Mastering Jazz Blues gives you all the tools you need

[princeplanet]

... what, with the IV7 , maj 2-5's, min 2-5's, all kinds of turnarounds and cycling , maj and or min Blues "planeing" as well as all the alt options for the Dom chords... it's all there.

Or is it?....

[TOMMO]

Probably. At least if you learn to get through "Parker" Blues changes in a couple of keys you have box full of useful "tools"....

[Drumbler]

If good for nothing else you will be good at playing over jazz blues.

[vintagelove]

Not, “all of”, but a LOT.


I personally use it as testing ground for most new advanced vocabulary.


Lastly, I’m not sure how you can really play (some) jazz without being able to kick butt on a blues.

[christianm77]

True, for standards/straightahead.

Have to master all the variations though.

[Bob Sushko]

When I was younger all I did was focus on playing through the changes and applying outside stuff for tension, listening back I always felt something was missing. Wasn't until I started getting into traditional blues did I realize it was that element. For years I played in blues bands and so forth, now my inspiration is towards the Hard Bop Soul stuff and I'm glad I spent a lot of time developing my traditional blues playing.

[Jazzstdnt]

Not, “all of”, but a LOT.


I personally use it as testing ground for most new advanced vocabulary.


Lastly, I’m not sure how you can really play (some) jazz without being able to kick butt on a blues.

Well said. I would echo this.

From a harmonic perspective blues can take you pretty far as long as you're including a lot of different chords in your blues - which people do.

And I would also echo that if you can't master jazz blues improvisation then you probably won't have much success with other jazz forms. The blues feeling and phrasing is applied in other tune forms in jazz - all the time.

I would also add that I have observed many times that a good jazz blues appeals to audience's in a way that many other tunes just don't seem to. More head nodding, foot tapping, "yeah!", and louder applause at the end. (So hey, learn your blues!)

But, the 12 bar form is very simple. Longer/more complex forms, and different moods beyond the blues require lots of direct practice too.

[Reg]

yea... sure. Throw in MM and some Modal concepts... and you can play them all.

[lammie200]

yea... sure. Throw in MM and some Modal concepts... and you can play them all.

I agree. At the risk of sounding really stupid, I would say that those two concepts are what sets 8 and 12 bar blues away from jazz blues. Especially modal concepts. It's a breadth thing.

[princeplanet]

I agree. At the risk of sounding really stupid, I would say that those two concepts are what sets 8 and 12 bar blues away from jazz blues. Especially modal concepts. It's a breadth thing.

I'm not understanding this, care to elaborate?

[Tal_175]

I'm gonna be the devil's advocate and disagree here.
I think blues is a completely different animal than any other form.
If you understand and HEAR the basic musical concepts:
diatonic harmony, chord function, secondary dominants, modulation, diminished chords as secondary dominants, then you can wrap your head and ears around all the straight ahead stuff, approach improvisation and chord substitution with a strong foundation.
Blues? Not so much. Let's take Bb blues. First chord Bb7. If you approach with the standard concepts then what the hell is that. Are we in Eb major? Nope, Are in Bb mixolydian mode? nope. We are in Bb major (sort of). So what scale you play? all 12 notes. May be not b9 or b6 as much. But other 10 notes for sure.
Ok next chord, Eb7, Whaaat? Did we just do a V7 to I7 cadence to Eb. NOPE, we are still in Bb. Holly shit. What scale do I play? Anything. But make sure you get that Db in there over Eb7. And it goes on and on.
It's a misconception that blues is easy just because it's a short form. Tunes like Autumn Leaves or Blue Bossa (16 bars) are a lot easier to handle in the beginning.
Yes rockers do one scale and some arpeggios over blues which makes people think it's an easy transition but that's not jazz blues.

[lammie200]

I'm not understanding this, care to elaborate?

Tal_175 just did.

[Tal_175]

It's perhaps best to consider blues as a different tonality. Standards are the usual major/minor tonality. Then there is the modal stuff, various major and MM modes as tonal centers. Then there is the blues.
You can pull from blues when you play a standard, and you can analyze blues in terms of standard chord functions etc. But it makes things simpler and clearer to conceptualize these tonalities as distinct entities that can cross pollinate.

