Earliest Jazz Guitar Method Books?

[mr. beaumont]

575588? Doubled 7th and 3rd?!

If I wanted to keep the bottom and top notes I'd play it 5x7788. They probably took you to see a doctor if you stacked fourths, back then.

Lol.

Truthfully, I don't ever use 5 and 6 note chords, really. Not even when playing solo.

But I sure am enjoying looking at these old books. Can always get ideas from somewhere...

[BigDaddyLoveHandles]

Lol.

Truthfully, I don't ever use 5 and 6 note chords, really. Not even when playing solo.

But I sure am enjoying looking at these old books. Can always get ideas from somewhere...

I guess back in the day, acoustic players needed all the strings they could muster in group situations.

Nowadays, I do like the occasional big chord: in chord melodies, it's something to arpeggiate or start of end on.

In comping, you can grab subsets of the notes. Lazy guy's chord changes. With 5x7788 I could play 5x778x then x7x788. Woops, cheated!

[Rob MacKillop]

Thanks, Monk. I didn't think it was the same guy, but musicians do strange things when in need of money!

[zephyrregent]

Here's another, the Mel Bey Jazz Guitar Method Volume I & II by Ronny Lee from 1962.

[MarkRhodes]

Here's another, the Mel Bey Jazz Guitar Method Volume I & II by Ronny Lee from 1962.

I think that's the book Fareed Haque learned chords from. (He's learned more modern voicings since then, but he definitely mentions working in that book during his "Comping Survival Guide" TrueFire lesson.)

[christianm77]

Here's another, the Mel Bey Jazz Guitar Method Volume I & II by Ronny Lee from 1962.

Get a load of that cover design

[CrackerJackLee]

I realise this is an old thread, but one that has my interest. I'm just a struggling guitarist, but as a young pup in Montreal, I got to hear a lot of live music, hiding outside the back of cabarets and clubs that always had a back door open (as there was no air-conditioning back then) while keeping an eye on the doormen. (The Saint Michel Club, Rockhead's Paradise, Aldo's, The All American, The Cat's Paw, The Black Bottom... It was like New Orleans back in the early 60's.) Not only an education on how a floor-show or fan-dance should work, but I got to see how MC's and musicians worked the stage (and how New York girls talked like TV stars...). Musicians in the neighbourhood were to me, as a child, what sports personalities are to kids today. There were more music cases to be seen than brief cases.

Johnny Rector's book says it all. It's the whole ball of wax. That's the sound I heard. Not just the chunk-chunk of three part chords of a full orchestra, but also full lush Broadway Elevenths and mysterious Minor-Sixths. Especially those chords with the 5th in the bass like C7/5 and CM6/5. But you have to read his short intros to each section carefully and understand what he means. They all look alike but they're not. He treats a fill (fill-in) differently from a riff, a run, a lick, a line, a cliche, a vamp, a quote, a lead-in, an intro, a finale, a verse, a bridge, or a turnaround. These are all treated differently and he's assigned different chords to them because they each mean something to somebody, the audience, the dancers, the other musicians...

In a turnaround, the harmonic tempo is fast, while that of a verse in a ballad is quite slow. There's a time for the lush chord and a time for the three part shell with only root and guide tones [3, 3b, 7, 7b]. Roger Edison has a great rhythm book with only 60 chords, but he explains why it all works in a programmed method.

These fancy JR chords on the page shown are for fills, intros and finales only. I would play parts of them or arpeggiate. At least getting the line. Back in the day, people expected to hear a short introduction of pretty chords on the guitar before starting the verse, to get your date in a dancing mood. This was the only chance you would get to talk, flirt or get close to a girl. The pre-Twist days... Some bass string tones mixed with top string notes, because you were playing the intro as a solo before the band jumped in. (It never sounds good for a big band to jump in flat-footed... Or a vocalist to start cold. As the guitar-man, boy, you had to impress that budding Dinah Shore or Sarah Vaughan for her to sing...) Try these grips as rhythm chords and you'll break your fingers...

