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Oh another thing - if you study swing lead guitar esp. Charlie Christian: Grant Green, Wes and Kenny Burrell make perfect sense right away. A lot of this playing is done out of that tradition. However, I'd hesitate to call these guitarists be-bop players per se.
The real be-bop guitarists are for me the wonderful Tal Farlow and Jimmy Raney. These players to my ears are more horn and piano influenced as these were the key instruments of bop - guitar didn't feature so much.
Swing Guitar Pointers
Whatever you do don't learn swing standards out of the real book! Get to know the simple version of the changes - the ones in the Real Book are substituted already. If you learn swing, you can get the simple version of the changes from the Django community, but by ear is always best. The Ralph Patt page might also be helpful. Get used to changing key - Django heads do everything in G, C and D which won't make you popular with the horn players!
Work on your ears - learn simple phrases and apply them in different places.
Don't be afraid to play lines out of chord shapes (Pete Bernstein said that in a clinic.) Practice chord tones and decorating them with semitones below and/or scale tones above.
Get your rhythm guitar together. You'll gig more than if you have a massive solo chops - that can come later. But your basic job is to play the beat.
Play an acoustic guitar for rhythm - pref a maccaferri or acoustic archtop but any one will do. Electric rhythm sounds more R&B or just plain muddy.
For lead, use downward rest strokes as much as possible. Learning Gypsy picking is a good idea - it gives you the correct sound and articulation adn projection on acoustic. It's likely all swing era guitarists used this technique - George Van Eps mentions it in his book.
Study photographs and film of swing guitarists to get hints on sitting positions, technique etc.
Charlie Christian
George Barnes
Al Casey
Freddie Green
Teddy Bunn
Dick McDonough
Allan Reuss
George Van Eps
Django Reinhardt
Oscar Aleman
Some of the gretest guitarists of all time!
Good luck!Last edited by christianm77; 04-02-2013 at 01:26 AM.
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04-02-2013 01:14 AM
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So,
if any of you were to recommend 10 Bop & 10 Swing songs to learn (for someone of a lower-intermediate musicianship level on guitar) , what songs would all of you choose?
I know that's a lot of material, but the more goals I have set in front of me, the more likely I am to learn at least a few of the objectives laid out in front of me. Plus, I am in school & I work, so I can't devote any huge amount of time to practice music; I just want to point myself in a general direction.
The past year I have really fallen in love with pretty much all Jazz & that's all I want to play, but I really don't know where to start. The only swing songs I know is Russian Lullaby & one I made up; besides that I pretty much play reggae, folk, funk, & rock. One swing song I really wanna learn is Topsy.
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Learn the rhythm Freddie Green style, learn the melody. Keep the chords 3-voice, 6,4,3rd strings if possible. It's no different than learning the other music you do. Just get into the rhythm and see what you can do from there. That's an Eddie Durham tune.
Originally Posted by Sti Eci Tephor
Eddie Durham - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Just my suggestions
10 Swing Tunes
Dinah
Lady be Good
All of Me
Minor Swing (of course!)
Topsy
I've Found a New Baby
Honeysuckle Rose
I Got Rhythm
Sheik of Araby
Blue Skies
(These get played all the time)
10 Bop tunes (many are based on swing songs)
Blues For Alice - modified 12 bar
Anthropology - I Got Rhythm
Scrapple from the Apple - Honeysuckle with a Rhythm Bridge
Dewey Square (You can make up the bridge) - based on Lady be Good
Now's the Time - 12 bar
Night in Tunisia - Original
Groovin' High - based on Whispering
In Walked Bud - Blue Skies
Rhythm-a-ning - I Got Rhythm
Ornithology - How High the Moon
Hopefully you'll see how the bop changes relate to the swing changes.
For my part I find it easier to learn bop heads by ear than reading. Using transcribe or audacity, you can slow down the recordings and make sure you get every note. This might be slow going at first, but it does get easier.
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Yeah...I was gonna say....if your brush got any bigger it wouldn't fit in your pail! Originally Posted by Stevebol
I love and feel moved by a lot of the newer jazz music that gets accused of being the product of too much head & not enough heart. If I'm feeling it, I figure there's a decent chance that the composers / performers might have been as well, though I have no real proof, so perhaps I'm being duped....I'm happy though!
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Thanks a bunch!! I just learned Topsy & Minor Swing so far. Originally Posted by christianm77
Is there any other rhythms I should be using besides a straight swing feel or variations of Charleston rhythm that you would consider important??
I have been applying different rhythms scofield uses in these instructional videos from the 80's I found on youtube & a few others as well. (the solo in the video is actually really nice sounding and he is just demonstrating (even though I usually love his playing I kinda wish he played like this more often.))
