Studying Jazz II - Lenny Breau

Part one

Sound and picture quality isn't great, you'll have to turn your speakers up, here's Winnipeg guitar player Lenny Breau at a workshop quite awhile ago.

Lenny got into jazz learning Chet Atkins songs by ear, what he didn't realize is that Chet would dub over a couple times to get those effects, because it was “impossible” to do it yourself. Lenny did it, often creating the illusion of two, sometimes three guitar players at once by himself. Lenny was also the one who conceptualized the chord shell ideas I talked about last month. As well as the cascading harmonics technique he does at about 1:05. Lenny laid the groundwork for the chord melody style of modern jazz guitar, his album “live at bourbon street” is often referred to as the greatest jazz guitar album ever recorded.

Lenny's style was unheard of in Jazz guitar, he borrowed a lot of techniques from country and flamenco and applied it to jazz, a style that few even today are able to pull off.

Unfortunately Lenny was one of the many great musicians that did way too many drugs, he was flaky and unreliable. And again, like so many others died young (at the age of 43), found strangled to death face down in a swimming pool. Too old to be recognized for dying young, but too young to have made a name for himself in the industry, other jazz guitar players became known for doing the same things, but Lenny is relatively unknown, often even in the jazz community, although his influence is seen in the majority of jazz guitarists coming after him, often without realizing where that styling comes from.

Harmonizing Scales III: Minor Pentatonic

Now that we've harmonized major and the melodic minor scale, let's talk about some other scales, namely the one that every rock player is extremely familiar with: the minor pentatonic scale, I'll use A so I don't have to deal with any sharps or flats.

A C D E G

Now let's go through the same process as before building triad chords by skipping every other note (ie the 1 3 5 of a pentatonic scale).

A D G

This ends up being the root, fourth and minor seventh of the minor scale, which will function as an A7sus4(omit 5).

C E A

This will function as a C6, again without the fifth.

D G C

D7sus4 Another 7sus4 chord, without the fifth.

E A D

E7sus4 – once more without the fifth.

G C E

G6sus4 – without the fifth.

So we get

I – A7sus4
II – C6
III – D7sus4
IV – E7sus4
V – G6sus4

Move up in fourths changes because this is only a 5 note scale:

I IV II V III I

This progression will sound pretty cool, however it's fairly dissonant, you can use the notes within the scale to pull other extensions, forming different chords, for example, A C E G are all in there, meaning your i chord could also be an Amin7.

The chord substations also change:

I and III
II and IV
III and V would form your substitutions. Therefore, using this information:

Gsus4 Dsus4 Amin

Actually forms a pretty interesting progression, and it's pulled completely off the minor pentatonic, this can really expand your vocabulary of progressions, and substitutions.

Related:
New ways to use pentatonic scales

Developing Practice Habits

No matter what level you are it's critical to get into a regular practice habit to make your best progress. This routine should be done at the same time every day if at all possible so it becomes habitual.

First determine the length that you are able to and willing to practice – obviously the further along you are the longer you'll need to practice in order to get better. And as lame as it sounds, use a clock and time yourself, don't allow yourself to get away with practicing less then normal unless a situation you cannot control arises – keep a practice journal for this purpose.

I generally don't recommend practicing any more then 30 minutes in one sitting, generally your hands need a break, even if it's to get up – stretch then sit right back down, personally I practice in 15 minute chunks.

What to Practice

Now there are quite a few aspects to, depending on your levels and goals what you need to practice changes, but basically what you need to practice falls into a few categories.

Tunes
Chords
Scales
Arpeggios
Chops
Ear Training
Theory

Tunes:

This one is fairly obvious, but even it can be broken up into two categories: Tunes you can play and tunes you can't play.

Work on some stuff you can't play: break things down work through it by section slowly, expand your repertoire.

Work on stuff you can play: This is what breaks up intense practice sessions, and helps you enjoy your playing, smooth things out, get it faster, change some notes and add your own spin.

Chords:

“I know all the chords” I've heard this a lot, if you think you do – you don't.

A chord is formed by any 3 or more notes, there are 12 notes, do the math, there's a lot of chords. And there are always different voicings you can learn for them (My old teacher had math showing that there were about 36 000 different ways to play a C major chord if my memory serves correctly).

Scales/Arpeggios:

Memorize, learn with a metronome, play faster, in different positions, in different sequences, etc.

Chops:

This one is pretty vague, Scales and Arpeggios tie in with this one, as well as things like right hand tapping, pinch harmonics, basically any technique developing exercise you have.

Ear Training:

For the most part people do this playing and tuning their instruments, however, if you really want to develop your ears, you have to learn to sing. Don't worry about tone, just hit the notes, sing scales, sing intervals, don't worry if you can't sing, anyone can learn to hit the notes. Also try transcribing some songs that you don't know, be patient with it, I'll post an article on the process soon.

Theory:

This is the only one not completely done with your guitar, learn something new theory wise and experiment. For example take Tri-tone subs and work with them over a progression you already know with a lot of dominant 7 chords. If you're not at that level theory wise, then there are resources such as musictheory.net that you can use to learn the basics.

