50 Jazz Blues Licks

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #35 Red Garland

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.

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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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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.

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50 Jazz Blues Licks

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March 26th 2012

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #31 Hank Jones

Hank Jones plays on two of my favorite jazz recordings, Wes Montgomery’s So Much Guitar and Cannonball Adderly’s Somethin’ Else. In fact, each of these albums includes a great minor blues, Wes’ “Somethin’ Like Bags,” and Cannonball’s “One For Daddy-0.” (Which raises, just tangentially, the question: just how do you get an awesome nickname like “Cannonball” in the first place?) Though Jones’ family seemingly did not hand out the sobriquets as freely as some others, it was clearly a hotbed of talent, as his younger siblings included trumpeter Thad Jones, as well as Elvin Jones – you know, the guy who played drums on all those Coltrane records (Jones himself appeared with Trane and Milt Jackson on the 1960 session Bags and Trane.) Jones began his career working with swing icons like Hot Lips Page and Lucky Thompson before discovering and delving into bebop as it was developing in the mid-1940s and ultimately recorded with both Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker as well as tenor giants Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster and several other greats. All this after working as a touring member of Norman Granz’ Jazz at the Philharmonic and serving as Ella Fitzgerald’s pianist from 1948 to 1953. Give a listen and you’ll see why so many people wanted him around.

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50 Jazz Blues Licks

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March 12th 2012

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #30 Tommy Flanagan

Jazz musicians have a whole different way of thinking about playing blues in a minor key, and at first, if you don’t know what they’re thinking, it can sound, to quote songwriter Richard Julian, like “that blind man played piano like he knew another key.” But it’s basically a two-part matter to understand what’s going on. First, you need to know what additional chords they’re swapping in or substituting for the basic I, IV and V you’re used to, and why that works harmonically. Then, you can look at what they’re doing melodically to make their solos *reflect* those more elaborate chord progressions. And really, if you get what’s been going on so far in terms of the occasional ii-V-I logic, some of the altered tones we’ve swapped in, and the idea behind the basic chromatic moves we’ve looked at, you’ll be able to navigate these minor moves as well. The best part is, it often sounds good to *imply* these more jazz-inflected chord changes even when the band isn’t, which means you can be grooving like Albert on “Born Under A Bad Sign” and make heads turn when you let just a little chromatic, altered or secondary dominant action sneak into your solo. Sweet.