonic minor which is the scale that gives you an A7 with a b9 and a b13.

It is a very neat way to introduce the sound of the progression and also get the right extensions in there without having to start talking about harmonic minor and making things complicated.

I guess the downside to thinking in functions is that you need to add other names or another level to how you think about the chord progression and that may be difficult to learn compared to just throwing away a chord. Joe Pass clearly came at this in a very practical way where I also learned from theory lessons when I was studying.

Reviewing Other Peoples Teaching

Just a side-note on this video, I actually get quite a lot of requests to talk about other peoples teaching,  and usually I say no to making a video explaining a video that Rick Beato,  or somebody else made, simply because it seems a bit weird to explain other peoples teaching. In this case, I decided to still do a video because I think it is really interesting to hear how Joe Pass thinks about chords and you can actually find a lot in this 1 to 2-minute segment of a very long video.

IVm and Backdoor Dominants

The other thing that really resonated with me , and actually is the reason I decided to make this video, is how Joe Pass described this section:

“3rd chord is Bb7 next chord
is Eb next chord is Eb minor Bb”

So he clearly hears the Ab7 as a minor subdominant since that dominant is then turned into a IV minor chord, rather than keeping it as a dominant, which to me also suggests that his ears probably think in functions as well.

A lot of the most beautiful harmony in Jazz standards is about minor subdominant chords in major. That small group of chords can do magical things, and it is very useful to realize that they belong together and that you can often mess around with changing one out for the other.

In this case, the song is in Bb major, so the IV chord is Eb and the IVm chord will be Ebm, as Joe plays in the video.

The different chords you then have available as common minor subdominant options would be:

Ebm6, EbmMaj7, Ebm7, Ab7, Gbmaj7, Bmaj7 and Cø.

The important notes for the sound are probably that the chord contains the Gb which is the minor 3rd of Ebm and that it does not contain an A, because that would make it a dominant chord.

Learning some Cole Porter songs will help you get acquainted with most of them, he also uses them really a lot.

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Amazing Chord Melody Without Any Chords? So Beautiful That Nobody Cares

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It is not often that you come across someone who manages to re-invent a style like this into something both beautiful and unique,  but this take on Days Of Wine And Roses is a such a beautiful version of the song that uses a lot of new techniques, and actually stuff you can use in your own playing that isn’t that common in Jazz guitar.

With most Jazz guitarists when you say Chord Melody then they think of people like Joe Pass or  Barney Kessel

Both of these are of course fantastic, but they are what I would consider a more traditional approach to chord melody, and Jazz is not only a tradition, it is also a style of music that while staying true to it’s roots also (luckily) keeps changing and evolving.

When it comes to playing chord melody then usually we are already having a hard time just laying down the harmony and playing the melody at the same time with any kind of phrasing, because  that is already quite a lot to have going on. But what if you could open it up with a completely different sound an instead of trying to sound like a piano or use traditional drop voicings then you can explore  the independent sound and possibilities of the electric guitar to create something else. I think that is exactly what Bill Frisell does in this version, and he manages to have a very clear connection to both Jazz tradition and to other styles especially Bluegrass but certainly also Blues and even Pop music.

The Blues and Wine And Roses

I don’t think I had this association right away, but if I listen now then to me the intro is really Blues inspired, and borrowing a lot from what you might hear in an acoustic blues song, something like Lightnin’ Hopkins, I am curious what you think? It is all pretty much just a playing a good old campfire C chord with some sparse fills giving you a #9 and a b7 to really make it more dominant and also make it sound like blues. One phrasing technique that I really connect with Bill Frisell is sliding down to a note. He seems to do that more than most people I am aware off, within Jazz at least. I think Guthrie Govan does it really a lot as well, he sort of re-invented what could be done with using slides to me, but I don’t really consider him Jazz. Here Frisell uses a slide to get to the minor 3rd from the major 3rd, It’s the blues thing. Because C is the V of the key, which is F major, then the intro still works as a “normal” intro where I think most Blues intros would set the mood up on the I chord, but Days Of Wine And Roses is of course not exactly a 12-bar blues.

