50 Jazz Blues Licks

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #28 Jimmy Forrest

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!

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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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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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.

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50 Jazz Blues Licks

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January 5th 2012

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #26 Tommy Flanagan

Once again, my first encounter with a legendary keyboard player was through the jazz guitar canon – Tommy Flanagan’s the pianist on The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery, one of the first jazz albums I and probably zillions of other guitarists got turned on to. (Right after Wes lays down the two-chorus head to “D-Natural Blues,” that’s Flanagan who comes in with the righteously laid-back opening solo.) Much more recently, I picked up an LP of The Tommy Flanagan Trio Overseas, which quickly became an all-time favorite of mine (and made my then-three-year-old son’s heavy rotation list for about three months, which about as high praise as you can get). Turns out, of course, what I thought was some weird, obscure old reissue was in fact considered an all-time classic itself, and with good reason – Flanagan, bassist Wilbur Ware and drummer Elvin Jones (you may have heard of him – he played with a guy named Coltrane) apply their intensely relaxed bebop groove to original material, an Ellington/Strayhorn tune and three different views of the twelve-bar form, with results any jazz-exploring blues musician will totally dig.

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50 Jazz Blues Licks

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December 14th 2011

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #25 Grant Green

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!

Grant Green’s arrival on the New York scene in 1959-1960 is in many ways the classic overnight success story – one in which the succeeder in question actually spent years under the radar honing his or her chops before getting exposed to a broader scene. Green was a working musician in St. Louis, playing gigs and doing his thing, when altoist Lou Donaldson (Jazz Blues Licks #4, #5) heard the guitarist on a swing through town. Donaldson, then recording for Blue Note records, brought Green to the attention of label partner/co-founder/producer Alfred Lion, and Green was soon in New York recording on a Donaldson session. Lion swiftly arranged for a date with Green as a leader, seen by many as an indication of how taken Lion was with Green – the more general policy at the label was to give a new musician a much longer trial period doing sessions with others in the stable before getting a session of one’s own. And interestingly, Lion may have felt he’d been overly hasty,, as Green’s initial date, with no less a rhythm section than Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones, was shelved (though released four decades later as First Session). The guitarist’s followup organ-trio date, with Baby Face Willette and Ben Dixon, however, evidently passed muster, as it was released in 1961, launching one of the most successful jazz guitar careers of the 1960s.

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50 Jazz Blues Licks

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November 29th 2011

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #24 Wes Montgomery

I studied for a while with guitarist Peter Einhorn when I lived in Brooklyn, and he turned me on to one of the most memorable and important ideas I’ve ever been exposed to as an improvisor. For centuries, classical composers have been using a concept called sequencing to take their most basic ideas, or motifs, and develop them in various directions, and Peter suggested that one could take the same concept and use it do develop a solo. In fact, he pointed out that Wes consistently used motivic development as an improviser, and suggested it might be illuminating to take one of his solos and analyze it that way. Ever the dutiful student (well, not really, but this particular week at least) I took a look at Wes’ first couple of choruses on “James and Wes” (from The Dynamic Duo with Jimmy Smith) and, sure enough, it was one of the most frighteningly logical things I’d ever seen – besides being funky as anything and swinging like a mo’fo’. At its simplest, you’re sequencing an idea when you play a lick including the major third on the I chord and then repeat it while flatting the third over the IV chord. The rest, to quote Rabbi Hillel, “is commentary. Now go and learn.”