Do The (Funky) Hustle
Published: Fri, 09/10/21
About ten years ago, I pulled off one of the great hustles of my career, when I pitched Truefire on the idea of a course on how jazz musicians play the blues. In my twenties, I had attempted to play jazz before dropping out of graduate school to play roots music. But once freed of the need to actually get good at jazz, I was able to resume my enjoyment of listening to it, and so eventually arrived at a project focused enough so as to not feel impossible. I realized I wasn't particularly interested in playing "Autumn Leaves," bossa novas or Wayne Shorter tunes, but I did want to understand once and for all what those mid-Fifties to mid-Sixties musicians on labels like Blue Note and Prestige were doing when they played the blues. It was obviously different from how blues guitarists were doing it, and different from how swing and jump blues musicians were doing it, too.
My kids were still pretty young, and all my creative juice was going into writing music for advertising and film projects, so I knew if I was going learn how to play hard bop, I was going to have to find some way to justify the time I put into a project like that. Hence the pitch. If I was making a course for Truefire, well, that was work, and that's something you have to show up for, right? Plus, then I'd have created a course I'd want to take. Amazingly, Truefire was all for it, and was also ok with a pretty long deadline. In the end, I spent about a year creating what became 50 Jazz Blues Licks You Must Know. And as a learning project, it worked like a charm. I rounded up dozens of hard bop blues tracks, discovering all kinds of artists I'd only known by name until then, and, working four bars at at time, transcribed their work on shuffles, uptempo swingers, minor blues and boogaloos to observe how musicians like Dexter Gordon, Grant Green, Hank Mobley, Blue Mitchell and Tommy Flanagan negotiate the jazz blues chord progression.
Still, there's a difference between knowing what makes something tick and really internalizing it, so the other day I went back to take a look at my own course. As I looked through and played some of the licks, there was definitely a sense of familiarity – "Oh yeah, that's where I got that move from." But playing others I thought, "ok, I should really get that one under my fingers," as in – internalized enough that I could grab it on the fly and drop it in without thinking too much about it. Mostly though, it just reminded me how much fun it had been to chase down that collection of licks in the first place, and sent me looking for more recordings like the ones I'd worked from at the time.
In the course of teaching fingerstyle blues over the past several years I've slowly ironed out a pretty systematic approach to improvisation, and it occurs to me it would work just as well for single-note soloing. Basically, you break the twelve-bar blues into three four-bar lines. Next, you learn just a few ways to play over each line, paying attention to how each four-bar phrase is actually made up of two or three smaller phrases, each leading into the next. Finally, armed with this stash of just nine to twelve extended licks, you focus on mixing and matching them over the progression to get a feel for how they address the chords and fit together into a coherent whole. I think of this process as "practicing improvisation," and it's a great intermediary step towards creating your own solos, because it takes the way most people learn to play blues – lick by lick – and just applies it to a more, for lack of a better phrase, harmonically sophisticated vocabulary.
I'd love to spend some time applying this idea to some new hard bop licks just for my own entertainment. But of course, I'm pretty occupied with all my usual fingerstyle shenanigans, so to actually spend any time on this, I'm going to have to pull another fast one, and turn it, even temporarily, into a gig. Now that I'm the boss, I have no choice but to pitch it to myself: What if I did I this month's Saturday morning workshop on single-note soloing over the jazz-blues changes? I haven't gotten back to myself on that one yet, but I think the idea's got legs. In the meantime, I've put together a playlist of jazz musicians playing the blues, with some old and new favorites, which you can find on the Playlists page of my web site, or at the link below:
Funky: Jazz Musicians Play The Blues
More soon,
David
P.S. If you've got a burning question about playing the changes on the blues, email it to me! I'll include the best ones in an upcoming Call And Response live stream on Youtube.