Jazz Comping Survival Guide

One of the biggest problems aspiring jazz guitarists face is learning chords and learning how to use them. Most guitarists learn chords from 'Jazz Chords for Guitar' style books with block chord diagrams, whether it be Mel Bay or Ronny Lee as it was in my case. These books open the door to big 'jazzy' sounding chords that are full and fat and usually four finger voicings. We memorize these voicings with excitement and enthusiasm. I remember sitting with Ronny Lee's book for hours everyday over a summer vacation, memorizing cool chord grips. Then I went on to the Ted Greene books, with pages and pages of amazing sounding chords. How could I ever memorize all of this? So I tried and tried to memorize. Finally got a gig or two. And lo and behold, my chords, so lovingly and painstakingly learned, were, well - almost useless! First thing the bass player says, "Hey man could you not play so many bass notes? It's sort of getting in my way. Next up to rip on me was the piano player, "Hey man, how about laying off those 9th and 13ths and s@#$%^t, it's stepping all over me". And then the sax player, "yeah man, it's cool man, just lay out a bit, ok? Thanks man, yeah great!" Slowly over many gigs I started to find that I was playing smaller and smaller chords. Eventually it was just the 3rds and 7ths that were working. So over the years of teaching, over 20 years of touring and teaching, I've focused my students not on learning chords and then throwing that all out and starting all over again, like me and so many others have had to do. Rather, we start with the small building blocks - just guide tones - and build. So we can use just guide tones when there is a bass player and piano player and vibes player. Or add bass notes when there is no bass player on the gig. Or just guide tones and extensions when there is no piano player. Or add bass notes, guide tones and one or two extensions if you are playing duo with a singer. This approach works! After 20 years of teaching I can humbly say this approach to comping has proven itself many times over. I have had students comping at jam sessions in Chicago after only 3 months of study! Are you ready? Let's go!

In this first part of the course we will examine playing the blues using only guide tones, and we will also introduce four principles of chord substitution that will become the basis for all of the jazz comping we do from here on out. So please study these carefully and completely, they will have far reaching applications and will be with you for the rest of this course, and probably for the rest of your life as a jazz musician.The ‘guide tones’ only approach is a new way of describing what jazz guitarists have been doing for years.

Let's explore it a bit more in depth here.

What are guide tones?

Simple! They are the most important notes in a jazz chord - the 3rd and 7th. Sometimes called ‘color tones’, we will call them guide tones, as they outline the important notes in a chord and ‘guide’ the player (and listener) through a jazz chord progression.

One of the things I always hated about jazz guitar chord and scale books is how long they were, and how much memorization they expected you to do, page after page of chord symbols, block diagrams, little riffs and licks.

Piano players had nice little formulas for building chords - no memorization! - so did jazz arrangers, why not guitar players too?

Well, as I explored it more I found that building chords on the guitar was simple too. Especially when I started with guide tones. First off, 90% of the time the bass player will be playing the root, or whatever bass note is needed. And the 5th is usually just a clumsy note, often left out of nice chords anyway, so let's start with guide tones for G7. That’s the 3rd and 7th of G dominant 7, right? G7 is spelled G, B, D, F - that’s 1, 3, 5, b7 of the G major scale, So:

F nat and, B nat are guide tones of G7








move it down one fret and you got the IV chord – C7




move up 1/2 step and you got the V chord – D7




All of the basic building blocks of harmony I,IV and V in a three fret span!

OK, Let's build some chords:

START WITH G7 GUIDE TONES ONLY

-Now flat the third - what dya got? Gm7!




-Now flat 7th 1 ½ step - what dya got? Gm6! (This chord is same as G dim or G ½ dim since there is no fifth at all)







-Now flat the 6th ½ step - what dya got? Gmb6!












-Now raise the B6 ½ step - what dya got? You are back to Gm6!

Playing the blues

I remember playing at the High Sierra Music Festival and getting invited to sit in with The Radiators (http://www.theradiators.org/index3.php) - the legendary New Orleans rock and blues band. I had just gotten off stage with my own group the Flat Earth Ensemble, wearing an all white Indian Kurta (formal long Indian concert dress).

When the Rads got a look at me, they sort of panicked - "Who is this weirdo, and what is he gonna do on our stage?" I’m sure I looked like I was more likely to offer them a ‘Hare Hare Krishna’ blessing, rather than throw down some jams.

