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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 Geoge 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!

Everyone knows that the artwork on the 50s and 60s Blue Note LPs was every bit as cool as the music inside, but in lieu of the usual mood-setting Frank Wolff photography, the cover of Kenny Burrell’s Blue Lights album featured a line drawing by designer Reid Miles’ friend Andy, who was short on work at the time. That’d be Andy Warhol – you may be familiar with his later work? Blue Lights was not unlike other jam session records of the period that featured minimal arrangements, a small handful of luminary soloists, and tracks that filled anywhere from a third to the entirety of an LP side. Often critically derided even at the time as mere “blowing dates” and as such virtually antithetical to the general Blue Note practice of tight, well-rehearsed arrangements of original material played by a recurring stable of musicians, Burrell nevertheless made several such records for the label, including All Night Long, All Day Long, and of course, Blue Lights Volume II, issued in tandem with the title at hand. “Yes Baby” is a slow blues, and Kenny’s lick here implies a double-time feel.

Read on for the full guitar lesson…

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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 Geoge 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!

As he reminisces in this interview, Orrin Keepnews produced records for the independent Riverside label during its highwater mark, working on records by Wes Montgomery, Milt Jackson, Thelonious Monk and many others including, prior to his stint with Blue Note, trumpeter Blue Mitchell. As the story everyone loves to repeat goes, the difference between Blue Note’s records and those of its other main rival on the scene, Prestige, was “a day of rehearsal.” Paid rehearsal, as Keepnews points out. Riverside, says Keepnews, was somewhere in the middle, and they certainly made some fabulous records of their own (hello, “Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery”). And if you’re a hopeless music geek like I am, you’ll also recognize Keepnews as the author of many jazz liner notes of that era and beyond, for Riverside and elsewhere. Dig his discussion here about what it was like to record Mitchell, including a story involving Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderly and a Hawaiian shirt that should make anyone who’s ever gotten vibed out by another musician feel a little better, knowing that it can and does happen to the best of them. And then check out our second Blue Mitchell turnaround.

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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 Geoge 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!

There’s always something new to discover, and I have to admit I was not hip to Blue Mitchell except in name prior to developing this course. Then it turned out he was everywhere – on these groovy Lou Donaldson records, of course, but also as the trumpet player during the heyday of the Horace Silver quintet and on numerous LPs of his own and of other favorites of mine throughout the sixties. He’s a great musician to learn from, as he embodies a classic balance of blues licks and bebop lines delivered with a forthright tone and tremendous yet even-keeled rhythmic propulsion. Much as I love, say, Lee Morgan (and I do), his playing is so full of cockeyed attitude, smeared, slippery phrasing and jaw-dropping doubletime that, more often than not, it’s just more fun to listen to than transcribe. It’s not unlike the difference between mid-sixties and mid-nineties Buddy Guy. At any rate, here’s a cool chromatic turnaround of Blue Mitchell’s to get you from the V back to I.

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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 Geoge 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!

The controversy over Playing George vs. Singing George is almost as thick as when the U.S. Post Office held a public debate over whether to immortalize Young Elvis or Old Elvis on a stamp. At this point it’s clear that while Singing George may have to bust out “On Broadway” at least once a year for the rest of his life, Playing George hasn’t gone anywhere and is in fact still as ferocious as ever. It certainly makes you wonder whether Wes Montgomery viewed those crossover records he was making for Creed Taylor when he passed away as just a chance to pay the bills, after which he fully intended to resume going out and kicking serious quartet ass as the world’s most happening jazz guitarist. We’ll never know, of course, and it’s not like Nat Cole ever turned around after making “Nature Boy” and opted to play club gigs with a trio again either. And why should he have? The hours suck for that kind of work unless you’re a vampire, and you don’t have to deal with untuned pianos when a fifty-piece orchestra’s got your back. But back to Benson. The beauty of the recorded age is that if you want, you can go hang out with Playing George any time you like – just pick up a copy of Giblet Gravy or It’s Uptown! or, for that matter, Alligator Boogaloo, which includes this groovy V-I lick on “The Thang.”

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