Where to start with Jazz?

R-4-5w/7ths/etc...but change up on your right wrist action. It also might help not to tune your guitar! 8)

Cat

Fleaaaaaa, I'm doing the same thing at the moment -- trying to graft some jazz skills onto a pop/rock foundation. I'm the wrong guy to recommend a course of study, but here's what I'm trying to do:

- Learn extended/altered chord voicings, their notations & their applications.

- Practice ii-V-I changes up & down the neck, in lots of keys.

- Listen to lots of tunes. CBC Radio 2 Jazz on iTunes covers a lot of ground.

- Find a "fake book." There are good legal ones out there, and they cost a lot of money. I'm looking in used-book stores for that heavily corrected, booze-stained "lawsuit" copy, preferably with a handwritten note on the cover: "RETURN TO GRANT GREEN, BLUE NOTE RECORDS." :)

Hey guitar teachers out there, anything you would add to that?

There are all sorts of chord sheets to jazz standards out there and, as Crow points out, a lot of good fake books, too. Don't be shy about taking a song you already know and trying to arrange it in a jazz style by altering the harmonies a bit. A lot of the standards we play around with today started out as pop songs back in their day.

If you're used to soloing strictly in pentatonic scales, start switching to using full major scales. You'll eventually need even more notes but it's a good step in the right direction. And you'll be surprised at how much more expression you'll get with just the two extra notes.

Hope this helps.

Peace

I was kinda hoping some possible songs I could learn would be mentioned because they get up in twos and perform pieces.

Okay - possible songs, taking a bit of all sorts of styles and genres of standards:
All Blues
All of Me
All the Things You Are
Autum Leaves
Baby It's Cold Outside
Basin Street Blues
Beyond the Sea
Blue Skies
Bye Bye Blackbird
Come Rain or Come Shine
Don't Get Around Much Anymore
Fly Me to the Moon
Georgia on My Mind
The Girl from Ipanema
God Bless the Child
In A Sentimental Mood
It Don't Mean a Thing If You Ain't Got that Swing
It's Only a Paper Moon
Jump Jive and Wail
Misty
Moon River
Moonlight in Vermont
My Favorite Things
On the Sunny Side of the Street
Satin Doll
Sentimental Journey
Take Five
Take the A Train
These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)
'Til There Was You
What a Wonderful World
You Made Me Love You (I Didn't Want to Do It)
Young at Heart

And that's just off the top of my head. There are hundreds more and I'm sure others will start posting them soon.

Peace

Hi Fleaaaaaa,

I'm not a jazz player, but I've always thought that jazz was primarily about an attitude to playing rather than particular songs or sets of chords.

There's a huge range of jazz styles and even the hard core fans can't seem to agree exactly what "jazz" is. It could be Trad, Dixieland, Swing, Behop, Cool Jazz, Hard Bop, Modal, Free Jazz, Latin Jazz, Gypsy jazz, Fusion, M-base or ... well, if you check out jazz sites that's only just getting started on the range of tags, so you can make your own variety up. :wink:

If you try and nail down specific techniques or elements that make up jazz you can often find a style that doesn't confirm to those 'rules', but (as far as I can see) if there are any common elements at all it's two things - the beat(s) and the degree of improvisation. Jazz is often said to 'swing' in some way - even those that don't belong to the sub-genere that's actually called "Swing" (confusing, eh?...). It tend to play around with the beat in some way, rather than run straight down more traditional rails. It's hard to be precise about who does what there, but it's a sort of "you know it when you hear it" kind of thing. :) As far as I know, the term originated because certain players "jazzed around" with tunes and didn't stick to the conventional arrangements. So you could do a jazz version of any song. Or, as the multitude of tags suggests, an endless array of jazz versions.

If you Google Autumn Leaves and Youtube you'll find a huge array of versions, from crooners and pickers to hard core jazzers. For a variety of approaches I found the like of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Oscar Peterson doing it, but also Chet Atkins and Eric Clapton. They all brought their own style, spin, and appeal to it, but one version by Stephan Grappelli and Oscar Peterson almost brought tears to my eyes it was so good.

In my view, the big thing is to be able to improvise though. Although some jazz styles were at least partly orchestrated, the core jazz image for me is of players taking turns to improvise solos, often variations on a main theme. One version of this is called "trading fours" (or eights, or whatever) where one musician has four bars to do their thing and then the next takes the theme up and extends it,twists it, changes, adds, subtracts, or alters it in some way. It can be a conversation or a playful contest to see who can outdo the other, but improvising on the fly is the key. Of course that doesn't always mean inventing a new jazz style every four bars, it can use well tried approaches, but just say it's more like having a chat than reading from a book.

If you fancy having a go at Autumn Leaves, you could find a sheet somewhere with the melody and try taking the first few notes or bars of the tune, which are instantly recognisable, and play around with them. Try varying the beats to see how many different 'feels' you can get but also try to take the tune for a little walk.... stay in key but just go off in other directions. You could try repeating phrases, adding extra notes, going up instead of down, adding new ideas, or generally taking the melody somewhere else in any number of ways and then looping back to it. Hard to explain, but a lot of fun to do. Good luck with it. :D

Cheers,

Chris

http://www.michaeljames.info/listen

the bass player in my band is an awesome jazz guitarist. he teaches full time and has studied jazz for over twenty years.
he makes it look easy. here is a link to his web site. I think I linked his songs section.

