50 Jazz Blues Licks

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #34 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 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!

It may seem like jazz musicians are continually trying to pull the rug out from underneath you with their tricky chord changes – why can’t they just play V IV and I, like everyone else? – but a little level-headed observation tends to reveal that, at least when it comes to the blues, there are really just a handful of paths through those twelve bars. Case in point: on a minor blues, jazzers reach for either the minor iv chord or the bVI chord in bars 5 and 6. It’s pretty much one or the other, and with a little practice you’ll hear it just as quickly as you can hear whether Albert Collins is going to the quick IV in measure 2 or not on a Texas shuffle. Likewise, the turnaround in the last four bars of a minor blues usually only goes in one of a couple of pretty recognizable directions. The default is arguably bVI to V to i, which in the key of, say, G minor, means going from Eb7 to D7 to G minor (if you played it in the same key, “The Thrill is Gone” would have a turnaround from Ebmaj7 to D7 to Gmin, which is pretty similar). What’s good to know is that most deviations from this one turnaround tend to just be elaborations on a framework: swapping in Eb9 for Eb7, adding b9, #9 and/or b13 alterations to the V chord, and sneaking in a iimin7b5 chord between bVI and V. Do all of those at once in the key of G minor and you get: Eb9 to Amin7b5 to D7alt. to Gmin. Cool? Now all you gotta do is play over it…

Video Guitar Lesson

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.

Tags: guitar lesson, jazz blues

50 Jazz Blues Licks

Comment on this post
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.