[princeplanet]

Sure, we all know that there are idiosyncratic things in the Jazz Blues (or even plain Blues for that matter). There are harmonic successions you scarcely find in other standard tunes, as well as idiomatic handling of the unique tension / resolution in a Blues. But if anything, this might allude to Jazz Blues requiring more careful handling than may be required for other many other Standards.

But many other tunes outside of Blues also throw up specific harmonic challenges, so I wonder if the Jazz Blues expert finds it easier to adapt what they have learned to other tunes, or the other way around, where if you were great at Standard tunes and then turned that knowledge to Jazz Blues.

Kind of a hypothetical question, obviously, but I'm just curious as I'll sometimes hear or read that "If you can play a sophisticated Jazz Blues, you can play anything"...

[christianm77]

It's perhaps best to consider blues as a different tonality. Standards are the usual major/minor tonality. Then there is the modal stuff, various major and MM modes as tonal centers. Then there is the blues.
You can pull from blues when you play a standard, and you can analyze blues in terms of standard chord functions etc. But it makes things simpler and clearer to conceptualize these tonalities as distinct entities that can cross pollinate.

Maybe - but I don’t feel in 30s/40s even 50s stuff there’s a huge distinction. There’s plenty of bluesy standards - Rhythm, Lady be Good, Honeysuckle and so on.

The is because the major 7 tonality in accompanying chords was not common. 6 or triad was more common. You do get dom7 on the blues too, but perhaps less than you might think from charts today.

It allowed a lot more openness. In fact playing b7 on a I chord as a colour? Not that common except when actually moving to IV. So b7 kind of reserved it’s function even in blues.

Bruce Forman points out the bebop/swing blues tonality is kind of 6th with a minor 3rd. The major blues scale 1 2 b3 3 5 6.... minor blues is generally reserved for chord IV or maybe V.

The head of Confirmation offers as good a look at Parker’s use of blues tonality as any of his actual blues tunes for instance.

So from the point of view of bop I don’t see the blues as a special case harmonically in any way shape or form. The fact it’s 12 bars long is the weirdest thing about it.

Later on it becomes more modal, Blue Note blues has more of a dominant I vibe. And we have the modal movement itself.

In bop, seems to me there’s a lot more weight on the IV chord being dominant than the I - the b3 of the key is much more essential to the sound of the jazz blues and features in many other bluesy tunes. There’s a lot about the history of how people played jazz back in those days that I could mention but this is too long already. Check out what Ethan Iverson says on Lester Young etc.

Anyway I think the fact that we teach the basic chord functions as seventh chords has a lot to do with this need to make a major/blues distinction. Given the major seventh chord is often a bad choice for accompaniment of the melody (if the melody is on the root) a more open seventhless tonality like 6/9 or even just a triad is a safer bet and also offers the soloist more options.

Let the soloist play the seventh as they like it, basically ....

[christianm77]

A good and very simple example might be the head Cool Blues which has a strong Ionian quality on chord I.

charlie parker cool blues - Google Search

The distinction between the first chord in a Parker Blues (Blues for Alice etc) and standard jazz blues played by Parker is basically nonexistent in my view.

So to play bop blues, you have to deal with the major seventh tonality.

Chord IV is major seventh too in this version, the phrase is simply repeated. Other versions change the third to b3 to give IV7.

The joke is the pianist is clearly accompanying with dominant chords. Clash! But these pungent chords are played as answering phrases so it’s no big deal.

I see and hear this a lot in this music.

[Tal_175]

Good points. That might explain why I hear Bob blues to be a lot less bluesy than say hard bop blues. Is it just me? Charlie Parker playing the blues is very different than Kenny Burrell to my ears. May be hard bop players had more Muddy Waters, 3 King's type of more emotive blues influences in their play.
So the distinction I was making regarding the blues tonality has more to do with that "less understated" electric blues influences than the early bebop perhaps. Do others hears bluenote blues differently than the early bop blues too?

[Tal_175]

Maybe - but I don’t feel in 30s/40s even 50s stuff there’s a huge distinction. There’s plenty of bluesy standards - Rhythm, Lady be Good, Honeysuckle and so on.

Although not a bluesy standard, Body and Soul also has it's bluesy moment in the bar 7 of the A section (Fb). I don't know if it was intended that way originally but it's hard not to hear it as a reference to blues.

