The short version: 

My third and final Groove Master Class takes place 

Saturday, September 21st at 10:30am CDT:

Groove Master Class Part Three • Embellish The Tune

Yesterday morning, Spotify's recommendations coughed up a nine-minute version of "Confirmation" as played by Clifford Brown and Lou Donaldson live at Birdland in 1954. This particular Charlie Parker tune was a bête noire of mine in college, the epitome of all that was impossible and frustrating about trying to play jazz.

Lately, however, I've been having one of my fits of revisiting the bebop world. It happens every decade or so, and each time, that music becomes a little more understandable. In between, of course, I do a lot of listening, so when I finally get the bug again, I can hear that much further into what I've cued up.

I can't remember what sparked things this time around – somehow, I decided to look at the chord progression to "Cherokee," a tune notorious for both its constantly shifting harmonic landscape (particularly on the bridge) and the tempo at which the bebop crowd preferred to execute it.

"Cherokee" became bebop canon with Parker and Dizzy Gillespie's recording of "Ko-ko," their original composition based on the "Cherokee" progression and performed somewhere in the neighborhood of a blistering 300 beats per minute. I first heard "Ko-ko" as a teenager, listening to the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, and was baffled within the first eight bars.

This time around, though, I'm running various versions of "Confirmation," "Cherokee" and the like through a program called "Transcribe!" to hear them at half speed. I'm pleased to discover at this point I can more or less grasp what's happening when I do so, and besides, if John Coltrane used a 16 rpm turntable to do the same thing, it's good enough for me.

All of which is just to say, at times this whole thing of learning to play music seems to unfold at a positively glacial pace – but unfold it does, if you hang in there and keep getting up to take the occasional swing at it. The longer I play, and the longer I teach, the more I appreciate how much of a long game music really is.

I used to teach these week-long workshops in the summer, and as much fun as they were, I remember coming away from them thinking, "This is no way to run a railroad." You can put a lot of information in someone's hands in a week, but with something like fingerstyle guitar, it simply takes time to assimilate the various skills involved. Just the basic coordination of combining one rhythm in your thumb with another rhythm in your fingers is potentially weeks if not months of work.

This October will mark the five year anniversary of my Fingerstyle Five membership, and one of the most significant conclusions I've reached over the past few years is how well-suited a long-term, ongoing program is for learning this genre and its techniques. Even though blues is not, on the surface, complicated music – you can cover a lot of ground with just a handful of open-position chords, a few 8- and 12-bar forms, and a couple of pentatonic scales – the prospect of playing two things at once every time you pick up the instrument is somewhat daunting.

So it's a style of music that rewards a certain minimalist relentlessness: showing up on a regular basis to pay careful attention to a handful of small, simple things. In teaching my groove workshops this week, I've had to get truly tangible and specific about something as slippery, if not downright ephemeral, as "a good groove."

And here is where being in the explanation business for so long comes to bear, as I don't think I could have necessarily found a way to articulate the relationship between how you practice and how you groove much earlier in my teaching career.

But here's what I think, and what I've been saying this week in the workshops: Groove is a matter of balancing urgency and relaxation, even in the most charged, dynamic circumstances. In music, time is constantly moving forward, and one impulse of the groove is to maintain a consistent relationship with time – to express a consistent tempo through one's playing.

But the other great impulse of the groove is relaxation. The astonishing thing about Charlie Parker playing "Ko-ko" at 300 beats per minute isn't exactly that he can simply do it, or even that he can concoct such remarkable melodic statements in the process. It's that he remain so relaxed while doing so. There is nothing but confidence in his sound; at no point do you ever wonder if he's going to make it through.

So for my money, there are two things that matter for grooving as a fingerstyle guitarist. The first is being able to trust your hands, and the second is knowing what's coming next before it actually happens.

Fortunately, these are both things you can work on. Seeing what's coming before it happens is about trading in rote memorization for musical understanding of what you're doing. Trusting your hands is a matter of anticipating – and practicing – the kind of thumb-and-fingers coordination solo blues guitar inevitably requires.

I covered how to improve your musical understanding of the tunes you play in Tuesday's live stream, "Form and Phrasing," and how to develop your right-hand coordination in yesterday's "Rudiments and Syncopation" lesson. You can find both of them on my Youtube channel:

Groove Master Class, Part One • Form & Phrasing

Groove Master Class, Part Two • Rudiments & Syncopation

Tomorrow, I'll explain how to use that kind of musical outlook and trustworthy right hand to turn eight bars of a traditional blues tune into a complete-sounding arrangement with just a few new chord voicings, syncopations and bass runs.

The workshop takes place Saturday, September 21st at 10:30am CDT:

Groove Master Class Part Three • Embellish The Tune

If you haven't downloaded the tab yet, you can get it here:

Groove Master Class PDF

See you then!

David