Why study jazz?

I hate Kenny G

The understanding of Jazz theory, harmony, structure and rhythms will improve your playing no matter what genre you play. The reasoning is simple, jazz is far more complex then other genres of music (except for possibly classical).

Now the average person would say jazz is slow and boring, this is where people like Kenny G come into play, the guy doesn't play jazz, he plays what is in essence instrumental pop-music but because of his popularity people tend to think all jazz is like that. In reality, a lot of jazz is way faster then any rock song (listen to Parker's Anthropology or Coltrane's Giant Steps). Anthropology sits around 240bpm, Giant Steps is around 300bpm.

Understanding the fundamentals of jazz will improve your rock playing and most of the great rock players know how to handle jazz – Steve Vai studied at Berklee afterall.

The main problem is that good jazz is hard to find, it doesn't have the wide range appeal (ask any jazz musician and they will tell you they mainly play for other musicians).

Now as I said before, learning the structures and harmonies will help you with other playing – I'm not attempting to say other styles have no merit.

So what I'll begin to do is introduce a few jazz artists a little about them and the tune they're playing. I'll be sticking primarily to guitar players (although I tend to forget this is a guitar based Blog), although throwing in a few of the more important players on other instruments.

Firstly I'll deal with Wes Montgomery, one of the better known names in jazz guitar. He was a self taught player – and like most self-taught players had a lot of bad habits, just looking at the way he sits will tell you that. He also played with with his thumb rather then ever using a pick, mainly because he didn't like the sound of a pick. Wes also was one of the first to play in octaves (as seen at 2:12 and 5:45 as well as some others). This is him playing one of Thelonious Monk's tunes “Round Midnight.”

Round Midnight is a ballad with some odd harmonies (usually played in Eb minor to boot), it's one of the jazz standards – and been done a lot (off hand I can think of Miles Davis, Joe Pass, and obviously Wes all doing covers of it, I could probably name a few more if I thought about it more). This is about as slow as Jazz can get, but even then he played a lot of really fast runs starting at around 3:13 and extending to around 4:30

Jazz is generally structured in the following manner:

Play the Head (or theme or melody).

Solo over the chord progression, using the head as your basis.

Play the head again (doesn't always happen).

So yes, take into account everything that isn't that base melody played at the beginning and end is completely improvised.