What is also really great about this is that he is starting a Jazz chord melody with something that is mostly a triad sound, so it is not exactly Bebop tradition, he is almost hiding the extensions and I think the way he does that is really inspired! I A huge difference in both the intro and really the whole performance is how the priority for Frisell ito create a beautiful mood around the melody more than a sort of clear functional harmony based intro or a groove. This is also how he gets to incorporate some of the very uncommon chord sounds and voicings that he uses, but we’ll get to those.

The Melody Can Stand Alone!

 

I might get slaughtered in the comments for this, since I am saying that he doesn’t use chords, because he is playing a chord in the first  bar of the melody, and a very basic and simple jazz chord at that. But he doesn’t harmonize the song the way you would usually work through a Jazz song. The “standard” way to create chord melody, that I have also taught in several videos, even using this song, is to put a chord under the melody on the heavy beats of the bar. For Days Of Wine And Roses that might give you an opening like this:

And that is very solid because it gives you a very clear picture of the harmony and the melody, but this approach is also very much focused on harmony and making that an important part of it, where Frisell’s take is much more about giving the melody a chance to shine, something you will see several examples along the way, and he also talks about it in his masterclass video:

This way of giving priority to the melody also sort of explains why he often prefers to just play the melody alone, and once that is there and if there is room then he adds things around it. While this is not the way we usually do things in Jazz, then I do think he has a point, and playing a complete chords under the melody also sort of takes away from the melody. If you listen to him like this then you understand what he does a lot better, at least to me it makes a lot more sense. Lets’ check it out and then also explore what he does with chords instead of playing full chords.

So you have the chords in here which are first an Fmaj7 shell voicing, so yes a very very basic Jazz chord, and this Eb7 which is really just an interval, but which does give you enough information in the context to hear what is going on, and if you listen to the melody that adds the 3rd of the chord G, that completes the picture with the Eb7.

It is Rubato!

A quick side-note about the sheet music: If you are only reading the tabs then you won’t care about this, but this entire performance is rubato, so I had to interpret it quite heavily when I was writing out the examples, and I wanted to keep the original structure of the song in there, since he is playing that song, but everything is actually out of time, so it may be difficult to follow, and I did have to make some choices to fit everything in there, but to me, it just makes more sense to relate it to the song to see it in that context.

Turning Chords into Arpeggios

On the two bars of D7 that follows he turns chords into a mix of arpeggios and smaller voicings, something you will see more great examples of as well. Here there are two voicings put together in a phrase that makes up the D7 and none of them are complete D7 chords. He is really as much playing them as a fill as he is playing them as chords. While doing that he makes the fill interesting with grace notes, open strings and sustaining minor 2nd intevals, and notice that he uses his thumb to grab a low note.

A Beautiful Gm Voicing

Another example of this is on the Gm7 chord that follows which also is an example of how he uses the volume pedal to add color to the sound, here it is sort of built around this shape

But he always splits it up also when he uses it later in the  song

When Intervals Are Chords

The song moves from Gm7 to Bbm, so subdominant to minor subdominant,  and here he fills up the long notes with shifting 3rd intervals and also adds some slides to add a different dynamic and sound to what is going on.

He sort of uses the same idea in the second half, but the he is playing it with 10th intervals

You already saw in the first bars of the song how he also just plays intervals as chords, and this is a part of the open sound that he uses.

There are also some really unusual dominant sounds and chords that are relying on interval structures, but I will get those in a bit together with an amazing ending chord for the song.

Bill Frisell

To me, Bill Frisell is one of the 3 most important Jazz guitarists of his generation with John Scofield and Pat Metheny being the other two, and I have listened really a lot to all 3 them.

