The Jazz Guitar MP3 Page: Leigh Jackson

I started playing the guitar at 15 and first got into jazz at about 20.

The first influential jazz guitarist I ever had lessons with amazingly enough was John Scofield. I was doing a BMus at university and my instrument was classical guitar. Even though I had played rock and blues prior to this I had no experience in jazz improvisation. I decided to attend a Jamey Aebersold workshop which was running for 10 days here in Wellington , New Zealand . I went along just to see what jazz was like as I felt quite disillusioned with the classical guitar. Well, I would say this 10 days changed my life as every day we had lessons with John and another wonderful guitarist called Steve Erquiaga and I tape-recorded everything they said so that I could review it all. Among the other tutors present were, Rufus Reid, Dave Liebman, David Baker,Woody Shaw, Steve Turre, Jamey Aebersold, Jerry Coker to name but a few. So even though it was a short and intense course it fired me up and the following year most of them came back and we did it all over again.

I listen to a wide variety of music but in jazz I still love Wes, Jim Hall, Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie, Alan Holdsworth, Mike Stern, Bill Frisell, Scofield and Django.

The first guitar I ever had was a Marinucci acoustic which I begged my father for. It was hard to play and had steel strings, but of course I didn't know any better until I played on a Gibson owned by a friend's father. I was amazed and depressed that there could be such a difference in playability between instruments.

My first decent guitar was a cherry burst 1984 Gibson Les-Paul Standard which I bought new in my early 20s, and this was the guitar that I used for playing jazz for quite a few years. Other electric guitars I have owned include an Ibanez GB-10, an Ibanez GB-20, Ibanez artist, 1980 Gibson Super 400CES, 1959 Gibson Custom Les-Paul and a Maton "George Golla".

For jazz I now use a 1959 Gibson es-175 and a 1975 Gibson es-335 which have very different characteristics, and for fusion I occasionally use the Les Paul Custom and a Japanese Fender Strat equipped with a midi pickup.

For the midi instruments I use a 17- inch G4 Powerbook with Apple Logic pro soft-synths and Rax, that works very well in a live gig going through a PA. The latency is fairly low and very manageable at about 5ms, but no doubt this will improve in the new Mac book pro equipped with the intel chip.

After years of trying different amps for my jazz setup I have settled down to three Polytone amps fed from a GSP-2101 tube preamp. The two side amps are just stereo and the rear speaker has a combination of both channels fed through a roland dep-5 which has a slight delay and pitch modulation. This gives the effect of spreading the sound around and creating a "chorus in the air" without causing muddiness, a sound which is hard to get with just two amps. This idea came from hearing and reading about Pat Metheny who just seemed to be coming from everywhere in the room yet his sound was so clear and defined. For small club gigs I use a single polytone with the es-175 with no effects.

I use D'angelico 11-gauge flatwound strings on the 175 and the same on the 335.

For years I always felt unhappy about my right hand picking technique as it would feel like it would never quite do what I wanted it to do. I always had trouble crossing strings and playing arpeggios at the same speed that I could play scales. When I was a kid I was taught Gypsy rest-stroke picking (part of my ancestry is from Alsace in France) but I never really developed it. Instead I used the standard free-stroke plectrum technique that 99% of guitarists currently use. About a year ago, after seeing a Bireli Lagrene DVD, I felt that with what I knew I should give this technique another go. The standard Gypsy technique uses mainly rest-strokes with a fair bit of sweeping combined with fast repeated downstrokes for descending arpeggios. After much practice I have adapted this so that I am using mainly alternating rest-stroke picking similar to that used by Joscho Stephan (nowhere near as fast though). If you see a video of Joscho playing (check out " China boy" on Youtube) it makes most people's right hand look very weak indeed, plus there seems to be very little tension happening. The thing I have noticed is that with this technique, even thought the hand is floating and not resting on the guitar, it feels very relaxed when playing fast, even on arpeggios. Most guitarists, when they move to a faster subdivision, have to tense up to maintain accuracy and will often change their hand position entirely resulting in a lack of mobility. Many modern jazz players have bypassed this rest-stroke technique as they have been told it is no good for bop or it interferes with the rhythmic flow too much. Like many things it was purely anecdotal and not as a result of having tried it for many years discovering it is a dead end. I think Django was right on to it. You only have to see Bireli, Stochelo Rosenberg, Angelo Debarre to realize that the Gypsy right-hand technique is a far more efficient geometry than the standard approach. When it is combined with a more modern harmonic sense and a looser swinging rhythm this technique has proven to be better for straight-ahead jazz even though it is relatively new to me. This discovery has set me on a path of trying to find other things that I may have wrongly made up my mind about without exploring them for myself.

I do practice technique regularly but I spend more time copying short phrases and learning tunes from Cds, plus I do a lot of comparing reharmonisations of standards.

