I got to see Dave Van Ronk a few times, a man who on more than one occasion would rasp, "When I was a kid, I wanted to play jazz in the worst way. And I succeeded."
In retrospect, I think it's no coincidence I gravitated towards Van Ronk, particularly his work on Sunday Street. I loved that jazz element in his playing, the synthesis of jazz chord progressions with the more down-and-dirty
elements of solo blues guitar.
I found a similar combination of blues and jazz elements in Richard Saslow's ragtime guitar pieces, some of Stefan Grossman's original blues instrumentals, and Guy Van Duser's improvising on early jazz and swing tunes.
So I particularly flipped out when I got to people like B.B. King, Charlie Christian and Grant Green. I couldn't really grok much jazz past around 1959, but Grant Green recorded lots of blues progressions, and
Charlie Christian played all of those amazing riffs on the Benny Goodman sextet tunes.
B.B. King was sort of the same thing, coming from the opposite direction: long after my intitial freak-out over Live At The Regal, I learned that King, the very incarnation of electric blues guitar, was hip to Django Reinhardt and Lonnie Johnson as well as the sharp sophistication of T-Bone Walker.
But it was one thing to hear and love those kinds of sounds, and
quite another to figure out how it was done. Pulling pentatonic licks off of records was doable. Decoding the chord changes on a Grant Green blues or mastering one of those intricately hip Charlie Christian licks proved to be way more challenging.
By far, the biggest hurdle was sorting out the information I needed from the information I didn't. There were more than enough resources for learning about jazz. But ninety percent of it was overkill.
I didn't
especially want to play standards, and while I liked listening to saxophonists like Ben Webster, it didn't make me want to learn to tear through the changes like John Coltrane. I just wanted to know how those jazz guys made the blues sound so cool.
Two years ago, I began my Reliable Source series with a workshop called "Freddie Green Chords." That class was the first in a three-part series that also included "The Swing Scale" and "Bebop For Beginners."
The
whole idea was to zero in on this one idea: how do jazz musicians think about playing 12-bar blues?
Turns out, it's not really about learning a million scales and arpeggios. It has much more to do with chords. The way jazz musicians play blues is based on how they're thinking about the chord progression itself.
So in "Freddie Green Chords" I explained not just the kinds of chord shapes jazz guitarists use, but how they add in chords to the twelve bar blues
and why they use the chords they do.
Once you know that jazzier approach to the blues progression, you can play single-note licks that reflect those new, underlying chords. In "The Swing Scale" I explained how to turn a simple combination of major and minor pentatonic notes into a vocabulary of jazz licks for the blues.
The trickiest sounds to decode on your own are the altered, diminished and chromatic moves you hear in the playing of guitarists like Grant
Green and Kenny Burrell. In "Bebop For Beginners" I showed how to start including these sounds in your solos without losing the overall bluesiness of your playing.
Together, these three classes provided a distilled, up-close look at how to get from playing pentatonic licks over I IV and V to playing the chords, progressions, licks and lines you hear jazz- and jazz-influenced musicians play on the blues.
And while I've continued to offer additional Reliable
Source workshops over the past couple of years, I've had numerous requests to make these three original classes available again. So –