I am aware that this may be a polarizing opinion, and it is certainly an opinion more than anything else, so you can always run amok in the comments with complaints about leaving out Mike Stern or John Abercrombie or maybe someone else that you like more. Frisell is probably the least famous of the 3, but like the others he has really managed to stay true to himself and keep on creating new music and new sounds, and he still does. The last year or two I have seen both his trio and a bluegrass project of his live, both concerts were fantastic,  I can only recommend that you check him out if you get the chance, his playing is truly impressive and actually a lot more technical or flashy than the example I am covering here.

In Polyphony Less Really Is More

You have already seen how Bill Frisell uses a lot of voice-leading and is very creative with that. The next part of theme shows how he will sometimes take out a single voice and leave out  almost everything else to let this voice shine next to the melody. In this case, it is very effective and he is really just using one simple melody to move from Gm7 to C7 and continue from Eø to A7

It is really just a guide tone line, and it is simple but also really used in the right place. Notice how this also means that he relies only on the melody and just leaves out most of the chords for this section.

There is another spot later where he does something similar but here the voices are really moving at the same time and there is a bit more going on also in the harmony, even if he is still just spelling out the harmony with one or two notes at a time. Beautiful minimalism using intervals and arpeggiating chords while having a top melody and a 2nd voice moving down. Playing this with full chords would not have the same effect.

Let’s look at some more of those strange dominant chord sounds.

Frisells Funny Dominants

Before the 2nd half of the theme, Bill changed the C7 into an Gb7, so a tritone substitution, fairly straight forward, but as you saw on the D7 in the beginning then chords are turned into a combination of arpeggios and intervals.

In this case he is using that a Gb7(b5) is the combination of 2 7th intervals: Gb E and C Bb, I know I am being a bit liberal with the enharmonic spelling here.

And then moves on while sustaining some notes to add a simple fill on top, and keeping it all practical and playable.

The D7 chords are, maybe except from the ending, the chords which are most surprising. This next example is first an example of a place where the melody is block harmonized (sort of) and then it disappears into a dissonant incomplete A diminished voicing that works as a D7. In this example, you also hear how the extensions and intervals within the chords are more important than a clear picture of the harmony, which is especially on the first two chords that don’t contain a 3rd and the first one is really just a Dm triad. It is actually funny that being vague is also a statement in music.

The Song and The Sound

Days Of Wine And Roses, is a Jazz standard that Bill Frisell really likes to play, since there are quite a few versions of it on YouTube and he also uses it in his masterclass video as an example for chord melody, I thought this was from there, but I am not sure about that anymore, since this is a different guitar? What is great about it is not only all the different things he is using borrowing from other styles and playing  surprising things.  It is as much how he manages to make that into a complete piece of music that doesn’t sound like things put together with copy-paste licks and gimmicks. In that respect he really reminds me of Hendrix.

This video of Days of Wine and Roses has him playing an SG, which is not the most common jazz guitar, but which I found out was his main guitar for quite a long time after he had stopped using an ES175, and in fact he was at one point playing in a band with Vinnie Colaiuta, this is a bit random but I thought it was very funny that they had been in a band together since they are so different. In the video, It sounds like the bridge pickup through a fender amp to me, but I can’t really tell for sure. Frisell often uses solid-body guitars, mostly telecasters and strats. I have also seen him play a 335 type guitar quite a few times. He also had a period where he played a Klein solid-body. In the video you hear quite a bit of reverb and delay which is probably a lexicon LXP-1 for reverb together with a digital delay. He was one of the people I saw using an LXP-1 that made me decide to get one. I had also seen Scofield, Rosenwinkel and Ben Monder using LXP-1 reverbs.  You can even see his settings for the lexicon here if you want to in this clip:

In the song, you also hear a fair amount of volume pedal, plus that and I am pretty sure he is also using a compressor of some sort.

A Suspension that more people should use

The ending of the song shows a few things that I think deserve to be highlighted, and actually we should all steal the ending chord!

First you get a C(b9) and then a typical very simple F triad melody, played largely with the left hand thumb!

