Currently learning how to play jazz.

grappagreen

Some good advice here..

My two pence would be to focus on harmony as much as melody. Don't know your level so please ignore accordingly..

1. Try and adopt a system of memorisation - CAGED for me but whatever works for you. Learn to see/hear the intervals in relation. Sing em as you play... shout out the names..doing this forces you to be active and not passive.
2. Try and expand your chord vocab within the above always actively trying to analyse the chord tones/intervals. Grab a progression and actually relate each chord to the relevant master system i.e. this is in the C shape in CAGED and shout out the degrees in the chord. You may wanna shout out the notes as well for good measure..
3. Change the key lots of the progression - forces you to be active i.e. have to think again.
4. Rinse and repeat gradually increasing harmonic complexity.
5. Get Chord Chemistry and Leon White's guide if you want to understand at a deep level.

From a melodic development perspective

1. Learn the lines of the masters! A solid knowledge of ii-V-I lines is the real key to getting your jazz chops together. This is pretty much how every decent jazz player got going and it works.. Take a line, understand it and the chord tones it outlines. Try and re-phrase it, try and modify it to taste. Make it your own. Learn many of them and string em together. This is how it was done before the World invented the music education ecosystem and we lost our way in many ways..

These are the short cuts btw

Playing Jazz at any decent pace requires it to flow without conscious thought. Anyone who thinks that a bebop player is thinking about each chord/arpeggio/substitution/scale @ 160bpm is wrong. It's a language and you gotta learn it like you would learn any language; an approach that requires both study of why but stronger focus on vocab and how to use it.

Hope this helps.

Simon

Roland

bigjon said:

viz said:

rossyamaha said:

Is there anyone here that started out as a rock guy and moved into jazz and actually got it? What was the lightbulb moment? I'm waiting for something to happen and the penny to drop when suddenly everything just makes sense. 

Yes, me!

Me too!

When I were a lad there was a lot of jazz on the radio, so I grew up feeling comfortable with the simpler stuff. But jazz isn’t a single entity. I spent a few years expecting the penny to drop over the likes of Coltrane, but it hasn’t. Probably because I’ve never felt an attraction for bebop in the same way that I’ve never felt anything for Bartok. 

Funkfingers

rossyamaha said:

Is there anyone here that started out as a rock guy and moved into jazz and actually got it? What was the lightbulb moment? I'm waiting for something to happen and the penny to drop when suddenly everything just makes sense. 

When trying to tempt Rock guitarists and music listeners towards Jazz, I usually suggest the Miles Davis album, A Tribute To Jack Johnson. 

IMO, like Blues, Jazz is something that you have to *feel* to play properly. The form was originally intended as dance music. A good deal of harder Rock is not. 

bingefeller

Check out Randy Vincent's drop 2 book and his 3 Note Voicings and Beyond book.  Robert Brown's Chord Connections book is also fantastic.  If you get those books you shouldn't need any other chord theory books.

For lead playing again Randy Vincent's Cellular Approach is great as is his Line Games book - no tab though, only standard notation.  Jason Lyon's Pentatonic book is another good one that simplifies things into variations of pentatonics.  Bruce Saunders has a pentatonic book too.  

clarkefan

viz said:

As Brad has said, the jazz blues is an excellent place to start because it will get you playing 13 chords on the tonic, 9 chords on the IV, the altered, half-whole and wholetone scales on the V (this is very important), diminished chords between the I, IV and V, hendrix and altered chords on the vi, it’ll give you ii-V-Is on the IV chord, and vi-ii-V-Is on the tonic, it’s got all the basic vocab of jazz. 

@viz , sounds like a place I'd like to start, but is there a specific "the jazz blues" you're referring to?  I get a mental number of variations when I plug that into Google?

viz

Yes - something like this. Excuse the terrible playing, it’s just meant to tell the chords, not sound nice!

https://youtu.be/cklYR21TcNE

HPhillipsmusic

To understand the numbers like 1 4 5 and 2 5 1, you need to really get a good hold over the major scale and figuring out how those numbers relate to degrees (notes) of the major scale. 1 always being the root of course! 1 4 5's are you basic 12 bar blues pattern - if you can understand why that is then you can start to understand 2 5 1's and more. Once you have the numbers down it becomes really easy to adjust an F to be an F6, as it's just a case of climbing up the major scale from the F until you reach the 6th and adding it on!

