Playing The Changes
Published: Tue, 05/16/23
Pretty daunting, particularly if you’re taking things any more seriously than listening, learning and playing for your own enjoyment. I dropped out of a graduate program in jazz composition after just one semester at the Manhattan School of Music, simultaneously abandoning any further serious intentions as a jazz musician. Curiously though, within just a few years I found myself enjoying listening to jazz more than ever. Soon after that realization, through a series of somewhat random circumstances I’ve detailed elsewhere, I found myself teaching – and learning much more about – swing-era improvisation. Ultimately, inspired in part by recordings I’d discovered through David Rosenthal’s outstanding 1993 history Hard Bop, I finally realized I needn't partake in most of those Everest-climbing absolutes to pursue the one problem I’d really wanted to solve all along: how do hard-bop musicians from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s – Grant Green, Kenny Burrell, Lee Morgan, Hank Mobley, and so on – play the changes on the blues?
Limiting my jazz pursuits to this incredibly specific and narrow project made it possible to finally make some tangible progress with improvising, and in a way that felt manageable and satisfying. For starters, picking a ten-year period out of the jazz century removed ninety percent of the territory, and narrowing things down to one strand, albeit a particularly wide and vivid one, of jazz practice from one particular decade simplified things further. Winnowing out everything but the blues form was just common sense – if you want to know what Grant Green is doing to sound like Grant Green rather than like a more recognizably “blues” guitarist like Freddie King – what makes him sound at once familiar and exotic, still bluesy yet more “out there” – checking out how Grant Green plays the twelve-bar blues is the most efficient way to do so. You’ll still have some familiar reference points, whereas if you start by trying to learn how to play the Lydian scale over “On Green Dolphin Street,” you’ll feel like you brought two broken checkers and a blunt crayon to a graduate seminar on four-dimensional chess.
All of which does beg the question, what is playing the changes and why is it worth pursuing? Playing the changes essentially means choosing to emphasize certain notes at certain points in your soloing, based on what chord you’re on – or about to be on – at that particular moment in the chord progression. In other words, making the linear sequence of notes you choose intentionally reflect, outline, or otherwise interact with each chord change in the progression.
To start understanding what this looks and sounds like, it can help to narrow things down even further. In today’s short lesson, I demonstrate one way to use the swing scale to spell out the change from I to IV and back again – the basis of the first four bars of the blues progression and a concept that launched a thousand swing-era riffs. You can check it out at the link below:
Playing The Changes On The Blues – A Four Minute Introduction
More soon,
David
For all the details about this Saturday's workshop, including how to sign up, go to:
The Swing Scale Workshop
More soon,
David