Repertoire, Part II: Improvise

Published: Mon, 09/21/20

Last week, my daughter frantically emerged from her remote-learning bubble in the living room long enough to blurt "I need a good dad joke! Right now!" I am, of course, a proud repository of outstanding dad jokes, both curated and spontaneous – it's the spontaneous ones that make me laugh to the point of tears, long after my cereal-eating children have fallen into a silence so stony you can watch the rime spread across the kitchen counter. But somehow, dad jokes have become something of a currency among texting girls of a certain age, at least at my kid's not-quite-school, so I coughed up an old favorite: "What did the zero say to the eight?"

"Oh, dad, everyone knows that one!" Dang. I threw out two more that likewise failed to make the grade, before resorting to a chestnut of the surreal school: "What's big and green and swims in the ocean?" That one actually got a laugh out of her, and off she went, back into the bubble with her prize in tow.

It reminded me, in a roundabout way, of the time I was talking with Paul Rishell about blues soloing. I've known Paul for over twenty-five years now, and I can't remember why we were on this subject at the time – whether it was for some article I was writing or if we were just chatting of this and that. Paul's been playing primarily acoustic blues since I've known him, but his background in electric blues run deep too, and his take on the the whole thing was both funny and succinct. About the fact that there's only so many notes involved, he said, "You know, soloing on the blues, it's like everyone is telling the same joke. It's just, you know – some people can really tell a joke, and some people can't."

I distinctly remember the moment I realized I couldn't improvise for beans playing fingerstyle guitar. I was in upstate New York, splitting a couple of shows with the songwriter and guitarist Jack Williams. I had made a couple of solo records at that point, and thought I had some pretty cool arrangements worked out for my tunes. And I thought of myself as someone who could solo, because I played electric guitar, and slide. But watching Jack play by himself was like watching someone do four-dimensional ballet – he could sing, and play fills, and groove, and his time was so good he could let the bottom drop out while he held a note on top, then fall back in with a shrug of his shoulders. It was pretty glorious, and humbling, too. I realized I knew what I wanted to be able to do, and I couldn't do it. Yet. I wanted to open up my playing like that, make room to improvise, do something more expressive than my fixed arrangements, without sacrificing the groove.

The first step was to open up my right hand, to learn how to groove with my thumb while leaving my fingers to operate independently, like I talked about in last Friday's lesson. The next step was to take what I knew about soloing thematically and playing the changes, and apply it to playing solo blues with a steady bass or alternating thumb. This was not a fast process, by any means, but over time, I did finally develop some specific, methodical ways to think about fingerstyle blues improvisation.

Practicing improvisation sounds like an oxymoron, but it's exactly what I'm going to be teaching this afternoon, in the second lesson of my three-part series on fingerstyle blues repertoire. You can check it out at the link below. There will be a replay available afterwards, and if you've got a specific question about improvising that you'd like me to address, you can go to the Youtube link now and leave your question in the comments section below the upcoming video:

Fingerstyle Blues Repertoire 2: Improvise

More soon,

David

P.S. If you missed the first lesson in this series, Groove, you can check out the replay of last Friday's live stream here:

Groove – The Replay