My typical day looks like this:

I get up around 10am, after breakfast and showering it's usually around 10:30, and I practice until one. I then eat lunch and head to my studio, I then practice there until I start teaching (usually four). I go to work early so that I don't have all the stuff at home to distract me, I generally have a really short attention span. If I sleep past 10, I won't practice nearly as much, most of the time trying to practice in the evening fails for me, simply because I currently don't have the habit of doing that in place.

That's over five hours of practice “time” but generally I only get 3.5-4 hours done during that. I then try to spend some time transcribing something, write something for here, or even screw around a bit before bed.

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.

Harmonizing Scales II: Minor Keys

Harmonizing scales part one.

As requested by Jason, I'll talk about the second most common scale for chord progressions to be written off which is the melodic minor scale, things here change however because the scale is different going up then it is coming back down. Upwards it's the same as the natural minor scale (or sixth mode of the major scale), with a sharp sixth and seventh note, downwards those notes revert back to the natural minor scale, looking like this:



This means we'll have two choices for notes when dealing with the sixth or seventh, I'll give the more common options.

i – Amin7
ii – Bmin7b5
iii – Cmaj7
iv – Dmin7
V – E7 (the third here is the #7 of the natural minor scale, this is primarily used due to the strength of the progression moving from a V7 down to a i chord)
VI – Fmaj7
VII – G7/Gmaj7 (Gmaj7 is often as to not to sound like it's leading to a i chord, VII7 usually leads to a i chord)

Now, if you're paying attention we have two notes that we haven't harmonized off yet, and that's the F# and G# giving us:

#vi – Fmin7b5
#vii – Gdim7

As far as progressions go the substitutions are the same as major keys, moving up in fourths is still the most common motion, you also begin to deal with the #vii and #vi chords being treated the same as the VI and VII chords – remember they're the same chords with a different root so they function exactly the same.

This style of creating chord progressions is far more common to be used over minor keys then it would be to use the A natural minor scale, especially when dealing with the V chord.

The Guitar Blog Discovery Project

Jason from The Atomic Guitarist has asked all guitar bloggers to create a network of links to both boost page rank and help each other and the readers find them all. I often have a hard time deciding whether I'm a guitar blog or a music theory blog in general, but I'm going to help out anyway. So if you have a guitar blog, throw these links up on a personalized description of the project and add any other links you know, the writers of that blog will take the trackback to you, and hopefully add your link.

Guitar Noize | IG Blog | Strat-O-Blogster | Guitar MX | Mad Stratter | Guitarz | Building the Ergonomic Guitar | Guitritus | Musician's Notebook | GuitarToyBox | IGUITARGOD | Mr. Blues Guy | markmcguigan.com | Acoustic Guitar Player | iFingers Guitar Experience | Play Like a Girl | Electric Guitar Review | Guitar Novice | Truth in Shredding | Thumbrella | Music Ramble | The Soul of Rock and Roll | Guitar Lifestyle | GuitaroJam News | Music Gadgets | The Guitar Channel | The Guitar Resource | Guitar Stuff | Axe Victim | Guitar Toy Box

Using Tritone Substitutions in Comping and Soloing

The tritone is the only interval invertible on itself – that is, the inverse of a tritone is also a tritone. This interval is also the flat fifth, or augmented forth (which is also the distance between the third and flat seventh of a dominant seven chord.)

The concept of a tritone substitution is simple and very easy to visualize using the chord shells I taught a while back.

The basic idea says that

C7: C E G Bb

can sub for

F#7: F# A#(Bb) C# E

The reasoning is, that the third and the seventh provide the most important tones of the given chords, and C7 and F#7 contain the same third and seventh (only inversed).

Also notice that the roots end up being a tritone apart.

Application for Comping

Let's take autumn leaves for example, and add some substitutions in

Am7 | D7 | Gmaj7 | Cmaj7

Create the first line, however lets substitute D7 with the dominant seven chord a tritone away, which would be Ab7.

Am7 | Ab7 | Gmaj7 | Cmaj7

We now have some cool chromaticism happening in the first three measures.

We can also take the last line of a standard twelve bar blues and create chromaticism: (in C, sub the C chord for it's tritone F#)

G7 | F7 | F#7 | G7 |

Application for Soloing

Let's take a generic line for a ii-V-I progression

Now let's move the notes over the G7 up a tritone, implying a C#7 chord in it's place (I've changed the last note of the bar to make it fit into the line better.

This adds a good chunk of dissonance to your soloing, and can be used any time you see a dominate seven chord (meaning you can go crazy with it during a 12 bar blues.

Melodic Phrasing (video)

I talked about controlling phrases yesterday now as much as I tend to dislike most guitar instructional videos (nothing against the concept I just don't like very many of them), Scott Henderson (of Tribal Tech, and early Chick Corea Electric band), has one on Phrasing that I did like, unfortunately I haven't seen the whole video but this clip of it alone says a lot.



If nothing else you can laugh at the faces he makes when playing.

Soloing Exercises II: Control

Link to soloing exercises 1

After being able to play a long stream of chord tones, it becomes a matter of being able to make everything sound musical. For this we need to worry about rhythms, and specifically the phrasing (a phrase is one musical idea, which 90% of the time is 4 measures long) – more information on what a phrase is here.

