I prefer Minor Jazz Blues over Major Jazz Blues

[fasstrack]

Barry kind of blows hot and cold about Bill Evans publicly. Personally, I think Evans made a great rhythmic contribution with his unique sense of displacement. This developed into his last phase. It's true he was playing way on top toward the end---uncomfortably so---but what he was going for and achieving rhythmically (and harmonically) will, and should, be studied for years. He got away from 'swinging' in the traditional sense, but found something of his own---and started a trend. (Personally, though Lennie Tristano was sort of there first and was brilliant, his playing never got to me like his prize pupil, Warne Marsh, did. I just find it cold). But I should look into him, b/c he was a master, too. Interesting to think of him in a discussion of Barry b/c of that 'personality cult' thing. Much as I adore Barry (I call him almost every week, and I feel that he's proud of me for splitting NY, etc.), I knew to stay miles away from that. I'll leave it at that. I can talk about Tristano, who I never knew and have no investment in 'protecting' his rep. I believe he messed many of his students up---but that's not totally on him, is it? Those seeking gurus are a trip in themselves. He was one of the first teachers of jazz, a pioneer and genius player, so I'll keep it positive.

Once, I was over Nica's, helping Barry promote a concert. He had a Bill Evans LP that hadn't been opened for so long the outer 'pockets' actually STUCK TOGETHER!! I pointed this out and we both cracked up. But, for the record, I asked if he liked Bill's playing. He smiled broadly and said 'Yeah!'. So his (public) bark is bigger than his bite---and he knows who the great players are, despite his 'ways'.

BTW, Chris Anderson was a Bill Evans admirer, especially the duet recordings with Tony Bennett. He raved to me about them...

[christianm77]

Jim Hall was a master at leaving out the first of a group of triplets (then he would build compositionally from these little fragments. That takes patience, courage---and you can always tell a player/composer. He really had the rhythm mastered, too----just didn't shove it down our throats).

Jimmy Raney, when I brought that leaving the first triplet note out up, smiled and said simply

'He INFERS a lot'.

Well put. (He also told me Jim Hall was his favorite guitar player)...

I was thinking of Jim actually

[matt.guitarteacher]

Yeah. Dropping the first one is where all the grease is. I picked this up accidentally , playing chord melody with fingers. If you play chords melodically as triplet double stops (chord-bass-chord), one voice is "on" and the other is "after". After is definitely better.

Learned this from playing Penthouse Serenade when I was first picking up some CM. It's mostly quarter note triplets to start. Well, alternating eighth note triplets played as a double stop gives you quarter note triplets in the melodic voice. Anyway, when you "mess up" and play the bass note on the beat instead of before, you end up with this really good stuff. I can't imagine that there's an easier way to learn to hear this.

[fasstrack]

Haha, I love this - I can imagine him actually thinking this way true to his mischievous spirit.

He used to turn rhythm sections around didn't he? Such a practical joker.

I doubt he was 'joking', just hearing way ahead of the pack. If they couldn't keep up that's their ass.

We all know the story about Miles Davis slamming poor Duke Jordan for always getting lost and turning the time around in the band. Personally, I find that unmitigated BS. Duke played introductions that were priceless and comped beautifully for Bird (as did the never mentioned Jimmy Bunn (I THINK that's his name), who got Bird on track on Lover Man, which led to a heart-wrenching performance. Duke was as good as Miles then---just another example of tasteless and ego-driven slamming fellow musicians publicly. Makes me sick to my stomach...

[christianm77]

I doubt he was 'joking', just hearing way ahead of the pack. If they couldn't keep up that's their ass.

Oh sure, but I feel there is a mischief, humour and wit in bop and the rhythmic phrasing is informed by that. We think of it as serious, difficult music now, and it is, but humour is present in much of the best art.

For a simple example, I think of a tune like Now's the Time and the way it disrupts and subverts what starts off as a simple swing riff type tune. To me there's humour in that.

