"The anonymous liner notician here reasonably suggests a comparison with Monk, who he refers to as 'Thelonius.' Why is it that so many competent writers and well-meaning musicians have misspelled Monk's name? What's with that missing 'o'? It must be the most common copyediting mistake in jazz. Seriusly."

"A big lanky guy, he got his nickname for the wild gesticulations he made while blowing. His music is not particularly free or wild, and in truth it proves Jones to be as sentimental and woozy as a balladeer can get without losing his punch. Don't get me wrong, he's punchy. But boy does this guy want to get cozy, too. He makes Ben Webster seem a little standoffish."

Later in the book, Corbett acknowledges a particular penchant for "free improvisation and creative music," explaining how the grim economics of the way such music is released creates the equivalent of a downhill skier's black diamond slope for the dedicated collector while ensuring certain records will never enjoy a resurrection on Spotify or Apple Music:

"Challenging music is not, by any means, an easy thing to create and sell. Take a hypothetical self-produced record of free improvisation, issued in an edition of 500. One hundred of them are perhaps bought by people on a whim at a concert, many going into the homes of people who never listened to them; plenty of these are subsequently thrown away; another 150 are dispersed around the community of dedicated listeners, some of whom die or get disinterested; 50 more are consigned to record stores or distributors, forgotten, and deleted or destroyed, the final 100 copies sat in in the musician's basement for twenty years before being ruined in a flood. This winnows the number of copies in active service to roughly 50. Which turns the hunt for them into real sport and the prospect of reissuing them into pure foolhardiness."

While my own record hunting has always been far more casual and low-finance, I do love the serendipity of finding things you wouldn't otherwise come across, which is why I'd rather poke through used books and records than just point and click for my entertainment, when possible. And while it's infinitely easier to extract the details from a digital recording (hello, Amazing Slow Downer) than it was to do so by slowly ruining favorite LPs, much of my taste and understanding has been formed by the music on records I brought home simply because they looked the coolest or came the closest to what I was initially looking for.

The thing about records and musicians is, it's never one hundred percent clear how much the records are for listening and how much they're for learning. This is good news when calculating one's tax deductions, but a little weird the rest of the time. Sometimes records bought for educational purposes wind up being highly entertaining; sometimes you have the deepest insights while just listening for fun. And then there's the experience of coming back to a record after a period of time to discover what once sounded impossibly cool is still just as cool but no longer impossible – that your ears have grown in the interim, and you now possess the insight to unlock that record's mysteries.

Chords can be one of the trickiest things to peel off of records – especially certain kinds of chord substitutions, where the musicians are adding in and/or superimposing various kinds of changes to the original progression, a form of improvisation all unto itself. So in today's lesson, I take spin through "See See Rider" to explain five different ways to add chords to a standard twelve-bar blues in E. You can find it at the link below:

Five Chord Substitutions You Can Use Right Away

More soon,

David

P.S. "See See Rider" is just one of over twenty traditional blues tunes you can learn in the Fingerstyle Five membership. To learn more and sign up, visit https://www.fretboardconfidential.com/