The CAGED system was maybe the biggest thing for me in terms of understanding across the neck, and once you've got basic CAGED chords under your belt, learning how to play your 7s, half diminished, diminished in those positions will come as well.

Sadly there is no short cut to this stuff, just time and focus. I think as guitar players a lot of us learnt to play when we were young and thankfully the process wasn't too traumatising as when you're young you can pick things up fast and don't have bills to go out and pay - but I do think we often lose that ability to learn something from scratch if we don't keep pushing ourselves on the instrument past what we learnt at 16 or whatever. It's good to break yourself down and approach jazz stuff (if you're interested of course) and build from the ground up - once you start seeing progress it's an addictive thing just like learning your first pentatonic, or learning how to alternate pick. 

If you need to learn fast for a tour, I would say get the majority of the jazz chords under your belt from the E and A string positions (as mentioned above), for example Dm7b5 or Gmaj7. (cheat mode; 7's and flat 5's are fairly easy to play and are important to get right when comping, but any other numbers can often be ignored if there's someone else in the band to illustrate those top alternative voicings). Once you've learnt the jazz chords, which hopefully will be a day or two, then you'll find it really useful to play the arpeggios of those chords in just a couple positions for each chord maybe, to help navigate across the neck and between chords. Arpeggios for me were the 'eureka' moment in jazz blues playing.

Good luck!

viz

I’ve just been asked to cover for an absent pianist and guitarist in a jazz quartet next Saturday - 39 jazz standards of which I know about 6. With just double bass, singer and me :-O

All the songs have been transposed from their original keys, there are some leadsheets but they’re peppered with mistakes, and we do subtly different versions from the originals. Still, it’s interesting.

Thankfully I’ve got a guitar lesson this evening so that gives us something to focus on

prowla

I didn't know you had to learn Jazz - I thought you just noodled about and everybody nodded their heads appreciatively.

clarkefan

viz said:

Yes - something like this. Excuse the terrible playing, it’s just meant to tell the chords, not sound nice!

https://youtu.be/cklYR21TcNE

@viz , thank you Sir for taking the time to do this, it's fantastic!  It gives me exactly what I personally need to put my toe in the water, all the theory will come later after I've felt it under my fingers

You've helped me and I appreciate it

Branshen

viz said:

I’ve just been asked to cover for an absent pianist and guitarist in a jazz quartet next Saturday - 39 jazz standards of which I know about 6. With just double bass, singer and me :-O

All the songs have been transposed from their original keys, there are some leadsheets but they’re peppered with mistakes, and we do subtly different versions from the originals. Still, it’s interesting.

Thankfully I’ve got a guitar lesson this evening so that gives us something to focus on

This is a great site for charts (no melody notes unfortunately). And the automatic transposition function is a real time saver.

http://www.jazzstudies.us/

Blueingreen

I don't regard myself as a jazz player,  but I dabble a bit.  I would recommend a couple of books:

- Mike Di Liddo: Maiden Voyage Guitar Voicings.  This covers basic comping for small group jazz.  Possibly the most useful single guitar book I've bought and one of the few I've learned almost from cover to cover.

If you're doing big band or swing stuff there's a book by Charlton Johnson that's superb.

Joe Elliot: Introduction to Jazz Guitar Soloing.  This is mainly for more traditional functional harmony stuff - major and minor 251s.  It won't help much with modal stuff.  I found it useful in answering the perennial question, how do you sound outside but inside the way jazz players do?

Matt_McG

I can second the Charlton Johnson book, which was a really useful way for me to learn some basics,* and get inversions, and Freddie Green style playing under my fingers.

* Which would imply, falsely, that I've gone much beyond those basics.