The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #1

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    There is a strong tendency for guitarists to take their vocabulary, their sound, their style from other guitarists. Far less common are those who cite horn players, particularly sax and trumpet players as primary influences.
    For you guitarists who have at some point been heavily influenced by a horn player (and I'm not talking "Oh I love Charlie Parker, I transcribed a solo because my teacher told me to), who did you focus on, what did you get out of it, what was compelling that was different from guitaristic approach, and how does this show up in your music today?
    For example, there was a period where I listened a lot to Clifford Brown, his use of fluid lines taught me a lot about economical use of notes, a trumpet player always thinks about breath. I also got an awareness of rhythmic eighth note vocabulary, space and embellishment. I'm aware of this each time I practice lines that come from finger patterns; I listen for a deeper sense of melodic intention.
    Hank Mobley showed me a melodic and harmonic vocabulary that really had a strong sense of swing. Dynamics and attack are also things Mobley made me aware of.

    I'd be curious to see how that world "beyond the guitar" has impacted guitarists in this group. I want to know from players who have evolved their own style by weaving musical influences and not really so interested in armchair commentary gleaned from the internet.
    Hey, while I'm at it, I'll include piano too, though I'm primarily interested in horn players pertaining to solo lines. I happen to love Herbie Nichols but I think that can be a whole different thread...
    Thanks
    David

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    The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
     
  3. #2
    Absolutely, one can learn more from great horn players than from guitarists. Or, better put, there are more great horn players that can teach you 'the real stuff' than there are jazz guitar players. IMHO, that is.

  4. #3

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    I am constantly impressed and influenced by Miles Davis. There are many things of his that I have tried to incorporate in my playing, from his albums where he played a million notes a minute to others where he seems to have imparted notes very sparingly and at just the right time. His style has made me work on understanding modes, structured solos, freeform improv.

    With my background in rock playing I tend to try and throw in too many notes all the time as if my life depended on it, and Miles is just the opposite much of the time - adding things that need to be said, not filling in the silences. It's hard; in rock music if you leave silences too long others assume you don't know how to play or are lost somehow! Miles makes me think about what I am playing rather than throwing in arpeggios or scales to fill up time.

  5. #4

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    I think the whole idea of imitating a horn stems from a desire to emulate the voice. The voice is the internal instrument so the music travels from the body.

    It seems to be a little more common for guitarists emulate horn players than say, piano players. This is where the whole integration of slurring comes from.

  6. #5

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    For me I've probably listened to more sax players than guitarists when it comes to jazz. Thinking about why brings me to these conclusions.


    • Firstly just like the big sound of the tenor.
    • Phrasing seemed nothing to do with unmusical guitarist things like 'playing in a position' or 'how you hold your pick' ;-) it's to do with breathing and crafting a music phrase- music first how you do it after.
    • Ballads.
    • Transcribing stuff over the years has broken down silly misconceptions, I almost never hear a straight ahead jazz guitarist using the fifth interval as a melodic device presumably if they're coming from a rock background it's because are so scared to sound like a rock player.. Whereas in the real world the solo that pretty much kick started the move from swing to modern jazz is literally full of them (you know that one right...!?)
    • Melodic embellishment, it's a natural skill for most horn players as an extension of learning and playing heads on the sax.
    • Dexter Gordon. I've listened to him SO much over the years his 'way behind the beat' playing has influenced my playing to sound quite shabby and amateurish when I do it, but it does happen in my playing quite naturally.
    • Register. I like melodies voiced quite low because of tenor players. I think the guitar sounds best on the low 3 strings.

  7. #6

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    i went through a period where i would create a playlist consisting of just solos (still do this regularly). for example, i have a playlist of just Charlie Parker solos, just Lester Young solos, just Ornette solos, etc. i'd listen to them wherever i go.

    many times i'd be waiting for a subway, and as trains rode past, the noise would overpower my (cheap) headphones. i wouldn't be able to make out the pitches of the solo, but i could still hear the rhythm of the lines, particularly all the accents

    listening to Charlie Parker and Bud Powell that way was revelatory

  8. #7
    destinytot Guest
    Transcribed and internalised several Dexter Gordon and Blue Mitchell solos. Now looking at James Moody.