And then he comes out on (yet another) strange dominant sound, in this case  a phrygian chord: Fsus2/E. He switches to playing with his right hand thumb to get the a different sound and the chord then resolves by letting it ring and playing the low F with the thumb on the left hand.

Check out another great chord melody player:

This Jazz Blues Solo is Perfect And Nobody Is Talking About It

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The Mistake Everyone Makes Learning Jazz Guitar

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A problem that comes up all the time with my students and Patreon supporters, and certainly also something remember from learning myself is that after a LOT of practice then you find yourself at a point where you know the scales and arpeggios, and you understand how that fits with the progression, but your solos still sound horrible!

But if focusing on playing the right notes is a mistake, then how do you fix this?

Clearly, something is missing,  and you don’t want to only focus on the dry theory stuff, so in this video you can take a closer look at what great players like Barry Harris and Charlie Parker are doing, because then you can get started working on making it sound right, because some it is not about the notes.

#1 Bebop Energy

Good Jazz lines have a certain energy, this really comes from Bebop where there is a LOT of forward motion

Take a lick like this Barry Harris Line from his solo on  “I’ll Remember April”:

It is pretty easy to hear that he is really playing from one chord to the next and has lines that move to a target note in the next chord.

In this case, I took an example where the targets are placed conveniently clear on the heavy beats of the bar. But you can open that up later.

This is from Live in Tokyo album which is really worth checking out. His playing is fantastic on this.

What you want to avoid is that your melodies have a lot of notes but are not going anywhere.

This is not a fantastic bebop line:

It doesn’t work because there is no direction, it is just moving back and forth and not really locking in with the flow of the chords.

You want to be able to make lines that move forward. You want to feel that the melody is going to hit the target note on the next chord.  Your solo lines should feel like they are saying: “we’re on a mission from god” (Blues Brothers)

What do you need: If we take Barry’s II V I lick as an example then you can see that he is hitting chord tones on the heavy beat, and that is an easy way to get started.  (Bring up his example with high lights)

The other thing that you need to get used to is knowing where the melody is ending and play towards that note.

Let’s say that you have a quick II V in C major and these target notes:

Now you want to make lines that go towards that note.

Dm7 to G7: You can run down the scale, super easy, barely an inconvenience!

To change things up a bit on the G7, we have 3 notes to get to  Cmaj7 and you can do that by playing a Dm triad that naturally resolves down to the G on Cmaj7.

Then you have:

If you start practicing making lines that do this, then you will start to get more of that Bebop energy or momentum into your solos. Think of where you want to go, and play a line that gets you there.

#2 Notes With More Bebop Energy

The first thing to work on is  something that I sort of skipped over the Barry Harris example. Notice how he uses chromatic notes to get more tension and in that way pull the melody forward. (Example with highlights?)

This can really help with the energy, and is a key part of the sound, I’ll show you more concepts like this later in the video.

Again it is something you probably want to mostly think of as moving to a specific note, and usually, that will also be a note in the chord at that point.

Check out how this Charlie Parker Lick from his solo on Cherokee is really pushing through to the resolution and has some great chromatic phrases as well:

It mostly makes sense to split these in two types: Single approach notes like these

The other type is a longer chromatic melody usually approaching the target note from above and below, which are called chromatic enclosures.

Adding this to your playing is really about learning to add chromatic notes and learning some chromatic enclosures that you then start to add to your lines, and the target notes for the chromatic phrases are often the chord tones that you would use as target notes in the line anyway.

An example of how you can do this with an enclosure on the Dm7 and two passing notes on the G7 sounds like this:

How Do You Practice Making Better Lines?

As you can tell by now, then I am showing you the concepts that are being used by Parker and Barry Harris. But how do you get those into your playing? If you want to play better lines or if you want to add a specific type of phrase into your playing, then you should work on writing lines.

This is not something that I made up, if you study Parker’s solos then he clearly has phrases that he uses a lot, and the Barry Harris masterclasses are really mostly about him showing the students how he composes solo phrases while breaking down the concepts he uses.