(I can't view videos on this computer. It's the part half way through where he is saying, " I hope I can do this." or something along those lines
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Hi haven't had a chance to check the Sco video (dare say I'll find it really interesting and useful) but you are right IMHO to focus on rhythm. Straight 4 and Charleston are the standard rhythms for swing rhythm guitar, but of course you can have a whole range of rhythms for solos and riffs.
I think it's a good idea to work on rhythms from solos (Lester Young is a classic) and maybe big band recordings (Basie riffs are good one.) Transcription can focus on rhythms before pitches - try singing the rhythms of solos without pitch.
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The Sco video covers chord/scale theory application, which isn't really relevant for bop and swing music - chord/scale stuff came into jazz around 1960ish. That's not to say there aren't scales or even modes and so forth used in jazz up to this point (Django was using the Dorian mode in the 1930's for example) but it's not the main part of the language, and crucially it's not how these musicians thought. For what it's worth, these are the types of melodic materials musicians were using in the swing and bop eras, as far as I can determine from my transcription:
Swing era
Chords
Major - Triads. Major sixth. Major seventh used melodically. Blues phrases with major thirds. Occasional extension to the ninth.
Minor - Triads. Minor sixth. Minmaj7 used melodically.
Dominant - Use of the minor sixth a perfect fifth above the dominant - extremely common. Diminished seventh a half step above. Augmented fifth very common (G7+5 for example.) Augmented symmetry - e.g. G7 substituted by B7. VERY common.
Half diminished - Regarded as an inversion on minor 6th - so Bm7b5 = Dm6
Full diminished - very common - arpeggios.
Scales
Major and minor - harmonic minor very popular
Whole tone harmony often used
Pentatonic scales - very often for a 'oriental sound' as much as a blues tonality
Chromaticism
Approach tones
Enclosure figures
3-4-#4-5
1-7-b7
Bop era: all of the above PLUS the following
Major - extension up to the 9th
Minor - extension up to the 11th. 6th and minmaj7 sounds common on vi chords
Dominant - Swing era substitutions all common - augmented sub falls out of favour a bit. Instead, more common use of tritone substitute - or minor 6th up a half step from root
Half diminished - still regarded as an inversion of minor sixth.
Greater use of ii-V's as opposed to just V chords. However soloists often played only over the V chord whatever the comping instruments were playing.
Full diminished - diminished scale starts to be used as a ascending and descending run - probably based on a chord tone/approach tone figure.
Scales
Greater use of scale steps in lines - 'be-bop scales', harmonic minor on ii (to give VI7 sound),
Use of substitutions and extensions edge us more towards modern chord/scale theory, but bear in mind this is not what the musicians were thinking, and they didn't use chord scales with the freedom that modern musicians do (e.g. making voicings and sequences from them.)
Chromaticism
Less regular - builds on the swing language, but breaks things up rhythmically. A Swing line might go 1-7-b7-6 and a be bop line might chuck in a few displacements - e.g. 3-1-5-7-b7-#5-6
Leap to the b6 of scale very common
This is just what I have noticed from transcribing and playing. No doubt I'll find out more stuff, but it does help me make a distinction between swing and bop language. The biggest difference though is Rhythm. All the bop stuff can be made to work in swing with the right feel, and vice versa.
A lot of be-bop stuff is actually very simple - triad arpeggios and so on.
Also, no amount of theory will help you play strong lines of itself. That's what you ears and transcription is for. If you understand nothing I've written here it doesn't matter, so long as you listen to the records, learn some solo and learn some tunes. In the words of Jim Mullen 'F**k scales.'
Finally, Charlie Christian is the m6 king!Last edited by christianm77; 04-08-2013 at 07:55 AM.
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Yeah, I was just talking about using the few times he played rhythm in that video. (& I thought the solo demonstration he did sounded awesome)
I was applying the feel he was using to my own playing rhythm playing; pretty much what I do is find videos of musicians playing rhythms I like, then record a section on my phone and then listening to it right before practicing. This way I don't have to keeping going back online find the video & section, saves a lot of time.
To be honest I just want to focus on learning songs & different rhythms for now, I learn 2-5-1 lines when I get then chance, but for me it really eats up a shit-load of time learning the single note stuff & I don't have time because of school. ( plus when I am playing music with my friends it seems that everyone wants to solo the whole time)Last edited by Sti Eci Tephor; 04-08-2013 at 09:29 PM.
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This has been a pretty extensive discussion and there's a lot of good info on here to complete my rambling thoughts. Just need to time to get these ideas under my fingers and maybe I'll swing like mad someday and then play some hot bop licks by the time I retire.
