50 Jazz Blues Licks: #36 Kenny Drew

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50 Jazz Blues Licks is an exclusive series of video guitar lessons by David Hamburger covering the jazz blues styles of historically great guitarists like George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Joe Pass, and many others. A new lick will be released each week, so be sure to subscribe and check back often!

Kenny Drew was as in the loop as any New York pianist before choosing to relocate to Copenhagen in 1961. Aside from making several trio and quintet records as a leader, in just the six years prior to his move, he played on recordings by Kenny Dorham, Dexter Gordon, Grant Green, Jackie McLean and Sonny Rollins, and was the pianist on John Coltrane’s landmark Blue Trane album, which also featured Lee Morgan and Curtis Fuller. You can hear Drew getting downhome on the Kenny Dorham shuffle “Buffalo” from Dorham’s Whistle Stop album, burning through the blues changes on the title cut from the aforementioned Blue Trane, and negotiating the minor blues on “Groovin’ The Blues” from Drew’s own Blue Note quintet date Undercurrent. The lick we’re working on here call for a bit of shifting positions on the fingerboard but everything still falls within a pretty narrow range, fret-wise, while covering a lot of ground melodically and harmonically. In that respect, it’s similar to some of the Oscar Peterson-inspired moves we’ve looked at, and as such can serve as a model for how to create contrast by combining less familiar shapes on the fingerboard with more blues- or pentatonic-based licks.

Video Guitar Lesson

If you like these guitar lessons, be sure to also check out Frank Vignola’s Jazz Up Your Blues, which showcases essential jazz blues vocabulary and techniques, Mark Stefani’s Jazzed Blues Assembly Lines, which takes you on a sonic learning tour through the funky rhythm and blues stylings and fretboard concepts of top jazz blues players, and of course all of David Hamburger’s courses.

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Learn How To Read Standard Notation With This Chart

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There are plenty of guitarists out there that would love to learn how to read standard notation, but only know how to read tab. While some players just haven’t had the time or put in the effort to learn how to read standard notation, many just aren’t sure how to start or how to translate their knowledge of tab into standard notation comprehension. Luckily, we stumbled upon a fantastic chart that will help you learn how to read standard notation fast and quite easily.

The chart below should help you learn how to read standard notation and memorize the guitar fretboard. For example, the note at the 7th fret of the low E (6th) string is B. The exact same pitch can also be found on the 2nd fret of the A (5th) string. If you were trying to read a piece of music and saw a note in that location (between the first and second ledger lines below the staff), you would know what options are available for you to play that note.

Learn How to Read Standard Notation - Chart

Key:
- The letters along the top from left to right are the note names of the strings from the thickest to the thinnest string.
- The numbers indicate the fret location, from 0 (not fretted) all the way up to the 24th fret (if your guitar spans two octaves).
- The letters down the right hand side indicate the note name at that particular fret number and string.

Let us know what you think of this chart in the comments and if it does indeed help you learn how to read standard notation quickly!

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50 Jazz Blues Licks: #35 Red Garland

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50 Jazz Blues Licks is an exclusive series of video guitar lessons by David Hamburger covering the jazz blues styles of historically great guitarists like George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Joe Pass, and many others. A new lick will be released each week, so be sure to subscribe and check back often!

Red Garland first rose to prominence as the pianist with Miles Davis’ mid- to late-1950s group, the quintet which also included saxophonist John Coltrane, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones. Although he played on the renowned Prestige albums Cookin’, Relaxin’, Steamin’ and Workin’ and Miles’ first couple of records on Columbia, Garland was gone by 1958, out playing with his own trio. While still with Davis, however, Garland did a few quintet sessions under his own name, with Coltrane on tenor and Donald Byrd on trumpet, Soul Junction and All Mornin’ Long, which have also been reissued under Coltrane’s name as Complete Recordings (With Red Garland and Donald Byrd). The title cut to each original album include pretty endless quantities of Garland playing relaxed, deep-dish blues, while “Soft Winds” and “Billie’s Bounce” are blues in a more uptempo, straight ahead vein. On the latter in particular Coltrane carves up the changes in double time from the get-go, though elsewhere the he still holds forth in a fairly conversational, pre-”Giant Steps” vein and Byrd blows all the textbook bebop lines you could want to hear. And there’s the minor blues “Birks Works,” which is positively cooking.