I mentioned briefly that I was from Chicago (home of the blues right?) and that seemed to be okay, but when we hit the stage my one number turned out to be eleven songs 'till how 4 am, you know what they say: You can take the Pakistani kid out of Chicago, but you can’t take the Chicago out of the Pakistani kid.

The blues is a deep and wonderful art, and understanding it, or beginning to, was and is a profound lesson for me.

I like to say that the basic difference between blues (and many other African and afro inspired musical forms) and ’western’ music is one of intention. Most western music is obsessed with the need to tell a story, hence the operas, long concertos and symphonies of the great classical composers. Most of the tin pan alley ‘standard’ songs that jazz is built on tell a story too, they are often from musicals so they were an essential part of telling the story. I call this ‘prosaic’ music like the prose of our western literature but on a deeper level. What we love about the blues is that it does not have to tell a story. It is not prosaic but rather it is poetic, in fact one of the most striking and surprising things about the blues is that in the blues nothing happens! We start out at home(I), head to sub dominant (IV) go back home (I) then off to V and back to I where we start the thing all over again. It's hypnotic, right?

In fact the blues progression is basically the same for almost all blues songs. So a blues band plays its set of ten blues songs at the blues festival, 5 bands a day for say 4 days, that’s like 200 blues tunes in one blues festival - the same song like 200 times and 200 songs later the audience is still jumpin' and jiving! It still sounds great!

Why doesn't it get boring?

What is it about repetition? Blues feels good and the repetition gets you into a groove. I feel that this difference represents the difference in concepts of time between The West and Africa (and much of the tribal world).

We in the west want things to go somewhere or do something. As a result we are always in a hurry ‘cause we have to get there! To the end, the destination, the goal. But the blues just feels good, and sits there. It does not have to go anywhere or tell a long story to get there because it's already there! We’re not in a hurry because we are all ready there and it feels just fine!

So in the blues one of the best things you can do is simply play something that feels good, and then play it again and again and again. Maybe in a slightly different way, like poetry, we are always saying a few things again and again, but with beauty and grace or charm. So it is with the blues

And you’ll find the same in so called "bluesy jazz". To groove and play something that feels good and repeat with variation will eventually get the audience into the groove.

It was the great alto sax player Arnie Lawrence (RIP brother) that first clued me into the blues. I was so young (16, 17?) and Arnie and I were playing together in Chile, with some great musicians from down there. He’d sing or play the blues, and then I’d play. I played so corny. I’d play one solo and then have to run backstage to dump the corn cobs out of my guitar. Corny because I still did not understand repetition and variation. Arnie used to kid me - on and off stage – he’d say (In a huge pre-war radio announcer voice) “Ladies and gentlemen, now our young guitarist is going to play for you one of his favorite songs it's called, (and I'm sure you're all going to lovethis snappy little number) "The blues"

Humiliating.

But I eventually started to get it, thanks Arnie for so much music, fun, and a seemingly endless supply of great jokes.

Even the great Joe Zawinul had his take on this. His very first instruction to me at our first rehearsal was "Play this part, and don’t ever change it! But be sure to never ever play it the same way twice". That took a week or a lifetime to make sense of, but Joe was making sense. He wanted me to play the part and never change it, but always keep making variations on it, like in nature no two leaves or snowflakes are ever the same, yet all the are the same - but slightly - poetically- different.

Check out Albert Collins, Freddie, Albert and BB King, Hendrix, John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson for a start on great blues players.

In this example I demonstrate using the guide tones only to comp a jazz blues. Don't think this is just academic. I can’t tell you how often I have played just guide tones when comping and got smiles all around from the band and audience. Simple is better than complex, almost always.

In this section we will play ii-V's, probably the most common progression in Jazz, using guide tones only.

A ii-V can be simply described as a fancy suspension. We create a suspension by replacing the 3rd with the 4th. The guide tones of G7 are B, and F. The guide tones of Dm7 are C and F. Since C is the 4th of G7 a Dm7 could be called simply a Gsus with the D (5th) in the bass. Well maybe not so simply, but check it on the guitar. The key here is that a ii-V can be used almost anywhere - a 7th chord can become a ii-V - since we are simply creating a suspension and resolving it. Guidetones of Dm7 - C, F - resolve to G7 - B, F.