Jazz Guitar Licks

[Rick5]

I learned a great deal from Mark Elfs site. His method is all about vocabulary and it will turn you into a pure bebop player. Highly recommended.

I'm a member. It's a great site. The comping and chord melody lessons are awesome too. I wish there were a lot more members over there. It's really a gold mine.

[jasonc]

Another thing you could do is to transcribe/compose/use prewritten two bar dominant licks that all begin from a chord tone. You'll start with eight licks total so it's very managable. For every chord tone have a lick that ascends and descends. For example if you're going to start with G7 come up with a two bar phrase that ascends from the root then come up with another phrase that descends from the root, then do it for the third, fifth and seventh. That way you have something to play in either direction for any chord tone that you may happen to land on. Then you can start one phrase and it with another etc... You can get a lot of milage with just eight licks and build from there.

[nosoyninja]

"Where do I start with all these licks?"

I recommend the book "Bebop licks for guitar" by Les Wise. It contains pure bebop vocab. The phrases are short and quick to learn, and there are many different chord changes covered in the book. If you have a problem are in a tune, the book is a great reference to grab a phrase for that area so that you have something to play. In the long run, the more licks you gather for the problem areas, the more fluidity you will develop and soon you'll be improvising all through the tune. But it starts with baby steps. I also recommend Pat Martinos book "Linear Expressions". It contains lots of vocabulary.
There are tons of lick videos on YouTube too. And those are all free!

"The Bebop Bible" also by Les Wise, is also full of tasty idiomatic bebop vocabulary. Catalogued by Major, Minor, dominant, ii-V-I, etc, AND also by starting chord tone, so it's pretty easy to put them together into coherent musical solos. If you are in a hurry and don't want/need to do some of the heavy lifting, this book will get you there quickly.

I take one on one lessons with Les through skype and he swears by his method of teaching improvisation through vocabulary. "thousands and thousands of students..." he says, "and it works, guaranteed".

I have to say, though, that it's OK to learn a few phrases from these types of "dictionary" books to have some "clay", or some material to work with... To start out. But you also need to work on LISTENING to tunes and solos, then learning them until you can sing them, then transcribing them from memory to acquire vocabulary. Also building your own vocabulary by mixing up pieces from different places or combining arpeggios, scales and chromatic approaches, etc...

Learning vocabulary, as we discussed in an earlier thread on this topic, is a form of ear training, in essence, teaching you to play what you hear... But I agree with Amund, it's not everything... Just a very important step in the beginning.

K

[JazzGuitar]

What do you guys think of Jamey Aebersold's book "Jazz Lines of the Greats"?

[MarkRhodes]

What do you guys think of Jamey Aebersold's book "Jazz Lines of the Greats"?

I'm unfamiliar with it. I have several of Jamey Aebersold's play-along recordings and enjoy working with them (-though I am not wild about his chord-scale theory emphasis) but I'm unfamiliar with this material.

[MarkRhodes]

Learning vocabulary, as we discussed in an earlier thread on this topic, is a form of ear training, in essence, teaching you to play what you hear... But I agree with Amund, it's not everything... Just a very important step in the beginning.

K

More than that, it's a form of FINGER training. One reason for focusing on vocabulary is that it develops one's sense of nuance, touch, feel, the 'little things' that make a line catch fire. I think Conti is right to emphasize the amount of PLAYING it takes to get good. You have to do it over and over, and as you do, you notice little things---nuances---and develop your feel for them. A great player can play a given line several different ways, with different feels. Learning all that helps one develop one's own lines, as you have refined your hearing and feel.