I don't transcribe whole solos anymore as I did a lot of that and I'm not sure how much it really helped me personally. I would rather take a 2-5-1 line from a Wes record for example, and try to play it in every key and analyse it so I can try some variations of my own. I always feel like a bit of a phoney when I trot out a line that I have learned, and somehow I get the feeling everyone in the room knows it's happening. I try to learn new tunes as often as I can and I compose regularly to reflect musical techniques that I am currently thinking about.

For 18 years I was head of the jazz guitar department at the Conservatorium of Music at Massey University in Wellington New Zealand , so over that period of time I had literally hundreds of great students. It was a job that I enjoyed greatly, but toward the end I felt it was sapping my energy and left me with little time to develop my own skills. Also there seemed to be more and more pressure on me to present papers and speak at conferences which frankly didn't suit me and didn't seem to help my students much either. I feel that jazz and academia are a very uncomfortable mix and what is presented as research has little to do with the essence of the music. One good thing to come out of this was a thesis that I wrote called "The Elements of Jazz" which earned me a Master of Music degree with distinction. As soon as I had finished that I left the job. I do still teach a bit for the university (now called The New Zealand School of Music or N.Z.S.M) but my role is very minor and I have no intention of getting involved in anything academic, life is too short.

I have several private students that come to my house for lessons but by far the most interesting development for me has been teaching over the internet. I have one of the new intel/mac machines that are very fast and enable you to video conference with iChat/AIM right out of the box, even with an average speed connection. I tried this a few years ago but it was a disaster as it proved to be impossible due to freezing and serious time delays. Somehow Apple have solved these issues, enabling full screen broadcast quality video and sound without the use of headphones or an external microphone. I have a couple of students in Sweden and Canada that use a similar setup, making the technology virtually transparent, so when we get together it is just like having them in the same room. You can also pass files back and forth by dragging them into the chat window or you can take a snapshot of the screen. I believe this recent advance with an existing technology, being so affordable and easy to use, has far reaching implications for the way we will learn and communicate in the future. Having said this I still enjoy making my students a cup of tea and doing it the old fashioned way.

Of course "Stella by Starlight" is one song that has always haunted me as I always seem to come up with something new when I play it. Dolphin Dance, Windows, In Your Own Sweet Way , Green Dolphin Street are other standards that I can always find something new on.

Living as a jazz musician in New Zealand it is tough to survive, as only 4 million people live here and jazz is not big, so you have to be more versatile to survive. Where I was born, in London, there is much more work so it is possible to survive without spreading your talents too thinly but there is something to be said for having to do lots of different styles. I suppose the Sibelius G7 software, on which I did the playing on the guitar guide, was as a result of being reasonably diverse. It is so important to have an area of your playing that you truly love, even though it may not be commercially viable, as it gives meaning to everything else you do. Of course you also have to be aware of the difference between this and the commercial side of music and other things you may have to do to survive. If you are lucky enough to be in a position where they are the same thing then consider yourself blessed.

I personally know several people who have been very successful at something they don't particularly like doing and they feel trapped by it. I know a very talented jazz musician who had huge success with a pop type album so when he tries to do a jazz gig now his audience just says huh what is this? and his record company actively discourage it. If you stick to what turned you on to music in the first place you have much more of a chance of being successful. Even if it doesn't lead to millions of dollars you can be wealthy in other ways.

I just recorded a straight ahead live album with a band that I play with in Wellington which is called Pleasure Point, which will be released in July 2007 on a great New Zealand jazz label called Rata records. I recently bought a Macafferi (not a real one) and have plans to do an acoustic album later in the year. I am currently writing a follow up to the fusion album "Parallax" which came out on Lydian Records, which will be completed next year. I am back playing a lot of straight ahead jazz live which feels good to do after taking a bit of a break.

Just recently a famous New Zealand scientist died, named McDiarmid. He invented the LCD screen among other things. When asked in an interview why he thought he had done so well in life he replied that he had been very lucky, and followed it up by saying the harder he works the luckier he seems to get, which I think is a brilliant thing to say. It is a common mistake to sit around waiting to be discovered as the next Wes or Django. Those guys were great because they had the confidence and conviction to be playing live so they were learning all the time and weren't plagued with modern notions of success. They just loved what they did. So many of us are saving ourselves for that day when we think we have got it all together, and then we will say right I am ready to take on the world. It's better to start now without a well-formed plan than waiting till you are "fully cooked". The reason I say this is that unless you get out there and have a few things go wrong on the gig then you tend to spend too much time guessing about what you need to work on.

The main difference between the professional and amateur player is that the professional has made way more mistakes and is very familiar with the type of things that can go wrong and has strategies to fix them. How frightened you feel about doing something is usually in proportion to the amount of pleasure you get after you have done it. How many of us have felt stage fright so intense that it feels like you can't even walk on stage, but by the time you have weathered it through and finished playing you just want to do it again.

My advice is simple: play live, record it, check it out, get advice, fix what needs to be fixed, start again and enjoy the journey rather than the destination, and above all be positive because what to you seems boring and ordinary in your own playing can be magic to someone else.