All Blues Soloing For Jazz Guitar : Scales, Lic...

For all the licks in this lesson, I will be basing the phrases mostly around pentatonic shapes, which will be immediately comfortable for anyone well versed in blues playing. I will be using the Harmonic Minor scale to add some outside notes and provide a jazz flavour to blues licks.

All blues soloing for jazz guitar : scales, lic...

This lick is another triplet feel lick with two notes per triplet for the first two beats, again sticking with a quarter note and eighth note before heading into a three note triplet run and a final two note triplet feel phrase to end. If you substitute the 4th fret of the G for the 7th, the lick would assume a very familiar feel as it would be typical of a blues lick you might play while improvising. Adding the outside notes from the Harmonic Minor and applying the triplet feel swing will make this blues lick assume a jazz sounding feel.

Descending triplets are a great way to add some jazz style speed to your blues licks. This lick uses the Harmonic Minor with some Pentatonic notes in to add to the familiar feel. The note groupings in this run cross between strings, each triplet contains one note on a string followed by two notes on the following string. This continues all the way down the scale until the final slide from the 6th fret to the 7th fret on the D, culminating in the final note being sustained for a whole beat.

In jazz style guitar, even ascending scale runs often incorporate the notes on that string, which may be typically played sequentially, to be re-ordered to change the flow of the pitch. This phrase built up of ascending triplets incorporates that idea on the third beat. The three notes on the G are re-ordered which gives the final jump from the 4th fret of the G to the 5th fret of the B a different intervallic gap. Large interval gaps are used a lot in jazz phrasing.

All the licks in this lesson are in the key of A Minor. They will work perfectly over an A Minor I IV V blues progression or any A Minor jazz progression. The licks are transposable so if you want to play them in other keys just move the position of the scale shapes to suit the key that you want to play in.

Over the course of his career, B.B. King crafted some of the best blues guitar solos of all time. A huge part of this came down to his soft touch, signature vibrato technique and his beautiful blues tone.

The documentation on the history of the blues is quite limited due to its age, but the earliest blues songs existed in the late 1800s, and it seems to have grown out from earlier African American musical styles, such as field hollers and work songs, as well as microtonal and rhythmic characteristics of West African music. In this sense, although jazz musicians very frequently play the blues, the blues as a tradition has distinct origins from jazz. Jazz developed first in New Orleans through a mix of African, Caribbean, and European influences. The result of this distinction is that many of the truisms of jazz or tonal music do not hold true in the blues. Among the biggest harmonic differences are:

Ulmer always has been a powerhouse guitarist, mashing together electric Delta blues with harmonically sophisticated Ornette Coleman-influenced solos that wildly splinter off into unexpected places. But he rarely finds himself in the company of like-minded musicians who can not only keep up with him but complement (and improve upon) his unique vision.

IN 1890 THE CENSUS BUREAU declared that all the territorial land of the continental United States was settled and there was no longer a frontier. Three years later historian Frederick Jackson Turner issued his "frontier thesis," in which he argued that the frontier had defined America's character and, although the Western frontier was closed, Americans would find new frontiers in business and civic life. Turner's thesis was influenced by what he witnessed around him, especially the expansion, maturation, and innovation of US agriculture, business, and cultural institutions. Indeed, these years witnessed the maturation of the steel, farming, and oil industries, as well as the banks that aided them. Steel was used to build suspension bridges such as the Brooklyn Bridge, steel-framed skyscrapers, and the farm equipment that transformed the plains into the farmland that fed the nation. With the growth of American industry came the growth of American cities, especially cities in the North and Midwest. Migrants and immigrants moved to cities in large numbers in search of employment in factories, an increasing number of which were powered by electricity. Migration to northern cities accelerated greatly after Reconstruction ended in 1878, largely due to the imposition of "Jim Crow" laws that segregated the South along racial lines and restricted African Americans' public and civic participation. The "Great Migration" of Blacks from the South to the North that began at this time stretched well into the mid-twentieth century. Big business also came to music during this era, just as it had come to manufacturing and farming. Whereas the music of Tin Pan Alley avoided controversial topics in order to entertain and please the widest spectrum of potential consumers, the musics outside of the dominant industry were often not intended to entertain. Of course, as with most attempts to homogenize American culture, Tin Pan Alley tunes, popular though they were, did not provide an outlet for expressing all the ideas and feelings of an increasingly diverse population. Although Tin Pan Alley dominated the nation's popular music industry, other significant musics appeared in working-class and minority communities across the nation. Whereas the music of Tin Pan Alley avoided controversial topics in order to entertain and please the widest spectrum of potential consumers, the musics outside of the dominant industry were not always so easily segregated into the "entertainment" category. These songs often reflected real-life triumphs and tragedies and were composed and sung by people who sang as they worked, played, celebrated, grieved, protested, or made political statements. The South and West, in particular, were less influenced by the musical mainstream and became the cradle of several musical traditions that would eventually gain popular notice in the twentieth century, including blues, jazz, and country and western.

Many field hollers are preserved in recordings made in the mid-twentieth century when ethnologists took steps to preserve the tradition before it died. In the late 1800s wandering singer-guitarists in the Deep South began to perform in segregated bars, train stations, on street corners, or for community events, dances, and picnics, where they played proto-blues songs such as "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor." Unfortunately little is known about these early musicians. In 1907 ethnologist Howard Odum recorded some of them, but his recordings are lost. His work, however, establishes a strong link between these songs and the commercial blues of the 1920s. In 1925 he noted that many of the lyrics that he had recorded and transcribed nearly two decades earlier were appearing in contemporary popular blues songs. The commercial blues emerged as artists such as composer W. C. Handy and singer Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, both of whom began their careers in minstrelsy, merged black folk traditions with theatrical traditions and formalized the conventions of the blues (see Unit 6). Many white communities were isolated from the popular music of Tin Pan Alley. Sometimes, as in the case of embittered southerners in the years after the Civil War, this was a deliberate choice. In other cases isolation resulted from geography, as communities in Appalachia and in rural areas of the North and South simply did not have access to current popular music. Instead, in these areas people continued to play and sing in the folk style descended from traditional music of the British Isles. Some songs like "Barbara Allen" and "Hangman, Slack Your Rope" were direct descendants of that tradition. "John Henry" (a song shared between white and Black traditions) and "Wreck of the Old 97" are examples of new songs based on real events written in the old ballad style of four-line verses. In addition to the old ballads, many rural Americans enjoyed instrumental tunes on fiddle or banjo. Fiddle tunes descended from the British isles, but the banjo was an instrument brought to America by enslaved Africans. By the turn of the century the guitar was the favored accompaniment and harmony was the favorite vocal style. All three instruments might be combined into string bands to perform instrumental dance tunes such as "Arkansas Traveler," "Old Joe Clark," and "Cotton-Eyed Joe." Rural music of these traditions was destined to be called "hillbilly music" when it first hit records and radio in the 1920s. From that popular beginning, it would evolve into the "country and western" style that developed in parallel to northern popular music (for more on hillbilly music and country and western, see Units 6 and 7). 041b061a72