50 Jazz Blues Licks

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #17 Hank Mobley

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!

Boy, do I love Hank Mobley. I first got hip to him when someone played me “Uh Huh” from the 1964 album Workout. It’s one of the zillion and a half Blue Note records Grant Green played on in the 1960s, and generally considered one of Mobley’s best efforts. Which is saying something, as Mobley’s records tend to feature the cream of the Blue Note stable, musicians like Lee Morgan, Green, Wynton Kelly and Art Blakey, and the material ranges from blues-based material and other funky originals to well-chosen standards. From a learning perspective, Mobley’s a great one to listen to, as he favors a famously “round” tone and clean, uncluttered lines, articulately delivered with an incessantly swinging feel, making it easier to pick out what’s going on than when checking out, say, Stanley Turrentine. Our lick this time is loosely adapted from Mobley’s playing on a tune from the fabulously titled “No Room For Squares” (and yes, say what you will about John Mayer, that guy obviously listens to good music in his spare time). We’re on a straight-eighths feel again, and with a little guitaristic flimflam you can make the descending double-time lick come out more smoothly than you might at first expect.

Read on for the full guitar lesson…

Comment on this post | Tags: guitar lesson, jazz blues, jazz blues licks

50 Jazz Blues Licks

Comment on this post
September 23rd 2011

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #15 Barry Harris

As a would-be jazz musician straight off the boat in New York, I had a handful of experiences with musicians I had absolutely no business being around, and while mortifying at the time (for the most part), I did manage to learn a thing or two while adding a name to my life list of Scary Musicians I Can Say I’ve Been In The Presence Of, For Better Or Worse. Including Barry Harris, who ran a school of sorts on the West Side of Manhattan in the 1980s called the Jazz Cultural Theatre. I spent a short, somewhat enlightening afternoon there one cold winter day in 1987, getting a first-hand introduction to Harris’ philosophy of bebop harmony. The ideas made sense, and if I’d spent the past two and a half decades implementing them I’d probably kind of of be able to do something with them right about now. Such is hindsight. But my favorite Barry Harris story is one he tells himself, about how, after playing on Lee Morgan’s “The Sidewinder,” Harris went up to the offices at Blue Note to ask for his own recording contract. Alfred Lion turned him down, on the grounds that Harris’ playing was “too beautiful.” The pianist’s response? “I thanked the man, and walked out.”