Rushing Lullabies
Published: Fri, 03/22/24
The other day, shortly after reading about a 1959 Jimmy Rushing album, Rushing Lullabies, which included both Ray Bryant on piano and Skeeter Best on guitar, I took a moment to locate the reissued recordings on Spotify. Bryant has long been one of my favorites, and I was intrigued by the presence of Mr. Best, as I speculate he must be the subject of the late-fifties Kenny Burrell title "Blues For Skeeter."
To find the small-group tracks in question within the full digital reissue required navigating halfway into the album, past a set of big-band selections of presumably similar vintage. And about halfway through the combo tracks, a couple of minutes into a dryly ironic slow blues called "Three Long Years," as Buddy Tate's tenor solo gave way to the piano I did a double-take of recognition: "I've heard this solo before – or something close enough as to be virtually same thing!"
This one-chorus piano solo opened with a climbing three-chord figure on the I chord, which was then repeated through the next three bars before giving way to a series of fluent, bebop-inflected blues licks, the whole chorus concluding with an idiosyncratic but curiously familiar turnaround. Ten minutes later, the mystery was solved – Bryant used almost the exact same chord moves, soloing sensibility and turnaround in one of his choruses from "Blues #3," the opening track on his landmark Prestige LP Alone With The Blues, recorded at the end of 1958 and released the same year as the Jimmy Rushing album.
It was pretty thrilling to discover one of my favorite musicians leaving behind such clear fingerprints from a different track on a different album. I'm guessing these moves were just an integral part of Bryant's musical personality at the time; the man had his chord licks, so to speak, an ingrained vocabulary he drew on when it came time to improvise. It's second nature to think of licks as single-note, linear things, but it makes just as much sense to have a reliable bag of harmonic (and rhythmic) moves up one's sleeve as well.
The question, of course, is how to come by such a stash of moves, often referred to as chord substitutions. One way is to develop an organized, repeatable way to embellish the basic I, IV and V chords of a tune – which is what I discuss in today's Youtube lesson:
Three Rules for Chord Substitutions
I'll be covering this idea in much more detail in my upcoming online workshop, Chord Substitutions, which will live stream on Saturday, March 30th and be available for on-demand replay afterwards. You can learn more about the workshop, and sign up, at the link below:
Chord Substitutions Workshop
More soon,
David