THE CROSSROADS PT5 Where blues meets jazz
Familiar Ideas, Unfamiliar Places
John Wheatcroft reveals how the brilliant American jazz-blues guitarist Scott Henderson plays familiar ideas in unfamiliar places.
“I’ll play maybe the same lick. I’ll just play it in different places” SCOTT HENDERSON
Down at the Crossroads this month John Wheatcroft discovers how today’s blues, jazz and fusion guitarists up-cycle traditional Pentatonic ideas to create new sounds that are fresh, vibrant and very hip.
As we’ve seen in previous months, the connections between the musical approaches adopted by blues and jazz guitar players are often greater than the differences. There are huge amounts of crossover, in terms of note selection, rhythmic phrasing and even technique, all shared across the wide range of related genres broadly falling under the umbrella of blues and jazz. The intention of this month’s article is to explore these connections further and shine a light on the musical potential of playing familiar musical ideas in unfamiliar places to create new and often unexpected, modern sounding ideas, the kind you might hear in the playing of modern blues and jazz artists, such as Robben Ford, Oz Noy, Scott Henderson and many more.
The learning process often works best when you can make clean and clear associations between material that you are familiar with, and any area that you are looking to nurture or develop. A good way to approach a new skill, such as learning a second language, is to consider how much you might already know, and/or by making very slight adjustments, such as all words in
English and French with certain endings - such as ‘ion’; words like ‘station’, ‘information’ or ‘occupation’ being exactly the same in both languages, with just a slight difference in the pronunciation.
There are clear musical parallels. Take Scott Henderson, who very frequently plays licks and phrases that any fan of Jimi Hendrix should be acutely familiar with, although he might disguise this explicit connection by often playing these ideas in unexpected places, juxtaposed against the harmony in what, at least initially, might seem like an unusual location.
The seven examples that form the basis of this lesson are divided into two categories. Examples 1-5 take the form of musical exercises, each showcasing a specific and distinct approach for applying or modifying the Pentatonic scale to allow us to create new sounds from old. The concepts here range from juxtaposing the exact same Minor Pentatonic phrase in multiple locations against both Minor and Major harmony, positioning a phrase that rises in semitones against a IIm7-V7-Imaj7-VI7 sequence, moving in an out of tonality by slipping up or down one fret mid-phrase, finding non-bluesy intervallic lines from within the Minor Pentatonic framework, and mimicking the motor skills and mechanical techniques when phrasing with the Minor Pentatonic scale, albeit changing the note selection to fit other harmonic possibilities. We round this study off with two contextualised solos each around a 12-bar blues progression, the first based around a Latin-blues style, while the second is more funky or fusion based.
As is almost always the case, these musical phrases are the tip of the iceberg, so make sure you get comfortable with each of the concepts in turn and explore each idea fully, creating rhythmic and melodic variations to allow you to create licks and phrases of your own design. Once you’ve learnt the examples and solos as written, use these ideas with the associated backing tracks to compose, improvise or a combination of the two and come up with some lines of you own. As always, enjoy...
Joe Diorio and Robben Ford’s collaborative album, Minor Elegance, is a great place to hear these two unique players and how their different styles complement each other perfectly. Twisted Blues Volume 1 by Oz Noy does exactly what it says it should, as does Scott Henderson: Live! If you’re the studious type then add Steve Khan’s instructional book, Pentatonic Khancepts to your collection.