How it sounds

How you want it to sound

What is playable

And that is what you should do. If you want to become better at using F major triads over a Dm7 chord then write 50 II V I licks in C major that uses that triad. Then you cover the 3 most important parts of getting that into your playing: how it sounds and getting it into your ears, how you want it to sound, and what is playable. That way you can get it into your playing. You don’t need to always write it down, but it can be a good idea, especially if you want to figure out why something sounds good, or maybe if it sounds bad. I’ll show you how I do this later in the video.

#3 Arpeggio Motion

Now you have a better idea about how to create lines that move forward, but there are other ways to make your solo lines more alive, and they are actually easy to start using.

One way is to play arpeggios as triplets to add short rapid phrases to lines that are for the rest mostly 8th notes, this is really just about changing up the flow and create variation

Check out this Joe Pass line that does that in two ways:

Joe Pass is playing the arpeggios as 8th-note triplets, and here you have a Bbmaj7 arpeggio with a leading note, which leads nicely into an enclosure,

and later also an Am7 arpeggio that he plays as a triplet and use to target the note F.

 

Both techniques are very common ways to use triplets and can be applied to all chords. They are a great way to change up the flow and get to a target note. You also see Barry Harris using this in the example on the Gmaj7 chord, both using Bm7 and Gmaj7 arpeggios.

Practice playing your scales in diatonic arpeggios using these two recipes and then start using that in your solos.

But there is also another great device in this example that can help you break up the 8th note flow, especially if you have too many scale runs in your solos.

#4 Trills

If you listen to the first part of the line then in the 2nd bar, Joe Pass plays a trill

which breaks up what is going on and stops it from just being a scale run, without it then you have this:

Joe Pass love using these, also often several after each, these are the kind of thing that you want to add to solos in the places where they are easy to play, simply because they are pretty fast and usually sounds the best if you can execute them with legato technique.

Barry uses them as well:

Here you have the trill leading into the root of F7, and this example illustrates another really powerful technique that I will get to in a bit as well, and I can use that to show how I compose lines to get something into my playing.

#5 Twist and Shout!

What I am talking about here is the first arpeggio in the line which is a pivot arpeggio, something that can really solve a lot of problems if your solo lines are very predictable and tend to just run up and down scales and arpeggios.

In this case it is an Ebmaj7 arpeggio over a Cm7 chord, so using the arpeggio from the 3rd of the chord.

The pivot arpeggio is constructed by taking an arpeggio:

You play the root and then move down the rest of the arpeggio an octave to get this much more interesting melody with a large interval skip: 

And don’t underestimate how powerful it is to have a way to make large intervals melodic, because they can sound really unnatural in a line.

How You Improve Your Vocabulary

When you want to get better at using something like a pivot arpeggio then try to keep it simple when you are composing lines.

One Phrase (or arpeggio in this case)

One Chord to apply it to

One  Way of playing it

You can so easily get lost in possible options, and it is not going to be nearly as useful if you do so.

If I use the Ebmaj7 pivot arpeggio and try to make a line that takes me from Cm7 to F7.

Try to get to A, as a target note on F7:

You could also target the high A by combining it with a Cm7 arpeggio

Maybe adding a trill to get to the F7

Or a chromatic enclosure:

The point is to play the pivot arpeggio and then see how you can put it together with the other stuff you know and turn that into a phrase that you like, essentially that is what Barry was doing in his soloing masterclasses by constructing great solos on songs. From there you can gradually start using it when you solo.

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This Jazz Blues Solo is Perfect And Nobody Is Talking About It

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Like me, you probably transitioned from playing some sort of Blues or Rock into playing Jazz, and often one of the first things that you “get” when listening to Jazz and that makes you explore the genre more is Jazz Blues. For getting that sort of crossover sound then I think this solo is the best there is, the perfect storm, and I never hear people talk about it which I find super weird.  It is the perfect mix of Bebop lines and Blues Licks and it is much more dynamic than most Jazz, but I’ll explain that along the way.

