JAZZ
John Wheatcroft starts at the beginning and finishes at the end, as he brings you a new series designed to bring your jazz playing to life.
John Wheatcroft begins a new series on jazz technique with a look at intros and endings.
Welcome to the first in a new series designed to develop your playing and vocabulary; to help you to think like a jazz player and increase your range of options. And what better place to commence than with intros and endings?
We can make a musical indication of which direction we intend to travel in an intro or ending, by selecting one of two harmonic events, often using the exact same idea in both instances. The tonic I chord sounds resolute and complete. It has no real desire to move and is like the musical equivalent of a full stop, so the perfect candidate for an ending. The V chord, however, sounds far from resolved, a bit like the word ‘and’ when used as part of a sentence. You usually wouldn’t stop on this word and, likewise, the V chord has a strong tendency to move somewhere else, usually back to the I. This ‘perfect cadence’ forms the basis of many of the endings presented here. Resolving to the V often works great as an intro, although we need to remember that the first chord in the body of our tune may not necessarily be the tonic. This presents us with some choices, one of which is still to resolve our intro to the I chord but move away as the piece unfolds. Another option is to select the V7 of the first chord in the sequence. So, if our piece is in C, but the first chord is Dm7, we have the option to construct an intro that pinpoints A7, the V7 of our temporary V-I resolution to D minor.
There are only three examples here today, although Ex1 (a-j) and Ex2 (a-j) are divided into 10 smaller excerpts that can be used independently. Once comfortable with the examples as written, I’d suggest adopting three transformative steps to each: first, transpose each idea to new keys or areas of the fretboard; secondly, consider what changes would need to be made to reharmonise from major to minor. The third step would be to replace my example with a variation, however close or far removed but composed by you. Ultimately, we’re aiming to cultivate such fluency that you can edit your ideas in real time, and not rely on premeditated phrases.
One of the best ways to improve is to play with other musicians so you can try these ideas out for real. This needn’t be a highpressure situation: getting together with a friend to play duets at home will quickly give your playing focus, direction and form. In an ideal world, seek out the company of more experienced players, perhaps finding a local jam session and sitting in with the band. You’ll learn an immense amount and this experience will shape your practice and put your musical priorities into perspective.
NEXT MONTH John covers cool chords and progressions for major key based Jazz-blues
I notice a lot of guitarists who are very good but don’t seem to know some of the basic procedures Joe Pass