50 Jazz Blues Licks

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #24 Wes Montgomery

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!

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.”

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50 Jazz Blues Licks

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November 16th 2011

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #23 Grant Green

Okay, time for some Grant Green! Green is less overtly chromatic than many of the horn and piano players we’ve checked out so far, and he’s something of an anomaly among his peers in another way as well: the fact that he played strictly single lines as a soloist. While he did his share of great comping, especially in the organ trio format he spent so much time in, you never hear any chord punctuation, double stops or octaves in his solos. It’s not that unusual in and of itself, but for a guitarist who was otherwise so deeply drenched in the blues it seems kind of weird – try and imagine Wes, Benson or Kenny Burrell with all but the single note playing stripped out of their solos and you’ll see what I mean. Yet Green remains highly accessible to blues guitarists due to his penchant for mixing intense blues-scale riffing with twisting, rapid-fire alterations on the changes to make his point, combined with a tendency to favor blues-based forms. Exhibit A: his Blue Note debut as a leader, Grant’s First Stand, consisted of four blues in various tempos and feels, an eight bar blues (“T’ain’t Nobody’s Business if I Do”) and the bluesy standard “Lullaby of the Leaves.”

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50 Jazz Blues Licks

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November 8th 2011

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #22 Oscar Peterson

Now, listen up, kids. Blowing people’s minds onstage is nice and all, but don’t make the mistake, like so many of us do, of aiming low. Before his death in 2007, sure, Oscar Peterson earned a worldwide reputation as a piano virtuoso, routine comparisons to Art Tatum, and emphatic, four-letter praise from Ray Charles. He played with Coleman Hawkins, Milt Jackson, Stephane Grappelli, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald and oh, um, Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong. Yeah. And he learned to play by getting the Bach Preludes and Fugues and Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto under his fingers (and, presumably, keeping them there until they were as burnin’ as his jazz chops became). And that’s all good, and worth aspiring to, as is making over 200 records in your lifetime and touring the world. Yes, yes. But if you’re looking for some New Year’s Goals (and it’s already November), here are a few to add to the list, after “learning the modes” and “practicing more:” 1. Become Chancellor of a University (Peterson, York University in Toronto, 1991-94) 2. Be considered for the position of Lieutenant Governor (Peterson was offered the gig by incoming Ontario governor Jean Chretien in 1993, but turned it down) or, perhaps best of all, 3. Get a dormitory named after you (“Oscar Peterson Hall” on the University of Toronto Missassauga campus, 2008.)

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50 Jazz Blues Licks

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October 25th 2011

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #20 George Benson

The great thing about a lot of these straight-eighth licks is that they come out of a school of 1960s tunes that generally use a V-IV-I turnaround for the last four bars, rather than the ii-V-I turnaround more typical of swing and bebop chord progressions. That makes them a lot more practical as a source for ideas if you’re used to playing over blues or funk material that also tends to give the ii-V-I ending a miss. And a lot of times, as in this week’s Benson-inspired lick, the moves are more modular and easier to adapt on a chord-by-chord basis to a different situation. You could take either the lick over the D7, or the lick over the C7, and use either one anyplace where you have a bar of some kind of dominant chord. In fact, a good way to practice some of these moves and get them under your fingers is to take a one-bar move like the lick over the C7, and try playing it on every chord in a G blues, one lick per measure. You could even do something similar with the minor pentatonic lick at the end – it won’t work to transpose it up to D, but you could use it just as it is over the IV chord in measures 5 and 6 of a G blues, and it would make a great contrast to playing the changes on the I and V.

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50 Jazz Blues Licks

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October 3rd 2011

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.