50 Jazz Blues Licks

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #36 Kenny Drew

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.

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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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50 Jazz Blues Licks

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May 14th 2012

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #35 Red Garland

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.

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50 Jazz Blues Licks

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May 7th 2012

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #34 Grant Green

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…

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50 Jazz Blues Licks

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April 16th 2012

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #33 Sonny Clark

Sonny Clark made only a handful of records as a leader before his untimely demise in 1963 at the age of 31. During his time in New York he was in regular rotation at Blue Note, and consequently recorded with the cream of the hard bop artists associated with the label, including saxophonists Lou Donaldson, Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Ike Quebec and Stanley Turrentine, trumpeters Lee Morgan, Art Farmer and Donald Byrd, and guitarist Grant Green. Like Wynton Kelly, another Blue Note pianist popular with his peers for his accompaniment skills, Clark worked with vocalist Dinah Washington in the 1950s, in part as a way to get himself from California, where he was working with musicians like Buddy DeFranco and Howard Rumsey, back to East Coast, explaining to critic Leonard Feather in the late 1950s, “I wanted to see the east again…the fellows out on the west coast have a different sort of feeling, a different approach to jazz. They swing in their own way. But…the eastern musicians play with so much fire and passion.” Clark’s quintet records like “Dial S For Sonny,” Leapin’ and Lopin’” and “Cool Struttin’” certainly exemplify that “Eastern” aesthetic, epitomizing everything there is to dig about the classic late-50s/early 60s hard bop approach.

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50 Jazz Blues Licks

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April 9th 2012

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #32 Wes Montgomery

I had the great fortune to take a handful of lessons with Emily Remler when I first moved to New York, and while I’d been listening to Wes Montgomery for a couple of years at that point, the way she broke down and explained some of Wes’ key approaches to the changes was consistently revelatory. While both ends of her excitement were highly hyperbolic, I do have fond memories of Emily’s reaction at my second lesson to the way I played some of the excercises she’d given me a couple of weeks earlier: “Yeah! Yeah! Last week you sounded like B.B. and now you sound like Wes!” As I say, I clearly sounded about as much like Montgomery at that moment as I’d sounded like the king of the blues a fortnight ago, but if nothing else it actually spoke volumes to her own ability to break down and explain some of the most significant aspects of how Wes did his thing. For my money Wes is still the guy to go to for some of the most consistently hip, swinging and thoroughly well-organized blowing by a guitarist or anyone else. For whatever reason, he didn’t lay back into the standard blues vocabulary to the extent of a Kenny Burrell or Grant Green, and yet his playing feels every bit as deep and swings ridiculously hard with inventive ideas from one end to the other.