  9. #8

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    These days I don't even listen to guitar player too much except for when a part of the group or I'm working on some guitaristic style or technique.

    I was the typically guitar player listening to guitar 95% of the time till I went to music school and around horns and Jazz all the time. Then I remember a guitar seminar with one of my favorite guitarists and he was asked who his favorite guitarist was and his answer was Bill Evans the pianist. Then one of the guitarists I hung with in school was transcribing horn players all the time. So I started listening more and more to horns. I stopped playing for awhile chasing another career I was in Boston and found an excellent teacher Peter Cicco and remember him talking all the time about Miles Davis and how much he listened to Miles. So everything was moving me to listening to horn more and more and trying to learn horn lines. The final impetus was studying with Sheryl Bailey and talking to her and how she said she learned so much from transcribing Hank Mobley and talking with Sheryl we talked about horn and pianists all the time. That was was when my listening and learning from horn player took over.

    I also started thinking about the difference in how horn players learn music and Jazz. Horns on learning and thinking notes fingering patterns are more for a note not scale patterns. They think chords, but again thinking chord spellings, notes again. Guitar players generally are taught via finger patterns and even learn licks as patterns and then when they decided to get serious later on start to learn notes, but that ingrained quest for patterns keeps influencing our study. Finger patterns and the slide rule effect of guitar is one of it's advantage, but I try to practice more thinking in notes. I try to limit my resources something I learned from Joe Diorio and Sheryl Bailey and practice soloing using only two adjacent strings. Lately working on melodies and lines on only one string. Even scales hard to get away from patterns, but I think in smaller patterns one octave or less. Also from a Tim Miller suggestion working on scales on one string, to use your ear to play scales correctly.

    So horn players have slowly worked their way into what I listen to, then what I trying to phrase like and copy, and now even how I practice and try to think about improv.

  10. #9

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    I prefer playing "Billie's Bounce" in the lower register to the higher one I usually see in guitar transcriptions.

  11. #10

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    I've listened to loads more horn players like Dexter Gordon, Miles Davis, Chet Baker than guitar players. I assume it's influenced my playing as a result. As far as guitarists go, my influences would probably be Wes, and Jimmy Raney.

  12. #11

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    I don't know...maybe if I was striving to create a truly original voice on the guitar as a professional musician I'd focus more on assimilating language from all the great horn players...but for me, as a non-pro with a busy life (which will only get busier I'm sure) and who didn't take up jazz until I was in my 30's, I just want to speak some reasonably fluent bebop-y jazz through the guitar. And I want to take most efficient route to get there. For me, I've found that copping vocabulary from guitarists is easier and more instructive than doing so from horns - it's more efficient. Plus there is the added benefit of giving me very guitar-specific tone to emulate. I listen to lots of horns, I just don't really try to cop their lines, at least not for the past year or so. Still I get a lot out from listening to horns...internalizing jazz and all that.

  13. #12

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    I listen and copy a lot of horn players....

    More horn transcriptions can be found on the net than guitar....Bob Keller's Jazz Page for one...

    Duane Eddy was my first influence...yes I go back that far....

    Then Chet Atkins....The Ventures...George Barnes...Barney Kessell..and the like...

    Time on the instrument...

  14. #13

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    I like the style of playing that Bob Brookmeyer, Art Farmer, Chet Baker, Tom Harrell, and Kenny Wheeler employ. Smooth and melodic.

  15. #14

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    Quote Originally Posted by docbop
    I was the typically guitar player listening to guitar 95% of the time till I went to music school and around horns and Jazz all the time. Then I remember a guitar seminar with one of my favorite guitarists and he was asked who his favorite guitarist was and his answer was Bill Evans the pianist.
    This exact same thing happened to me. In my case, it was my first guitar teacher telling me that he rarely listened to other guitar players, and said the exact same about Bill Evans.

    I burned out on "guitar music" while in music school. The only stuff I listen to now, with great guitar players, is the Benny Goodman stuff with Christian, or Oscar Peterson with Ellis/Kessel/Pass; stuff where the guitar player is not the leader.