These chords serve great as fills because they have a lot of colour if you ain't in a rush. The last bar of every four bars in a blues, or eight bars in a standard has room for a fill-in because the vocals don't usually exist there. It's a breathing space or pause. So the pianist or guitarist would inject a fill-in to cover the pause.

And of course you had to have a grande finale with a big ol' Hollywood chord..., a ten dollar chord that said, "Good-night, the dance is over..." and was meant to make your date feel romantic. A Major Sixth Add Ninth, sometimes with a flatted fifth. Run it up the neck by minor thirds and back down again as a glissando ending out in space somewhere... Or Mickey Baker's famous "Good-Night" change: 13-5-9 [5b9bx313] followed by his long Major Seventh chord [15x373].

Turnaround chords are smaller and closer together with a descending line running through them to recap the verse in two bars and inform the listener "Well, drink up cuz here we go again...!" Women used to sing and dance in those days. And if you wanted to be a beau, you'd better croak a tune and cut a rug... cuz you wouldn't want to be labelled by the gals as a square! A hard date! And word would get around...

The minor Cliché lives on in Michelle, Time in a Bottle, Summer Rain, My Funny Valentine, This Masquerade...

Chunking rhythm chords are three part shell chords that can be switched quickly and smartly like:
1M7-1M6 [x1x73x]-[x1x63x] and 2m7-57 [x1x7b3bx]-[x5x37bx]... NY-NY! Play it backwards for T42!
These small shell chords also leave free fingers for chord-melody.

I've been studying the Rector book for years and always get something out of it, but I also highly recommend Roger Edison's Alfred Way Jazz Guitar - Rhythm for any jazz or pop guitarist.

If you're playing JR's first intro/finale, realise that you're in the key of F and playing a line on the top string. It's a C note pedal for the first 3 chords, then Gb / E and back to C.

The Am7 is tough, I would drop the root, thus no index barre to obtain a Top 5 chord Am7/5 (second inversion). This is a common chord. As long as you make the top line, you're good.

Roots and fifths are expendable for guitarists. It's not a piano and it's not a string bass. Those notes belong to the bassist, anyway. If you're banging on the E and A string, you're playing country as Merle Travis and Chet Atkins did. And in jazz, you're in the bassist's way. I play string bass also, and guitarists that bang on those barre chords drive me nuts. It's not a campfire singalong. It's an orchestra or trio. Pick a part and stay in your lane. Those low frequencies block out the soft spoken double bass and ruin the swing feel.

If you're playing this alone as an intro with all of JR's notes, on-stage in front of an audience, then you'd better have JR's talent and experience to do it right. I think he's only indicating the best that should be attempted to give us an idea of what it should sound like in a perfect world and what we should aspire to play someday.

As for the other 3 chords...

FM69: Finger it as shown, but angle the index barre 45 degrees to the frets till it points at you. First, place the ring and pinky, then angle the small index barre and lastly drop the badfinger.

Gb13-5: To get into this grip, first practice with a Gb9, then a Gb13, then try the Gb13-5.

Gb+7-9: This chord is really Gb9-5! Play a Gb9 then switch digits one and two to get the Gb9-5.

AbM7: Realise that the ring finger is allowed to touch and mute the D string as long as the G string rings free. And the index, middle and ring fingers must stop up against the frets, as close as possible. A little practice in descending this grip from the 10th fret and working down the neck carefully without getting carpal tunnel will eventually stretch the pinky from the ring over a short time. They're joined at the hip, those two.

What a gift Johnny Rector left for us vintage guitarists. He was quoted to have said that it was a mistake when he sold this book to Mel Bay. A lesson to us all.

[60s Pop Man]

I think that's the book Fareed Haque learned chords from. (He's learned more modern voicings since then, but he definitely mentions working in that book during his "Comping Survival Guide" TrueFire lesson.)

It was a real treat to see the Ronnie Lee book cover posted here. As a kid I worked through both of the Ronnie Lee books back in mid-60s. They're still on my guitar books shelf along with the Mickey Baker books 1 and 2.