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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February 17th 2012

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #29 Wynton Kelly

The official rap on Wynton Kelly is that he was everyone’s favorite accompanist in the hard bop era. “Everyone” in this case includes Miles Davis during one of the trumpeter’s most revered periods, the late fifties-early sixties group that also featured Cannonball Adderly, John Coltrane, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb, but Kelly also recorded with a virtual who’s who of the era, and often seemed to show up whenever and wherever people happened to be making some of their best work ever. While Bill Evans was the pianist for much of the landmark Davis LP Kind of Blue, that’s Kelly on “Freddie Freeloader.” Likewise, while making Giant Steps with Tommy Flanagan, Coltrane tagged Kelly in for the recording of “Naima.” The five albums Kelly made with Hank Mobley include the two widely considered the saxophonist’s finest, Workout and Soul Station. Kelly teamed up with Wes Montgomery for two of the guitarist’s best efforts, Full House and Smokin’ at the Half Note. Record producers clearly trusted Kelly to deliver the goods as well, as the pianist appeared on the LP debuts of Grant Green, Johnny Griffin, Wayne Shorter and Blue Mitchell. This in addition to working with Cannonball Adderly, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Elvin Jones, Benny Golson, Lee Morgan and, just to show how cool he was, King Curtis. Maybe he was such a good accompanist because of all the work he did with singers. Which singers, you ask? Oh, you know: Dinah Washington, Abbey Lincoln, Helen Humes and, ah, Billie Holiday.

And his fourteen records as a leader are totally worth checking out, too.

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50 Jazz Blues Licks

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January 25th 2012

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #28 Jimmy Forrest

When I lived in New York I spent most of my radio time with WBGO, the Newark-based 24-hour jazz station where, among other things, Bob Porter hosted the show “Portraits in Blue.” No matter who Porter profiled on any given week, I was always transfixed by the opening theme, which I eventually discovered was a track by saxophonist Jimmy Forrest called “The Bolo Blues,” which appeared on a1961 Prestige album called Out of the Forrest. Speaking anachronistically, it’s the 1950s version of a slow jam – when the lights dim and the downtempo, gutbucket sax licks start wafting through the window, you know the star of the film is about to get lucky, or get shot trying. Forrest was best known for another blues, “Night Train,” which was adapted from an earlier Duke Ellington tune and has an equally classy cultural role as the embodiment of the mid-century stripper groove. All that steaminess aside, however, Forrest was also a badass uptempo purveyor of bebop, as evidenced by his playing on organist Jack McDuff’s 1961 record The Honeydripper – check out the solo he tears off on the opening blues and you’ll see what I mean. Grant Green and McDuff are no slouches on this album either, but Forrest’s playing on tracks like this and on “Sunkenfoal” from 1959’s All The Gin Is Gone is at once gritty and dazzling, no mean feat.

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50 Jazz Blues Licks

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January 18th 2012

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #27 Eddie Costa

There have been any number of piano/guitar/bass trios in jazz. Tenor guitarist Tiny Grimes described his position in keyboard wizard Art Tatum’s group as “low man on the Tatum pole,” and Nat Cole, who found himself leading such a group inadvertently when his drummer failed to show one night, was so successful with the format that Ray Charles did his level best to imitate the sound of the Cole group on his own first recordings (and came damn close). But the Tal Farlow trio with Eddie Costa on piano and Vinnie Burke on bass turned the idea sideways by featuring Farlow’s near-continuously unspooling lines that blurred Charlies Christian and Parker into his own inventive style. But far from being a mere vehicle for the formidable guitarist, the trio placed equal emphasis on deft, imaginative arrangments of well-chosen standards and on Costa’s own unique musical personality, which included frequent use of octaves, an unusual predilection for the lower register of the keyboard and a linear sensibility that had no trouble matching Farlow’s for intensity. My favorite of the Farlow trio records, simply titled Tal, has been reissued as part of The Complete Verve Sessions, and handful of those tunes also turn up on Tal Farlow’s Finest Hour; both include the blues “Chuckles,” which has plenty of soloing from both Costa and Farlow.