The first exercise here is actually harder then it sounds, and that is to put three and only three notes into each phrase. The trick here it to use different rhythms each time, if you play 3 sixteenth notes and rest for the rest, this is perfectly fine, but don't do it every time. (note there does not have to be a note on the first beat of the phrase, or even the first measure for that matter.)

Continue doing this exercise using different amounts, such as 4, 5, 6 and 7 notes per phrase. This will force you to think in terms of phrases and really control how you place your notes.

The second group of exercises forces you to control where you put the notes within the measure, to begin play only on beats one and three (this does not mean you have to play on EVERY first and third beat.) Then only beat two and four. Then play only the offbeats.

This exercise can actually be made incredibly complex (try playing only on the third note of every quintuplet, using exactly three notes per phrase). And the more complex you make it the more ability to control your notes you can show.

Bossa Novas and Latin Style Rhythms

Bossa Novas are a subject that gets talked about a lot and everyone has a different opinion on how to play them, I'm going to tell you mine:

Firstly the reason I think this is the correct way is that if you talk to anyone who grew up with this style of music, like a native Brazilian they will simply tell you to "just feel it." Rather then give you a specific way to count the rhythm. However, those of us who grew up with Western style music find it impossible to not think in numbers and counting, therefore we're going to train ourselves to count differently. Here's a Bossa rhythm, there are a number of variations of it, but this seems to feel like the base:



Now most of us would count this 1 (2) + (3) (4) + | (1) 2 3 (4). And to begin you should do that, spend about a week counting and clapping the hell out of that rhythm, know it inside and out. Once you can do that we want to change the counting for it, simply count 1 2 3, 1 2. This will completely change the pulse of the music.

Why this is significant

With the new way of counting try playing straight triplets:



This is a drastic change from the conventional western way of thinking of rhythms.

The bass line:

The conventional thing for the bass player to do is to just play beats 1 and 3 (with western counting) in straight half notes, I tend to prefer my bass players to play the and of 2 and the and of 4 as well, adds a bit more Latin feel to it.

New Ways to use Pentatonic Scales

Firstly if you're a guitar player who uses the minor pentatonic scale almost exclusively the first thing you need to do is break that habit. Go through my Soloing Exercises And focus on chord tones, once that habit is broken; read on.

A minor pentatonic scale is the natural minor scale, or Aeolian Mode without the sixth or the second.

A major pentatonic scale is the major scale without the fourth or the seventh.

I once heard someone with his BA in music claim that pentatonic scales are the invention of the devil, and for a long time I agreed, however if you know how to work them they can produce some really cool sounds. To understand how these ideas will work you will need to understand Thirteenth Chords so read my article if you don't know what they are.

We're going to start by using a minor pentatonic scale over the Amin7 chord.

Amin7:           A  C     E  G
Amin pentatonic: A  C  D  E  G

Notice there's only a one know difference between the scale and the arpeggio, that note is actually the 4th, or 11th of the chord, so by playing the A minor pentatonic scale over the Amin7 chord we are actually implying a Amin11 chord. Now let's try something else, let's build a minor pentatonic scale off the ninth of the chord.

Amin7:            A    C  E       G
Bmin Pentatonic:  A  B    E  D F#

A little more difference here, the root and the fifth are still there, but we're also adding B (the ninth), D (the 11th) and F# (the 13th.) So we're actually implying a Amin13 chord here, omitting the third and the seventh.

We can also build of the fifth of the chord, giving us the root, fifth, minor seventh, ninth and eleventh, again implying an Amin11 chord, with an omitted third.

Major Pentatonic scales work the same way with maj7 chords.

Building off the root gives you: root, third, fifth, ninth, thirteenth.

Building off the fifth gives you: third, fifth, seventh, ninth, thirteenth

Building off the ninth gives you: third, seventh, ninth, sharp eleventh, thirteenth

Now the Application:

Let's use Black Orpheus as an example, the first line goes as follows:

Am7      |Bm7b5  E7  |Am7      |Bm7b5  E7  |

If we use the C#minor/E major (same notes) pentatonic scale over the second and forth measures, it will work nicely, (C# is the ninth of B minor) and the major pentatonic can be built off the root of a dominant seven chord easily (it contains no seventh).

However for the first and third measures we have a couple options, the most obvious being to change scales, perhaps move a whole tone down and build off the ninth, or move it somewhere else: however let's try keeping it right where it is:

E – The fifth of A
F# - the thirteenth of A
G# - the major seventh of A
B – the ninth of A
C# - the Major third of A

So the only two notes not within the Amin13 chord are the G# and the C#, now if you know this tune well enough, you can easily change the Am7 into a Am/maj7 (1. b3, 5, 7) since the G is never played over the Amin7 chord, provided you let the rest of the band know you're doing this you're golden. However that leaves us with the C# this isn't a particularly great sounding note over the chord, however it really isn't that horrible, and can easily be used provided you resolve in the a nearby strong note, (the fifth is probably best in most situations here.)