A lot of blues guitarists experiment with jazz guitar lessons, hoping to find a way to play more than just pentatonic licks. And yet I know from both personal and anecdotal experience how easy it is to quickly get overwhelmed by the jazz practice philosophy.

My own interest in jazz-adjacent musicians like Gatemouth Brown and Duke Robillard, with their swing-inspired vocabulary and fraternization with horn players, got me in over my head more than once as I pursued improvisational competence (don't get me started on my history as a grad-school dropout).

And I can't count the number of guitarists I met with similar experiences when I was teaching summer workshops on Freddie Green chords, Charlie Christian licks and the like. 

We all know there's something out there that fills the gaps you can't stuff with pentatonic licks, but go looking for the answers in a jazz environment and faster than you can say "Modes of the melodic minor scale in all twelve keys!" you're knee-deep in, well, modes of the melodic minor scale in all twelve keys, and other fearsome and overwhelming tasks with no immediately clear relationship to the thing that got you interested in expanding your palette in the first place.

In retrospect, what finally made things click, for me, was almost ridiculously simple. I just started listening more closely to the jazz musicians I liked best – guitarist Grant Green, saxophonists Hank Mobley and Stanley Turrentine, and pianist Wynton Kelly – as they soloed on the twelve-bar blues form.

In particular, I listened for anything that didn't sound like blues licks or pentatonic scales, and then tried to figure out what that was. Why were they playing those kinds of sounds? What chords were going on underneath?

From there, I worked backwards to identify: oh, these are the scales you need most, and here are the spots in the twelve-bar form where you need to use them.

Basically, over fifteen years after dropping out of Manhattan School of Music, it finally occurred to me to try and learn to play jazz the way I'd learned to play blues: by listening to my favorite people play on my favorite tracks, and working out the licks I liked the best.

So that's the approach I'll be teaching in the new Blue Note Blues workshop. I've tabbed out four blues choruses in total: two by Grant Green, one by Hank Mobley and one by Wynton Kelly.

We'll zero in on the moments that bring the most jazz flavor to the blues: the chromatic transitions from the I to the IV chord, the altered licks in the turnaround, and the slippery not-quite-ii-V's that bring you back to the top of the form.

And of course, we'll also look at what scales and arpeggios these musicians are using to create their licks, and how to use those licks as models to come up with your own ideas in the same vein.

By breaking down how musicians like Grant Green play the twelve-bar form, you can start adding jazzier licks to your solos without losing that essential blues feeling, or getting overwhelmed by too much information.

I'm pretty excited to teach this new class. If you're excited to take it, you can sign up now at the link below:

BLUE NOTE BLUES • Saturday, Nov. 2 • 10:30am CDT

Sign Up Now

Today's Youtube lesson previews a bit of what I'll be teaching in the upcoming workshop: I explain one of Grant Green's favorite turnaround licks, a cool G7 move he likes to use on the blues in Bb.

You can find the lesson here:

Grant Green Plays The Altered Turnaround 

More soon,

David

P.S. Thanks to everyone who tuned in and/or dropped me a line about Wednesday night's Roy Book Binder show. It was as much fun as it looked like, and while the notice was last-minute, I'm delighted so many people had a chance to check Roy out.