[christianm77]

Good points. That might explain why I hear Bob blues to be a lot less bluesy than say hard bop blues. Is it just me? Charlie Parker playing the blues is very different than Kenny Burrell to my ears. May be hard bop players had more Muddy Waters, 3 King's type of more emotive blues influences in their play.
So the distinction I was making regarding the blues tonality has more to do with that "less understated" electric blues influences than the early bebop perhaps. Do others hears bluenote blues differently than the early bop blues too?

That’s what I was thinking.

Mind you, If you have a quick listen to that Parker track, the pianist takes a much more pointedly ‘bluesy’ take on the changes than Bird, blues scale licks, the whole thing. (Is it Erroll Garner? Not a bop player per se)

So maybe there’s more variation between players. It’s not necessarily a history thing.

I don’t know much influence Chicago blues had on Blue Note? Anyone know?

[christianm77]

Although not a bluesy standard, Body and Soul also has it's bluesy moment in the bar 7 of the A section (Fb). I don't know if it was intended that way originally but it's hard not to hear it as a reference to blues.

Oh yeah the old jazz rep is full of that stuff.

The b13/#5 on the dominant (also being the b3) of the key is a defining stylistic feature of that era of music. If you want to sound pre war, making the dom7s into augmented triads and 7#5 chords is a good tack, where the melody allows of course.

Even tunes that really aren’t bluesy such as Stardust can lend themselves to a blues treatment - check out Charlie Christian.

And of course in performance tunes often had their thirds flatted or had shout choruses written that heavily referenced those sounds - Honeysuckle Rose is a case in point.

[John A.]

In the abstract, sure, the many variants of "jazz blues" in toto capture much of the harmonic ground found in the rest of the canon of standards. But I think the premise of the thread is kind of backwards - I think it's more a matter of learning standards teaches you how to play Parker blues changes than its is learning the blues variants teaches you standards. Or, people's experience is a bit of both.

I think the greater value of really drilling into playing blues is the other stuff blues gives you - phrasing, a well marked sense of beginning-middle-end of every chorus + vocabulary for getting to the next one, motivic development, transposition, dissonance/blue notes/altered dominant vocabulary, articulations on the instrument. That stuff is built into playing the blues in a way that it's not in most other song forms.

John

[Bob Sushko]

Good points. That might explain why I hear Bob blues to be a lot less bluesy than say hard bop blues. Is it just me? Charlie Parker playing the blues is very different than Kenny Burrell to my ears. May be hard bop players had more Muddy Waters, 3 King's type of more emotive blues influences in their play.
So the distinction I was making regarding the blues tonality has more to do with that "less understated" electric blues influences than the early bebop perhaps. Do others hears bluenote blues differently than the early bop blues too?

How would you define 'Bop Blues' 'Hard Bop Blues' & 'Bluenote Blues'?

[ragman1]

I've been mulling over this one too. I'm really not sure.

The fact is that any practice of playing over changes is experience. Perhaps because jazz blues contains a lot of essential ingredients is only of value because of the shorter number of bars! Also, of course, the IV chord appears in bar 5 whereas in most standards it doesn't.

I have a feeling that, because jazz is difficult, we're always looking for short-cuts and quick routes. I'm not sure that this idea isn't secretly one of those. The blues sound is obviously fundamental to a blues but often injected into standards and other forms for colour. But I'd say that the blues has its own particular flavour. If one literally played a standard as a blues it wouldn't really work.

It's probably worth debating though :-)

[Tal_175]

How would you define 'Bop Blues' 'Hard Bop Blues' & 'Bluenote Blues'?

I don't think there are official sub-categories of jazz blues like bob blues, blue note blues etc. I also don't think there is a need for one. These are just colloquial terms to refer to blues played during different eras. Whether there actually is a meaningful difference in the way blues played in those era's is I guess one of the sub discussions of the thread.
The standard historical perspective is, bebop and swing eras are more European music influenced, hard bop is more African American music influenced (blues, gospel etc). Of course bebop and swing are also African American music. But hard bop emphasized the African American folk music traditions more heavily.
Playing a tune hard bop style has implications as to how the band plays overall, not just the note choices of the soloist. So I don't know if it makes sense to say something like "jazz blues improvisation in the hard bop style". Does it?

[Toddep]

False


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro