The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #151

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    Quote Originally Posted by lawson-stone
    My very sloppy, but fun attack on this song.

    Observations, insights, advice, all welcome.

    Very nice, lawson. While some passages sound a bit hurried, others are laid back and relaxed. That chord solo is very promising.

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  3. #152

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    Quote Originally Posted by lawson-stone
    My very sloppy, but fun attack on this song.

    Observations, insights, advice, all welcome.
    Pretty good chord soloing there, I thought! Got a Wes flavour at times.

    I know how hard it is to do those, I tend to be wary of trying them on a video because they make me nervous, I always fear a train-wreck!

  4. #153

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    Quote Originally Posted by grahambop
    Pretty good chord soloing there, I thought! Got a Wes flavour at times.

    I know how hard it is to do those, I tend to be wary of trying them on a video because they make me nervous, I always fear a train-wreck!
    I know what you mean, but unlike most, who started with line playing, I started jazz from an addiction to its wonderful chords. I was playing pretty complex chord solos long before I could play a decent line, and I actually feel freer improvising chordally than playing lines.

    The only thing about my line playing in this clip that I was really excited about was learning I could play a Gm Pentatonic over a C7 in the blues sections, like in the first 4 measures of the solo. It seemed to sound more like Wes to do that.

  5. #154

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    Quote Originally Posted by lawson-stone
    What backing track are you using?
    I believe i used this one

  6. #155

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    Lawson, got to listen.

    Lots of good stuff there. Good lines, the chord soloing was quite good and really fun...the only recommendation I could make is to actively work on your time...which I get, is REALLY tough with a track...

    I'm really not sure what the best way to work on time feel is, when in isolation, so to speak. Seriously, maybe drumgenius, and playing one note, or a head you can play in your sleep, and focusing first on totally locking in to the beat, then on laying back a little, and recording the results.

  7. #156

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    Quote Originally Posted by lawson-stone
    I know what you mean, but unlike most, who started with line playing, I started jazz from an addiction to its wonderful chords. I was playing pretty complex chord solos long before I could play a decent line, and I actually feel freer improvising chordally than playing lines.

    The only thing about my line playing in this clip that I was really excited about was learning I could play a Gm Pentatonic over a C7 in the blues sections, like in the first 4 measures of the solo. It seemed to sound more like Wes to do that.
    yes I tend to play Gm and Cm over the I and IV on this tune. Probably because when I learned this tune about 100 years ago directly from the Wes recording, I actually thought those were the chords they were using! As you say, it sounds rather like how Wes handled it. Like Pat Martino’s ‘minorisation’ of everything.

  8. #157

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    Quote Originally Posted by grahambop
    yes I tend to play Gm and Cm over the I and IV on this tune. Probably because when I learned this tune about 100 years ago directly from the Wes recording, I actually thought those were the chords they were using! As you say, it sounds rather like how Wes handled it. Like Pat Martino’s ‘minorisation’ of everything.
    Yeah, it's funny, and maybe it's just from having listened to Wes' version a few thousand times, but I had a hard time with a lot of the tracks that seemed to play it much more like a blues in C, where my ears want to hear it more like a minor blues in G.

  9. #158

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    Yes I didn’t like any of the online tracks, so I opened up my old BIAB song for this tune (which I probably created ages ago) and saw I had set up the chords as Gm, C7, Gm, C7 for the first 4 bars, and so on.

    It sounded ok, so I used that for my video.

  10. #159

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    Quote Originally Posted by lawson-stone;[URL="tel:1114266"
    1114266[/URL]]The only thing about my line playing in this clip that I was really excited about was learning I could play a Gm Pentatonic over a C7 in the blues sections, like in the first 4 measures of the solo. It seemed to sound more like Wes to do that.
    loved the chord solo too! Did you use this same approach (Gm over C7) with the chord solo? Like adding Gm drop 2 chords where C7 should be?

  11. #160

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    Quote Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
    Yeah, it's funny, and maybe it's just from having listened to Wes' version a few thousand times, but I had a hard time with a lot of the tracks that seemed to play it much more like a blues in C, where my ears want to hear it more like a minor blues in G.
    Interesting. It always sounded like C blues to me, but he does something similar on Cariba, and I hear that one as Fmin, and am always jarred when it breaks into Bb blues.

    John

  12. #161

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    Quote Originally Posted by John A.
    Interesting. It always sounded like C blues to me, but he does something similar on Cariba, and I hear that one as Fmin, and am always jarred when it breaks into Bb blues.

    John
    That's a sneaky one, ain't it?

  13. #162

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    Quote Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
    That's a sneaky one, ain't it?
    Yup, and another Wes tune with a deceptive degree of difficulty/speed.

    John

  14. #163

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    Quote Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
    Yeah, it's funny, and maybe it's just from having listened to Wes' version a few thousand times, but I had a hard time with a lot of the tracks that seemed to play it much more like a blues in C, where my ears want to hear it more like a minor blues in G.
    When Wes lands on the Bb of the melody over the first G minor chord, I hear that chord as distinctly GmM7. Recording quality is not the best, so could be phantoms, but anyone else hearing it this way?

  15. #164

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    Quote Originally Posted by wzpgsr
    When Wes lands on the Bb of the melody over the first G minor chord, I hear that chord as distinctly GmM7. Recording quality is not the best, so could be phantoms, but anyone else hearing it this way?
    You could really hear the first 4 bars of the form as twice through the minor "cliche," Gm Gm/maj7 Gm7 Gm6...

  16. #165

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    Quote Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
    You could really hear the first 4 bars of the form as twice through the minor "cliche," Gm Gm/maj7 Gm7 Gm6...
    The best part about this is that I am an idiot and thought we were talking about In Your Own Sweet Way.

  17. #166

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    Quote Originally Posted by wzpgsr
    The best part about this is that I am an idiot and thought we were talking about In Your Own Sweet Way.
    I think Mr B. has started adding the name of the tune to the thread title, that certainly helps old codgers like me to keep track.

  18. #167

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    Quote Originally Posted by wzpgsr
    The best part about this is that I am an idiot and thought we were talking about In Your Own Sweet Way.
    Quote Originally Posted by grahambop
    I think Mr B. has started adding the name of the tune to the thread title, that certainly helps old codgers like me to keep track.
    Thanks for the laughs, guys - made for a perfect end of the day....

  19. #168

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    Quote Originally Posted by Triple_Jazz
    loved the chord solo too! Did you use this same approach (Gm over C7) with the chord solo? Like adding Gm drop 2 chords where C7 should be?
    you know what odd, is that for me chord-soloing is easy improvisation. I tend to see and hear all kinds of phrases and ideas chordally so when I break into a chord-solo type section, I feel like I've fallen back on the easy part, like just playing a blues scale. I actually feel guilty about it. "I should be playing lines, not leaning on my improvised chord-solo crutch." But from the beginning I've always been able to "hear" chordal ideas in my head and once I learn the voicings, it's pretty easy for me to use them all over. For some reason this has never transferred over to line playing. I've learned 8 or 9 Jimmy Raney solos, and while it improved my playing, the actual musical phrases haven't transferred. But I can learn 8 bars of a Joe Pass solo and suddenly it shows up every time I play.

    It actually encourages me to hear some on this forum talk about how hard chord-soloing is in improvisation, because it's the one thing that for me seems to come more naturally.

  20. #169

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    Quote Originally Posted by wzpgsr
    When Wes lands on the Bb of the melody over the first G minor chord, I hear that chord as distinctly GmM7. Recording quality is not the best, so could be phantoms, but anyone else hearing it this way?
    Now I'm understanding what you played on your take a little better ... When I heard it before, I was like "oh, that's interesting. I like the dissonance of the b5 on the I dom7 chord." But you were thinking of the tune as being in Gmin, and playing something you thought was consonant with that, not a deliberate dissonance over C7.

    Anyway, I just listened again pretty closely to the recording, and there's no GmM7 there. Neither Wes nor anyone else in the band plays an F# (at least not that I can hear), and the bass is very definitely playing in C blues (not Gmin). But what Wes does somewhat confuses things. He plays two figures: G A Bb (call) and then F E (response). The call is the melody. The response is actually not the melody (though you may be be thinking of it as melody). Rather, it's Wes playing the piano harmony from the Cannonball version on the guitar in response to his own call, making it seem like one part in Gmin instead of two separate parts in C7. On the original, it's much more distinctly two parts -- the sax and trumpet hold the Bb while the piano plays the "response". If you focus on Wes and tune out the bass and the piano (which is also very definitely playing C7, C9, and C13), you hear Gmin, and interpolate the "minor line cliche". It actually sounds cool, but it's not what Wes plays.

    John
    Last edited by John A.; 04-14-2021 at 05:04 PM.

  21. #170

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    Quote Originally Posted by John A.
    Now I'm understanding what you played on your take a little better ... When I heard it before, I was like "oh, that's interesting. I like the dissonance of the b5 on the I dom7 chord." But you were thinking of the tune as being in Gmin, and playing something you thought was consonant with that, not a deliberate dissonance over C7.

    Anyway, I just listened again pretty closely to the recording, and there's no GmM7 there. Neither Wes nor anyone else in the band plays an F# (at least not that I can hear), and the bass is very definitely playing in C blues (not Gmin). But what Wes does somewhat confuses things. He plays two figures: G A Bb (call) and then F E (response). The call is the melody. The response is actually not the melody (though you may be be thinking of it as melody). Rather, it's Wes playing the piano harmony from the Cannonball version on the guitar in response to his own call, making it seem like one part in Gmin instead of two separate parts in C7. On the original, it's much more distinctly two parts -- the sax and trumpet hold the Bb while the piano plays the "response". If you focus on Wes and tune out the bass and the piano (which is also very definitely playing C7, C9, and C13), you hear Gmin, and interpolate the "minor line cliche". It actually sounds cool, but it's not what Wes plays.

    John
    I'm likely missing something... but setting aside "blues rules" for a moment, Joe Pass once said in a ii-V7 situation, you could play either the ii or the V7. That seems a general rule actually, that you can pretty much over any dominant play its ii and have a decent line. So the C7 chord is addressed nicely by playing a Gm pentatonic or Gm7 arpeggio-derived phrase. It doesn't seem to me to be that hard an idea. The use of a Gm line is also implied in the punch of Gm-C7 between melodic phrases in the first 4 bars of the A section. Likewise, as Graham has said, over the F7 you can play Cm derived lines for the same reason.

  22. #171

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    Quote Originally Posted by lawson-stone
    I'm likely missing something... but setting aside "blues rules" for a moment, Joe Pass once said in a ii-V7 situation, you could play either the ii or the V7. That seems a general rule actually, that you can pretty much over any dominant play its ii and have a decent line. So the C7 chord is addressed nicely by playing a Gm pentatonic or Gm7 arpeggio-derived phrase. It doesn't seem to me to be that hard an idea. The use of a Gm line is also implied in the punch of Gm-C7 between melodic phrases in the first 4 bars of the A section. Likewise, as Graham has said, over the F7 you can play Cm derived lines for the same reason.
    Yes Gmin7 and C9 are the same pitch collection, but G melodic minor and C9 aren't. So, you have to watch how you use F# in a C7. It's also a matter of emphasis and how you interact with the harmony. You usually want to play at least some choruses in a blues solo where you make it explicitly clear when you're on I, IV, back on I, and in the turnaround, and if you just hang out on vmin7, you obscure that to a degree.

    John
    Last edited by John A.; 04-14-2021 at 06:37 PM.

  23. #172

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    Quote Originally Posted by John A.
    Now I'm understanding what you played on your take a little better ... When I heard it before, I was like "oh, that's interesting. I like the dissonance of the b5 on the I dom7 chord." But you were thinking of the tune as being in Gmin, and playing something you thought was consonant with that, not a deliberate dissonance over C7.

    Anyway, I just listened again pretty closely to the recording, and there's no GmM7 there. Neither Wes nor anyone else in the band plays an F# (at least not that I can hear), and the bass is very definitely playing in C blues (not Gmin). But what Wes does somewhat confuses things. He plays two figures: G A Bb (call) and then F E (response). The call is the melody. The response is actually not the melody (though you may be be thinking of it as melody). Rather, it's Wes playing the piano harmony from the Cannonball version on the guitar in response to his own call, making it seem like one part in Gmin instead of two separate parts in C7. On the original, it's much more distinctly two parts -- the sax and trumpet hold the Bb while the piano plays the "response". If you focus on Wes and tune out the bass and the piano (which is also very definitely playing C7, C9, and C13), you hear Gmin, and interpolate the "minor line cliche". It actually sounds cool, but it's not what Wes plays.

    John
    I’ve made a huge mess!

    This thread is about Unit 7 but I thought I was in the In Your Own Sweet Way thread, which is where I hear GmM7.

    But I think I know the dissonance you’re talking about in my Unit 7 take, though—during the head, right at the beginning? I stole that straight from Bobby Broom on his album The Way I Play. He plays the first A section straight, but then throws in those dissonant notes on subsequent repeats.

  24. #173

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    Quote Originally Posted by John A.
    Yes Gmin7 and C9 are the same pitch collection, but G melodic minor and C9 aren't. So, you have to watch how you use F# in a C7. It's also a matter of emphasis and how you interact with the harmony. You usually want to play at least some choruses in a blues solo where you make it explicitly clear when you're on I, IV, back on I, and in the turnaround, and if you just hang out on vmin7, you obscure that to a degree.

    John
    I wasn't talking about staying on it for the whole chorus, but only over the C7.

    One thing I puzzle over with Wes Montgomery. He plays the blues, but it's amazingly free of cliches. He plays bop, but doesn't sound like a Charlie Parker-on-Guitar clone. It's always kinds of surprising but not weird. This Gm Pentatonic over C7 in a blues has that Wes feel that I've been hunting for. Likewise, playing the Cm over the F7 does the harmonic shift but continues the different feel. Maybe it's just a matter of playing the same set of notes but with a different starting tones and off-center emphasis notes!

    I'm so far out of my depth here... I went nuts about 20 years ago studying chord-scale theory but couldn't play anything, so for 15 years or so I've basically just played and not thought too much about the theory, so this is straining my brain.

    I'm heading for something simpler, like a Middle Egyptian Hieroglyphic inscription...

  25. #174

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    Quote Originally Posted by lawson-stone
    I wasn't talking about staying on it for the whole chorus, but only over the C7.
    OK, limiting the discussion to C7 chords in a C blues: yes, you can certainly play the chord tones of a Gmin6 or Gmin7 chord over C7 (they're he same notes as C9 and C11, respectively, minus the C). But if you do that without playing a C it sounds more like Gmin than C7, and creates a sense of suspension/ambiguity as to where you are in the form. Wes did that often (he also often used pedal points a lot). That's neither a good nor a bad thing in itself. But I do think it works better if you don't do that in every chorus and hit C sometimes. Apply the equivalent logic to Cmin and F. There's a duet version of Unit 7 by Frank Vignola and Jimmy Bruno on youtube, which I think illustrates this pretty clearly. Bruno plays his solo in a way that emphasizes Gmin; Vignola emphasizes C7 + making all the changes. It's an interesting contrast. Going beyond just the 4 notes of that chord you then have to think about what flavor of Gmin you draw additional pitches from (i.e., natural, harmonic, melodic, or dorian) because there are pitches there (e.g., F# in GMM) that produces dissonances over a C7 chord. That's all I'm saying.

    I misunderstood wzpgsr, and thought he was talking about playing a GminMaj7 (and by implication, G melodic minor) on that C7 change. But strangely, he wasn't talking about doing that (he was talking about IYOSW), but he was actually playing it, which sparked my little trip down theory alley. Anyway, that's as far down that path I go.


    Quote Originally Posted by lawson-stone
    One thing I puzzle over with Wes Montgomery. He plays the blues, but it's amazingly free of cliches. He plays bop, but doesn't sound like a Charlie Parker-on-Guitar clone. It's always kinds of surprising but not weird.
    TBH, I haven't thought all that much about why Wes's lines don't sound like Bird, but I think the main reasons are phrasing, time, and articulations on the instrument rather note choices, which are the things that make him unique overall, not just with respect to Bird. Wes was generally right on top of the beat or a hair behind; Bird was on top or ahead. Bird generally played longer and less symmetrical phrases. Wes's tended to be less jagged/angular. Bird held notes, Wes didn't. Bird used a wide vibrato and bent notes a lot; Wes's didn't do much of either. Wes didn't do the 1/16 and 1/32 runs that Bird would do. That sort of thing. However, I do think that there was a greater degree of similarity between Wes's soloing and some trumpet players. Check out the Wes/Cannonball version of Au Privave and compare it to the Bird version with Miles Davis on Trumpet. I haven't transcribed it, but at least on a superficial listening, I get a fairly similar vibe out of MIles's and Wes's approaches (and between Cannonball's and Bird's, obviously)

    Quote Originally Posted by lawson-stone
    This Gm Pentatonic over C7 in a blues has that Wes feel that I've been hunting for. Likewise, playing the Cm over the F7 does the harmonic shift but continues the different feel. Maybe it's just a matter of playing the same set of notes but with a different starting tones and off-center emphasis notes!
    Yes, that an avoiding the root and creating a sense of "modal" playing over moving changes

    Quote Originally Posted by lawson-stone
    I'm so far out of my depth here... I went nuts about 20 years ago studying chord-scale theory but couldn't play anything, so for 15 years or so I've basically just played and not thought too much about the theory, so this is straining my brain.

    I'm heading for something simpler, like a Middle Egyptian Hieroglyphic inscription...
    Presumably the tune to play alongside that pursuit is Stelae by Starlight.

    John

  26. #175

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    Quote Originally Posted by wzpgsr
    I’ve made a huge mess!

    This thread is about Unit 7 but I thought I was in the In Your Own Sweet Way thread, which is where I hear GmM7.

    But I think I know the dissonance you’re talking about in my Unit 7 take, though—during the head, right at the beginning? I stole that straight from Bobby Broom on his album The Way I Play. He plays the first A section straight, but then throws in those dissonant notes on subsequent repeats.
    Yup. Maybe it actually does come from him thinking about GMM over C7. It does sound that way to me.

    John