I have no idea of Bird was deliberately trying to cut rhythm sections with his phrasing. Possibly not as I think 'trying' to do anything on the stand mucks up my rhythm for sure. But then I am not Charlie Parker lol!

[fasstrack]

Oh sure, but I feel there is a mischief, humour and wit in bop and the rhythmic phrasing is informed by that. We think of it as serious, difficult music now, and it is, but humour is present in much of the best art.

For a simple example, I think of a tune like Now's the Time and the way it disrupts and subverts what starts off as a simple swing riff type tune. To me there's humour in that.

I have no idea of Bird was deliberately trying to cut rhythm sections with his phrasing. Possibly not as I think 'trying' to do anything on the stand mucks up my rhythm for sure. But then I am not Charlie Parker lol!

I used to like listening to Phil Schaap's Bird Flight here on WKCR FM. Don't know if you can get in online in the UK, but I don't see why not. KCR is wonderful. I've been listening since the early '80s, and even am a 'supernumerary' on some broadcasts in their archives (buried DEEP) from the West End.

Back to Schaap: I listened for years, and it's great that he does it with dedication and fervor day after day. But he DRIVES ME (and others) CRACKERS! Every time I listen at 8:20 AM, by 8:24 I say

'I'm buying a GUN!'.

The man never tires of his own voice or obsession with every bit of minutia (sp?). He'll go on w/o playing any music for an hour, like an obsessed rabbinical student who feels he has unearthed new meaning from a passage in the Torah.

And he makes wild assumptions or at least postulates wild, unproven theories:

'Bird quoted Sly Mongoose on the airshot from Billy Berg's. Could he have been referring to Berg with that quote?'

WTF?

I DID appreciate his many interviews with those who knew and played with Bird: Jimmy Heath, and especially Red Rodney. I taped that one, now lost to the ages. He did some great work, Schaap. And he IS sincere. I saw him stand over George Kelly's casket at the funeral parlor in Bed-Stuy. He's at least as much a friend to jazz as to Phil Schaap.

But check out the other jazz and other music shows on KCR. They're aces.

[fasstrack]

For a simple example, I think of a tune like Now's the Time and the way it disrupts and subverts what starts off as a simple swing riff type tune.

Now's the Time WAS co-opted into a swing-riff tune, The Huckabuck. Don't know if he ever got a royalty...

[fasstrack]

OK:

Shelter, the song I printed lyrics and changes to (it's a 'major blues') back in the Ice Age here is hearable here:

SoundClick artist: Joel Fass - Jazz Guitarist/Composer/Arranger

But I'm deleting it and the other tracks from Melody Messenger today. Soundclick has a hell of a nerve putting tracks on my 'free' page, when I uploaded them to the 'store'. I'll fix THEIR wagon. Har har.

Speaking of which, why not go ahead and invest a semolean and download it or the other tracks? A friend is helping my retarded self post the entire CD and remove the tracks from the 'free' page today. The old stuff is on me...

[ragman1]

I'm not sure I understand this business of major and dominant blues being virtually interchangeable. I mean, you can surely play some blue notes over a major chord (b7, m3, b5, #9) but playing major lines over a dominant chord...?

Unless it's like that Wes thing the other day where the maj7 is very quick. And quirky, of course. Perhaps I'm missing something.

[christianm77]

What I'm talking about is the practice around the time of Charlie Parker as it seems to me.

accompanying chords were often missing the seventh at this time even in blues tunes, so that gives more freedom - but in general vertical relationships seem somewhat relaxed.

For example a major 6th or major is often used as a tonic chord in a blues, leaving the seventh up to the improviser. In this sense blues tunes at this time seem not have been considered distinct from any other tune harmonically.

But even when accompanied by Dom 7 chords soloists still referenced the major 7. A famous example is Miles Davis on Now's the Time. Given time I'm sure I could track down some other examples.

Whether or not you hear those notes as clams I think depends on whether you are listening to the composite harmony of the group or instead focusing on one melodic line in the ensemble.

