Minor Blues Workshops: Registration Now Open!
Published: Wed, 09/13/23
When you understand how one chord leads to the next, and have a vocabulary of chords shapes under your fingers to make that happen, it's much easier to start expanding your soloing beyond the pentatonic scale as well. The jazzier kinds of blues musicians aren't just randomly picking different notes out of thin air – they're choosing to play the important notes of just a few essential scales, in order to emphasize the underlying chords they know are there.
Unfortunately, it can feel intimidating trying to learn to do this, because of the way things like this are typically taught: from a jazz perspective emphasizing knowing more shapes than Mel Bay for any given chord you might need, and learning every scale imaginable in at least two octaves, in every key, all over the neck.
An approach which I respectively submit is, pretty much, baloney.
Or rather: if you really want to pursue jazz for its own sake, maybe that's the way to go. But if, like me, you're more or less a blues-based guitar player looking just to get a bit of jazz sophistication into your playing, there is another way to go about it. You can look at jazz chords and scales as just another kind of blues, and start learning about it the way you learned to play blues: a few cool chords or licks at a time, one or two progressions at a time. Instead of learning every scale and chord in every position, you can start in just one position, learning which licks work best over which chords. Before worrying about playing things in every key, you can learn how to put things together in one key, to the point that it sounds really good, and then move on.
Is playing minor blues really all that different from playing "major" (dominant 7th-chord) blues? Yes and no. There's overlap as far as what scales and chords are involved, but the best blues (and jazz) playing is really about how things resolve – how your single-note phrases and chord sequences draw the ear into the next measure, the next line. And the harmonies, and therefore the scale choices, in a minor key are just different enough from major that ultimately, even if you know your way around the blues in a major key, you need to learn to think and play differently in a minor key or it won't ever quite sound right.
Now, since you can get away with just playing minor pentatonic scales on a minor blues and not get in trouble, you don't have to really do anything different. But if your ear gravitates towards those other sounds you're hearing – those licks Grant Green plays to get from I to IV, say, or those chord hits Kenny Burrell punctuates his single-note solos with – you're going to need a few new tools to get there.
This fall's three minor blues workshops – Minor Blues Chord Substitutions, Minor Blues & Bebop, and Kenny Burrell Chords – are designed to show you not just what to play, but how to play it. In Minor Blues Chord Substitutions, we'll look at how use Freddie Green voicings to play new chord substitutions on the minor blues form, then check out how to adapt those to another tune, an eight-bar blues like "St. James Infirmary." We'll even look at how to update those voicings from the swing era four-to-the-bar style to the more flexible bebop approach.
In Minor Blues & Bebop, we'll focus on how those same chord substitutions create a new roadmap through the minor blues progression, and what scales you now need to make those chords sound good. We'll look specifically at altered and diminished sounds, and how with just a few new three- or four-note shapes you can really start "playing the changes" in the very same position you've always used for your pentatonic licks.
Then, in Kenny Burrell Chords, we'll pull all of this together, starting with moving those Freddie Green chord substitutions to the top four strings. You'll learn how to harmonize blues melodies using just a handful of three- and four-note voicings, which you can then also use to build your solos, adding comping and riffs to your own single-note improvisations.
If you're ready to register, you can go to the link below to sign up:
Register Now
This link will also provide you with essential details like when the workshops are taking place, how much they cost, and whether you can watch them on your own schedule (you can). I'm really looking forward to teaching this material, and I hope you'll join me for the entire series!
More soon,
David