    Horns and keys are my biggest source of inspiration. Paul Desmond, early Miles Davis, Lester Young, early John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderly, and recently Ambrose Akinmusire. I read a quote somewhere that talked about if Bird played 10 notes, Miles might play 3, but those 3 would be the right notes at the right time. I think about that all the time when I play.

    For me, it was an evolution thing, at some point over the course of my playing and learning, I decided that I wanted to be more musician and less guitarist.

  16. #15

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    I'm MUCH more influenced by horn players than guitar players. Too tired to write much else. The lines and phrasing just sounds so much more legit to my ears. Bird, Gordon, Lateef, Cannonball, Freddie, Brownie, Trane, Brecker, Liebman, Rollins, and pianists Chick, Herbie, Oscar, Phineas, Bud, Jarrett, Walton, Red all were very influential and just sounded legit. Most or too many guitarist don't sound the same in terms of lines and phrasing. Some modern guitarists have some great stuff going on, almost bypassing the bop phraseology. But it's not the same.

  17. #16

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    95% of the jazz I listen to is horns / piano dominated. Most transcriptions I've done, and memorized and studied are sax or trumpet solos, yet I don't sound like a horn player. I don't think I sound like any guitar players either, but I do sound like a guitar player, if you know what I mean...

    I figured out a while back that it was hard to really "own" my fave Cannonball, Dexter, Rollins, Mclean lines etc, because try as I may (and believe me I tried every knowable way to play them!), they didn't sound or feel like they were mine, y'know? But what I did find is that all that trying somehow informed my own original lines.

    Now I just wanna create lines on the guitar that horn players would wanna make their own, but can't!

  18. #17

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    So many avenues into musicality. Yes. The breath is a really compelling element in music, and there can be a danger that with all the effects and processing toys there are out there to fall in love with, the sound of breath is not a high priority.
    A while ago I was reminiscing with Bill (Frisell) and remembering a time when he told me the volume pedal would be the last effect to go, but then he wasn't using it at all. He said the compression he needed to maintain a signal was cancelling out the feeling of breath and natural decay. So from then on, there was a natural envelope in his sound. It was a turning point and an evolution of his relationship with breath and acoustics.

    It was the music of Michael Brecker that really hit me. Every note had a rich dynamic flow to it and I thought "Why doesn't somebody make a breath controller for volume that I could use?" and the awareness of breath, dynamics, space and short phrases got me listening to horn players almost exclusively. The guitarists I did listen to, Monder, Goodrick, Kurt, Bill, Tronzo, were ones I thought really transcended the limitations of the instrument in very deliberate and organic ways. But Brecker's sound. Yeah. That's the elusive sound I'd love to find the guitar equivalent to.

    David

  19. #18

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    Quote Originally Posted by princeplanet
    Now I just wanna create lines on the guitar that horn players would wanna make their own, but can't!
    Michael Brecker always talked about getting his blues licks and feel from guitarists so we are good for something!

  20. #19

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    Quote Originally Posted by Foulds Jazz Guitars
    Michael Brecker always talked about getting his blues licks and feel from guitarists so we are good for something!
    Yeah, but I didn't mean those kinda blues licks, sax players always like those.... I hardly ever hear about sax players copping jazz guitarists lines...

  21. #20

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    fascinating thread - great stuff!

    i've never learned a guitar solo - i've only been motivated to sit down and learn the solos that totally kill me, and for me that means four players: bird; bud; sonny; bill

    but i don't - truth be told - learn bill evans solos - not yet anyway - because i love them a bit too much and just can't imagine getting his vibe coming out of my guitar.

    a key for me has been whether or not i feel that the cells out of which the solo is built stand on their own out of context - and that is usually about their rhythmical properties. say the flat five phrase at the heart of sonny's blue seven (which is a seven note phrase). when i hear something like that i just want to have it for myself. i've never tried to play someone's solo from beginning to end (perhaps i should). i just move through the bits i dig most playing isolated phrases again and again and again. i don't think about the fact that i'm playing them on guitar - i just get excited about acquiring ideas that feel hip and in the pocket.

    my main thing - by far - is charlie parker blues tunes and solos. when i went through them i buggered my back because i was bending over the record player for so long picking up and putting down the needle. and singing the phrases has always been as important to me as learning to play them (i do that first always).

    i think i love the guitar primarily because its like a quiet piano that you can have in your lap. and there's a dry-silver to the sound that i quite like too. but i defer musically to horn players - and it costs me no distress whatever.

  22. #21

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    Look back at post on this thread and something hit me and part of listening and learning from horn is important. By not being a guitar you can't fall back on familiar patterns and guitar phrasing. Without all the subscounsius things we do then you have to think out of the box, try different fingerings, use melodic ideas that your fingers might not normally gravitate to. So beside learning new lines and improv you have to look differently at the instrument.


    Part of this came to me from re-watching a Jerry Bergonzi improv DVD and having the student sax player use odd number note grouping. They talked how it forced them out of tje "auto-fingering of phrases".

    Just a thought.

  23. #22

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    I think you can tell if a guitarist is using mainly lines ripped from horn lines. They sound messy, forced, or "shoehorned" to fit the fingerboard. Not saying it has to sound this way, but it can, easily... To put it another way, how silly would it be for a horn player to try to fit all the "guitaristic" shapes and licks onto the horn as his main way of playing? Every instrument has it's own innate set of exploitable features and advantages. I mean tapping on the fingerboard with all 10 fingers is fine, but really, you may as well play the damn piano!

    Going against the grain may very well be the way you're gonna stand out from the herd, just as long as you can pull it off! Me, I try to make all the horn lines I steal play nice on the guitar, which means changing them to suit the instrument. There are Parker solos that no guitar player would have ever written for guitar...

  24. #23

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    Quote Originally Posted by docbop
    Part of this came to me from re-watching a Jerry Bergonzi improv DVD and having the student sax player use odd number note grouping. They talked how it forced them out of tje "auto-fingering of phrases".
    I go see Jerry weekly, he has a weekly gig at a tiny club in this town. He's like a tornado. If your ear is up for it, you jump in and he takes you on a ride full of all sorts of things I never imagined from thinking of myself as a guitar player. Honestly, seeing him and Garzone back to back (every Monday here) I do get the impression that the thinking process is different with them. Not that guitarists can't play like that, but seeing horn players setting the bar higher and higher every time they play, it's really inspiring. And as I watch them, I get this hint as to one reason they can play so purely on ideas: The sax line comes from breath and thought. They really don't have to wrestle with the burden of shifting positions and physicality on the fingerboard the way guitarists do. They think of something really challenging and they hear it and a little wiggle of the fingers and it's out there. No positions, no weird finger stretches, no "shit what an awkward pinky stretch I've gotten myself into, no "Let me plug this lick in here while I get to an easier fingering" kind of thing.
    Guitar is physically... just weird. It's great but watching Jerry churn out those lines, it's impressive that little finger wiggles take him through 3 octaves in no time at all. At the end of the night though, it's his rhythmic approach, catch your breath and rest, that makes the most sense. I always have a notebook of "things to remember" when I listen to Jerry.
    David

  25. #24

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    I've never really stolen any licks or tried to literally play like a horn. I just have the tenor/alto in my head. I've transcribed a bunch of solos but have never memorized lines and tried to use them. For what I'm doing that's the wrong way. I just wanted to understand what I was hearing and to hear it better. I never wanted to play like a horn player per se. I think I kind of do. Kinda. The lines are horn-piano like. But I never TRIED to make them so.

  26. #25

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    Quote Originally Posted by princeplanet
    Right, just sayin' some lines can sound decidedly out of place in a Jazz context. In any case, I don't think anyone is saying Jazz guitarists have nothing interesting to say (play), I just think we acknowledge that it's harder to say it on our instrument.

    Personally I think it's nothing short of heroic to attempt to say anything through Jazz guitar. Either that or we're all retarded in some way....
    So you're saying they come up with better line than us because their instrument is much easier to play. I don't think Wes thought so. When you look at him play on Youtube it seems like he's playing a piano and so does George Van Eps. And by the way, I love horn players too. Charlie Parker, Freddie Hubbard, and Joe Henderson are among my favorite.