Shared DNA
Published: Tue, 06/20/23
Also, anything I have to say about jazz on my Youtube channel, in the Fingerstyle Five membership, in the Reliable Source workshops, or within earshot of my long-suffering coterie of musician friends and confidantes, is the result of my own epic, ongoing effort to decode the things I love about the way jazz musicians play the blues, and translate them into the kind of hands-on, practical and memorable moves we guitar players need to have up our sleeves if we're going to be able to improvise with both facility and emotional investment. I'm basically trying to solve the problem that goes like this: "It feels like I can actually say something about how I feel when I play blues, but like I'm just solving a chess problem, and badly at that, when I play jazz."
There is admittedly more information involved in playing jazz – more chord changes, on more kinds of chord progressions, requiring more scale choices, to be made more often, often on more challenging tempos. At their best, both musics involve a similar degree of nuance, detail and depth, but since blues and jazz are both improvising musics with a good deal of shared DNA, the "more information" aspect can lead to the notion that jazz is something you graduate to when your blues playing starts to feel stale.
And this is where things can get overwhelming, mostly if one overlooks the whole "shared DNA" aspect of the situation. A big part of what makes a genre a genre is its repertoire, and depending on who you're listening to, blues as a recognizable 8- or 12-bar form can be part and parcel of the jazz repertoire (see: organ combos and other hard bop groups) or scarcely there at all (see: Ella Fitzgerald, free jazz). If you're going to make a Venn diagram of blues and jazz, the blues form itself is a big part of where things overlap, so for my money, seeking out recordings where jazz musicians are literally playing on the blues form is about the best place to start understanding both the similarities between the two genres, and how they diverge.
Once I started looking at things this way myself, the whole situation became a lot more manageable, and a lot more fun. If you already have the blues form in your head, you can start zeroing in on the moments in someone's solo where you know they've left the more familiar blues licks behind, but you're not sure yet what they're doing instead. And it's a lot easier to try and figure out what that is if you're not also trying to figure out an unfamiliar chord progression, possibly with multiple sections and/or key changes within that progression.
Words like "bebop" and "jazz" can sound intimidating, but I'm really just using them as shorthand for "those cool things you hear jazz musicians play on the blues that you want to play too but can't figure out on your own." But that would make a preposterously long title for a Youtube video, or a workshop, for that matter. So my upcoming workshop this weekend is called Bebop For Beginners, not because it's for beginning guitar players, but because it's for guitar players who are maybe beginners at bebop but want to play more interesting solos on the blues. In this two-hour online class, we'll zero in on a few key spots in the twelve-bar blues progression so you can learn 1) what jazz musicians do in those spots, 2) why it works, and 3) how you can start to use licks like that your own solos.
You don't have to have taken my previous two workshops to take Bebop For Beginners – although it couldn't hurt, and you can still sign up to watch replays of Freddie Green Chords and The Swing Scale when you register for the bebop workshop. Find out more about this weekend's workshop, and register, at the link below:
Bebop For Beginners • Saturday, June 24 • 10:30 AM CDT
Register Now
Meanwhile, if you're curious about those specific spots in the blues progression that jazz musicians tend to focus on, I've made a short lesson about that for my Youtube channel; you can find it at the link below:
The Three Essential Moves For Playing The Changes On The Blues
More soon,
David