Video Guitar Lesson

If you like these guitar lessons, be sure to also check out Frank Vignola’s Jazz Up Your Blues, which showcases essential jazz blues vocabulary and techniques, Mark Stefani’s Jazzed Blues Assembly Lines, which takes you on a sonic learning tour through the funky rhythm and blues stylings and fretboard concepts of top jazz blues players, and of course all of David Hamburger’s courses.

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Bar Room Blues: “Shaky Ground”

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Bar Room Blues is an exclusive series of video guitar lessons by Steve “Red” Lasner covering classic blues songs from historically great guitarists like B.B. King, T-Bone Walker, Buddy Guy, and many others. A new lesson will be released each week, so be sure to subscribe and check back often! Also, if you want more guitar lessons like these, be sure to check out Red’s Guitar Sherpa class.

“Standing On Shaky Ground” is a great funk tune often called at jam sessions. Usually performed in the key of E. I searched the web to find out who originally wrote the song and found conflicting stories but it’s my belief that it was first written by Lionel Richie for the Temptations but I also find claims it was written by Jeffrey Bowen, Eddie Hazel, and Alphonso Boyd . The version by Delbert McClinton seems to be the most popular release today.

This is a lick based song and an E7#9 chord works great for comping over the lick which follows the bass line. In this lesson we’ll look at a few options for both rhythm and lead.

In this video guitar lesson, I show you how to play this classic song on guitar in your own style. Check it out:

Video Guitar Lesson

Jam Track

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Bar Room Blues is an exclusive series of video guitar lessons by Steve “Red” Lasner covering classic blues songs from historically great guitarists like B.B. King, T-Bone Walker, Buddy Guy, and many others. A new lesson will be released each week, so be sure to subscribe and check back often! Also, if you want more guitar lessons like these, be sure to check out Red’s Guitar Sherpa class.

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50 Jazz Blues Licks: #34 Grant Green

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50 Jazz Blues Licks is an exclusive series of video guitar lessons by David Hamburger covering the jazz blues styles of historically great guitarists like George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Joe Pass, and many others. A new lick will be released each week, so be sure to subscribe and check back often!

It may seem like jazz musicians are continually trying to pull the rug out from underneath you with their tricky chord changes – why can’t they just play V IV and I, like everyone else? – but a little level-headed observation tends to reveal that, at least when it comes to the blues, there are really just a handful of paths through those twelve bars. Case in point: on a minor blues, jazzers reach for either the minor iv chord or the bVI chord in bars 5 and 6. It’s pretty much one or the other, and with a little practice you’ll hear it just as quickly as you can hear whether Albert Collins is going to the quick IV in measure 2 or not on a Texas shuffle. Likewise, the turnaround in the last four bars of a minor blues usually only goes in one of a couple of pretty recognizable directions. The default is arguably bVI to V to i, which in the key of, say, G minor, means going from Eb7 to D7 to G minor (if you played it in the same key, “The Thrill is Gone” would have a turnaround from Ebmaj7 to D7 to Gmin, which is pretty similar). What’s good to know is that most deviations from this one turnaround tend to just be elaborations on a framework: swapping in Eb9 for Eb7, adding b9, #9 and/or b13 alterations to the V chord, and sneaking in a iimin7b5 chord between bVI and V. Do all of those at once in the key of G minor and you get: Eb9 to Amin7b5 to D7alt. to Gmin. Cool? Now all you gotta do is play over it…

Video Guitar Lesson

If you like these guitar lessons, be sure to also check out Frank Vignola’s Jazz Up Your Blues, which showcases essential jazz blues vocabulary and techniques, Mark Stefani’s Jazzed Blues Assembly Lines, which takes you on a sonic learning tour through the funky rhythm and blues stylings and fretboard concepts of top jazz blues players, and of course all of David Hamburger’s courses.

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