I was talking about this with one of the students in the Roadmap course the other day, and that made me think of this solo which really nails what Jazz Blues as a sound is and it is an Amazing solo! Certainly one of my favorite Jazz guitar solos of all time, and probably my favorite Joe Pass solo. It is a great song to demonstrate what is Blues and What is Jazz because it has clear elements from both and Joe Pass mixes that up and uses it in an amazing and creative way while also demonstrating just how incredible his range is with the music both in tempo, technique, sound, and harmony. Some of it is about the notes, but there is a LOT more going on.

There is a lot of real blues in this, with minor pentatonic stuff already from the rubato intro:

This is really all Blues scale stuff and using that sound. But he goes into some bop lines quite fast afterwards. Side note: I think the first part he is playing with his fingers and not with a pick, it is a little bit like you can hear the finger mute the string before it sounds which is different from playing with a pick, with a pick it is faster, almost instant.

Joe’s Blues & The Album

The song is off the “Intercontinental” album from 1970 which has Joe playing in a trio with drummer Kenny Clare and bass player Eberhard Weber.

Weber, is for me, much more associated with modern ECM stuff, so to hear him in this setting playing on an album of mostly standards is a bit funny, but he plays great on it! I have talked about how this is one of my favorite Joe Pass albums, if not just my favorite album. As far as I can tell, they didn’t rehearse anything and just spend a day in the studio with Joe calling tunes, which makes this album even more mind-blowing.

B-roll: Viking guitar teacher – “Learn Joe Pass” “go practice” + tape with Joe’s Blues

I was introduced to this song as homework, which was sort of scary. My teacher copied a tape of it and told me to go learn it. At the time I hadn’t really been listening to Joe Pass that much, I had been checking out Wes, Ulf Wakenius, Scofield, and Pat Martino,  not so much a choice on my part, it was just what people told me to listen to, since this was before the internet, so I couldn’t google it

This solo was really different from the other Jazz Blues things I had heard.

Most of the time when I had heard Jazz Blues then it was a LOT faster and a lot denser, more 8th note based, like Parker playing Au Privave.

And at those tempos then the solos are much more bebop lines and most of the time the emphasis is really on the Jazz side of things with phrases weaving through the changes.

That is not how Joe’s blues works though, there’s a lot more space in there.

The Sound – Archtop and Polytone?

But first, let’s talk a little bit about the sound, I think Joe’s sound on this album is a great traditional Jazz guitar sound. I always imagined that he used his ES175 into a polytone on this album, but I don’t know if it was that guitar and what amp was there, though it does have a polytone vibe to me, it could just as easily be fender tube amp or a music man. I am not even sure if Polytone amps existed in 1970?

There is also quite a bit of reverb on the guitar, and, to me, that sounds like a plate reverb, not an amp spring reverb, which you may already know that I don’t really like. As far as I know, most Polytones don’t have a reverb, so it is likely that it was a plate reverb given that it was recorded in 1970 before digital reverbs.

I am curious what you think he used, and you can hear it all quite clearly in the intro before the rhythm section comes in. Let me know if you have a suggestion, or maybe you know what he used.

Leave a comment to let me know!

Jazz Guitar Has NO Dynamics

Jazz guitar as an instrument actually suffers a bit from not having a very wide dynamic range, compared to drums or a trumpet. In this song, then the rhythm section is really playing as if they are in your living room, so the bass is really loud in the mix, and the drums playing only brushes is really just supplying a clear groove for Joe Pass to lock in with and float over, and because the drums are very soft then Joe Pass has an easier time using the dynamics of the guitar to the full extent.

I don’t know if you have thought about that, but traditionally,  Jazz guitar trios were often softer than bands with horns, and you can tell that they often are still a bit more in the chamber ensemble corner when they play. Like if you listen to Julian Lage trio, or Gilad Hekselman

Both, modern guitarists, who really embrace this and are very good at using dynamics and colors in their playing, while also being really different.