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Sounds sensible. I think I got a bit carried away, there: been hitting the woodshed a lot lately, makes a man a bit strange....
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"Too dumb to bop...yeah, right"--how jazz is/can be like modern art Originally Posted by Stevebol
Don't lose sight of something my gf always reminds me of when I put most jazz on..."you can't dance to it..." for the most part. (And yes, she really does exist...unlike Det. Columbo's wife)
Any good swing band, or a western swing band, or any decent C-W honky tonk band must groove...because if there "ain't no groove---then there ain't no move"---i.e. the audience remains uninvolved...sitting or wandering aimlessly, guess what ===THAT band is about to become a former band (kind of like the "former parrot" in the Monty Python sketch about the parrot that "was just resting...not dead".)
So there is a sort of "self-policing" test of any dance band's validity/value....the ultimate test of "rubber meeting the road" so to speak...I saw the Basie Band back in the early 80's ---led by Frank Foster, I believe. They were like a car going from 0-60 in 8 seconds...and stopping in 2.5 seconds ("on a dime---and give ya change"). It was in a college auditorium--but people were bopping in their seats... Musicians that had been bringing it for more than forty-five years at that pt.---in some cases, and Big Joe Williams came out and just blew away some thin-voiced scat song pretender who went on before him---he came out...scatted a chorus or two, then held that falsetto warble of his for about a minute it seemed, and swooped down to the bass range, and just stomped that sucker---no prisoners taken---like the story about Louis A. blowing 40 choruses in a row to humiliate some poor guy who thought he was going to show old Satchmo' a thing or two, at some nightclub gig. And Williams was probably 70 years old---like a silver haired grizzly showing he was STILL king of the hill, whereas the guy he vanquished was maybe 25-30 (?!), but Big Joe still had power in his voice into his 70's, just like Al Jolson.
So a dance band, constantly has to prove its worth, and let's be honest, small group jazz doesn't face the same test, as it does not pose the same question. Frankly, a lot of small group jazz does not rise to the standard of stuff Bird, Diz, Sonny Stitt, Horace Silver and the various incarnations of the Jazz Messengers, Clifford Brown, etc. put out....it is/can be self-indulgent meandering whose value (?!)/validity is not apparent to even "sophisticated" listeners---much less the general public.
Like modern art, some of the stuff that is put out....does not really bear the imprint of mastery that more traditional forms bear. ( I say this---noting that Andy Warhol was technically, really very good, and Jasper Johns is obviously talented, and Picasso was a talented draftsman, in the quite traditional vein, at a VERY early age, but look at stuff that is out of the "conceptual art" realm---e.g. Yoko Ono's pseudo-art agit-prop and its value, or the quality of worksmanship that went into it is dubious, to say the least, at least to this observer....to someone like John Lennon who, in many ways, was an overgrown adolescent--her stuff smacked of genius, and of course old Yoko, anxious to preserve the trappings of the life of privilege she grew up in...sized him up pretty quickly, and took him to the cleaners...emotionally, intellectually, artistically, and financially, IMO. Sorry to digress, that's another topic.) Maybe I'm just a moldy fig, at heart.
One final point re: jazz' "curatorial status": Art----Fauvism, Cubism, "Found objects and Marcel Duchamp", Surrealism, Objectivism and Malevich, Boccioni and the pseudo-Fascistic stuff he put out---can't even remember the name of that ism now--Futurism, maybe, serialism, Pop Art, Op Art, Abstract Expressionism---have we even get past 1950 yet?!
Jazz: Ragtime, the Blues, Dixieland, Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Songbook, Stephen Foster, Western swing, Swing, Zydeco, Gypsy Jazz, Big Band, be-bop, Cool Jazz, Latin jazz and salsa, Bossa Nova, Hard Bop, Modal Jazz, Har-melodic jazz, "Space is the Place", Free Jazz, Fusion, Neo-con, Gypsy jazz redux....up to the present
....I love be-bop, aspire to play it....because it is so demanding and satisfying when it's done well....but it never would have happened without KC dance bands because that's where Bird came of age...
I sound preachy here, and don't really mean to...just go get a copy of the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz from your library , and sit down and listen to it....I think its about 8 record sides or so...maybe its 75 tunes in all...most of them less than three minutes....it lays out in a pretty accurate/accessible format...though it kind of stops about mid-60's...
What Faulkner said about the South, "The past is not dead...it's not even past..." is equally true of "jazz" music.
(Now off to listen to Tomasz Stanko who is a new find for me---fusion that grooves...with some obvious heart and obvious, but not intrusive, musicianship behind it.)
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