Nowadays we think of the basic building blocks of jazz harmony not as triads or sixth chords so we tend to get more hung up about where the seventh is at. I think this is a post modal thing and I suspect the blue note/hard bop approach to the blues changed things too.

I'm not 100% sure but I suspect the adoption of minor seventh etc as a tonic minor chord happened about the same time, certainly by the 60s. Until that point the regular choice for minor seems to have been m6 or m(maj7)

I'm aware that the guys who popularised modern modal jazz theory are quite relaxed about their own theory. Jamie Aebersold told a colleague in a lesson that he shouldn't play so harmonically correct all the time! So there you have it :-)

What Reg talks about can also be seen as a perspective on the same thing couched in CST in so much as I understand it. Matt might be better placed to comment as he seems to have a knack for elucidating these ideas.

In my own terms, I just try to play melodic lines that sound good to me, and I do so without accompaniment. I'm into defining my own harmonic pocket, esp. as I often play without chordal accompaniment on gigs.

One thing that's rarely discussed is the amount of harmonic freedom playing in a band as the only harmonist gives you. Pianists are really into this though.

[christianm77]

In any case the long and the short of it is that I have found myself intuitively playing maj 7s in lines on blues tunes, without any theoretical excuse.

I hear them, probably because they have a relationship to notes further on in the line than the underlying chords and cos I heard Parker doing them.

[Richard Luther]

Smokin' minor blues

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[christianm77]

I guess so. I have a feeling this falls under the heading of 'forget all that **** and just play' rather than any big theory thing.

The blues is one of those forms I can do this on, at least a bit. Inner Urge, not so much.

[ragman1]

Absolutely. I know one thing, if you get a finger slip and play the maj7 by mistake they'll open a thread on Jazz Guitar Online to tell you it's perfectly OK

[ragman1]

Great, now we can back to worrying about the oncoming banana catastrophe :-)

Quite. It's funny, I didn't know about it and suddenly didn't buy any bananas last week. Must have been an omen. It's the poor growers I'm concerned about. I hope they survive it all right. They may not very well.

[ragman1]

I've no doubt some of the prettiness was created by introducing the maj7 notes. I didn't realise it myself till I heard it back.

[christianm77]

Yeah you see, you start playing with those major sevenths in that way with your phrasing and the acoustic sound and I start to hear a bit more old school swing/early jazz perhaps.

I'm glad that you can see what I mean - sometimes you have to give things a go just to see if they work aurally.

One step further out:

I'm still playing around with the thing Matt was talking about from Reg - using scales to organise dissonant notes. This is not something I ever really understood but Matt explained it brilliantly. It's not unconnected to this stuff, actually.

If I've understood it correctly - instead of playing a major key over a major/dom blues you could play say an F locrian and see how that gets you playing - sure there will be notes demanding resolution, but it's up to you to find musical ways to resolve them and it might open up a door.

It's certainly a more creative and freeing way of working with modes and scales once the basics of 'over that chord play that scale' have been mastered - if that's the way you happen to play, of course. And it's very right brain - you will find ways to resolve so it removes some of the worry of playing 'right notes' over the chords.

Anyway, I'm finding that increasingly my practice is about finding ways to avoid playing my usual stuff, throwing something into the mix just to keep it fresh. Sometimes when 'practicing like a scientist' perhaps you need to be a bit of a mad scientist.

[FZ2017]

Let's see if I can put this in words. For me, there is a smoke air to Minor Jazz Blues tonalities that Major tonalities just don't have.

It was after coming to this forum that I realized that I like my Blues (whether Jazz Blues or Traditional Blues) with some minor thirds, minor sevenths, and with that "Blue Note" in their somewhere - whether it be the b5 on the minor pentatonic or the b3 on the Major Pentatonic).

Happy Blues lacks the drama that I seek.

This is a personal preference, but do you kind of feel the same way?

You make a good point my friend.

Sent from my SM-G955U using Tapatalk