If you listen to Julian Lage on Nocturne then you can probably hear that if the band was louder then his soft call-response would just disappear, or have to be so loud that it wouldn’t come across as comping the melody.

And that is also how the rhythm section works behind Joe Pass giving him room to really get the contrast out between loud and soft and using chords and single-note lines. Let’s look at some of those types of phrases he is using, and how that is as much about rhythm.

Mixing Up Blues and Bebop

Most Jazz solos will stick to the subdivision of the groove, which is usually 8th notes, but for a slow blues like this that really is more like a ballad then you can do a LOT more and Joe Pass almost uses all the options!

He has phrases that are using 8th notes as this part from the beginning:

But since Blues is more fluid on top of the groove he also uses that in some of the phrases mixing 16th notes and triplets into it, more open but also sort of going for the Blues feel.

And then a few beats later he plays double time phrases:

And we didn’t even get to the IV chord in bar 5 yet!

Another really nice harmonic trick that he uses a few times is to turn the Am7 in bar 9 into an A7, and then us notes from the G blues scale to make it sort of an altered sound and then stick to the blues sound on the D7 that follows.

That is really giving you an A7 with a b9 and a #9 when he uses C and Bb over the A7 it is like a phrase you can hear in two ways at the same time.

Another nice variation with the rhythm is where he uses straight 8th notes on top of the swing groove

Harmonizing Blues Licks

Of course, there are also some really great phrases, harmonizing melodies, and mixing chords with single-note lines.

A great example is this really simple 3-note Blues phrase that is harmonized on a G7:

and then repeated on a C7

First using G7 and Ab7 chords and then the same notes but now using C7 and Db7 chords and he is using some of the same chords and a G pedal note for this simple but very effective part of the solo

 

Wes Montgomery!

Another guitarist with incredibly strong melodic ideas who is a a master of using chords in his solos is Wes Montgomery. If you want to know more about his playing, then check out this video that talks about both his singl note lines and his chord solos.

3 Reasons Wes Montgomery Is Amazing And Worth Checking Out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTOTO4CGrzs&list=PLWYuNvZPqqcGmFEa5n98zh0m46GcARyUh&index=1

 

 

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How To Understand The Style of Jazz Solos

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The Style of a Jazz Solo is about how the notes are used in melodies and against the chords.

John Coltrane and Lester Young are mostly playing the same notes, and they are more similar than different. Yet if you listen to Jazz, they are worlds apart.

In this video, I am going to take a phrase from Lester Young, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Joe Henderson and then compare how they improvise in their solos.

This will give you a clear picture of why these styles sound so different and also some ideas on what and how to work on your own playing to sound the way you want to.

I am curious what you guys think!

Content:

0:00 Intro

0:12 4 Solos From Different Styles

0:27 Working on knowing different Styles of phrasing and improvising

0:41 #1 Lester Young – All Of Me

0:52 Analysing Lester – Melodies on top of the chords

2:15 Example #1 Slow

2:37 #2 Charlie Parker – Anthropology

2:41 Bebop – Forward motion and Harmony

3:50 Example #2 Slow

4:00 #3 John Coltrane – Take The Coltrane

4:08  Painting on a Chord Progression  – Abstraction on a Blues

5:36 Example #3 Slow

5:54 #4 Joe Henderson – Solid

6:07 Hardbop – New Melodies and Old Blues

7:38 Example #4 Slow

7:56 What Do You Think Is The Difference between the Styles

8:20 Like The Video? Check out my Patreon Page

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Joe Pass – How to Keep Solos Interesting

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An important part of playing a great solo is also to not play with the same approach all the time. You have to play the song and make strong melodies, but like Joe Pass does here: You need to have different types of melodies or colors in your playing.

If there is one guitar player you want to check out for bop guitar then it is probably Joe Pass. His playing is really setting the standard when it comes to solid bebop lines on guitar.

In this video, I take a few examples of his playing on the C Jazz Blues: Relaxin’ at Camarillo and talk about the different kinds of lines that he uses on the blues.

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