I teach a lot of jazz guitarists. As Chris noted, "jazz" encompasses a lot - it's like saying you want to be a "rock" guitarist. Does that mean Stones or Pink Floyd? Sex Pistols or Jefferson Airplane? Metallica or Chuck Berry?

I think "jazz" implies a few things:

1. Complex harmony. Rock or blues uses major and minor chords; in jazz, the most basic chord is usually a 7th - major, minor, dominant, altered, extended... you need to know a lot more chords to do the tunes.

2. Improvisation. Rock reads from a script, maybe changing the delivery of the lines. Jazz is a conversation between the musicians. You agree on a starting point (the 'head' of the tune), but after that you share different viewpoints... expounding on what others did before, interjecting your own ideas, maybe even changing the subject.

3. Syncopation. Jazz plays with time. You play ahead of beats, behind beats, between beats. You change the meter, putting accents in odd or shifting places. four bars of 4/4 time plays out the same way in rock; in jazz, it might become one bar of 4/4, one of 5/4, a 3/4 and back to 4/4 - or some other combination.

4. Modulation. Most jazz tunes will change keys. Sometimes they change keys pretty often.

You don't have to do all of that at once to enjoy playing jazz. Just like a rock guitarist who knows only three chords, you can start with a few basics and play on at least some tunes.

Because jazz is so broad a playing field, the way I teach it is highly individualized; I'll try to take what a student's interest are (or what his jazz band leader has given to him or her to play) as a starting point. But I do follow several general teaching tracks...

1. A good jazz solo often starts out sounding like a continuation of the tune. This is especially true of older styles like dixieland, the "cool" jazz of the 60s, and interpretations of Broadway tunes. So a good starting point is to learn the head by heart, and start by playing around with the rhythm - play the basic melody, but make some notes longer or shorter. Use that as a jumping off point for other ideas.

2. As David mentioned, jazz uses bigger scales. Starting with your pentatonic scales, add 6ths or 2nds. Be safe at first - use them as passing tones or 'neighbor' tones (go from a b7 to a 6 and back to b7, or from b3 to 2 and back to b3). Jazz blues is a great jumping off point for this - instead of using a simple pentatonic or blues scale, pick one "outside" note and see how you can incorporate it into your solos.

3. Some jazz is modal. In a modal tune like "So What" or "Maiden Voyage", change the scale root to follow the solo - for "So What", use E Dorian over the Em7 chord and D Dorian over the Dm7 chord. 16 bars into it you'll go up a half step on each chord, using F Dorian and Eb Dorian. After 8 bars of that, you're back to E/D for another 8... then you repeat.

Jazz is very much a 'thinking' musical style, where rock or blues is largely a 'feeling' style. In a blues, you feel where the changes will happen. In jazz (at least for the first, oh 25 years or so of playing it) you'll need to count where you are.

If I'm teaching someone jazz from scratch, I generally start with the modal stuff - you can use one fingering for a Dorian scale and just change positions. Later on, you'll learn what notes are involved, and stay in one position while changing fingerings. That's great for developing your ears and counting skills. Next we do blues using altered scale notes. I'll have the student deliberately use dissonant tones and weave them into their theme. Then standards, starting with easy ones like "All of Me" or "Satin Doll" or "My Favorite Things", playing around with the rhythm of the head, and incorporating what they've learned with earlier efforts. Then maybe some tunes with Latin rhythms, like bossa novas. Eventually you'd be doing tunes like "Cherokee" or "Giant Steps"

In the meantime, remember that the goal of improvisation is to create a melody on the spot. The moment you play the first note, you've achieved that - nothing you can ever play is wrong; you've made a melody where nothing existed before. Jazz is a mix of confidence and total abandon.

And it's a lot of fun. Just jump in - you'll find that real jazzers are quite willing to help you through the rough spots.

I've only heard a few jazz albums if I am absolutely honest.........

Miles Davis - Kind of blue - which is great

John Coltrane - A love supreme - which went right over my head

Herbie Hancock - Headhunters - which is my favouite out of these

Someone played Cherokee at the night too!

three classic jazz albums. can't go wrong there.

Sorry, I missed this thread. My two cents.

I'm playing jazz guitar for a couple of years or so. As I am self taught, I like the instruction books because they define a methodology. I bought the first book by Jody Fisher: The Complete Jazz Guitar Method (they are four volumes although recently I saw there is a new edition with the four volumes in the same book). It covers the major scales and modes (I think modes stuff could be improved), basic chord vocings (basic triads, 7th, 9th, 11th, 13th... it "only" shows the extended chords, the altered are viewed in the second book), and it has many studies in which you practice as the chords as the scales.

Moreover I also learn and play jazz standards. You need to know them. Autumn Leaves is probably the most covered standard and you will find lots of information and videos on how to play. It follows the basic ii-V-I progression (almost all the standards follow that progression -modal jazz is a different issue-) you must know it.

IMHO the best of the jazz is that you can play, for example, the ii-V-I progression for a couple of hours and you can play in a different way each time you do it. Some chords can be substituted by others. Part of the fun is to try which chords and chord voicings sound better to your ears.

And also the improvisation. I follow a similar approach to Noteboat's post. First I learn the original melody. Then I try to change some notes by others or its length or the rhythm. Then I start to add new notes... Surely my solos are not the best solos on the world but I have a lot of fun!

Jazz has a lot of theory and study behind it. The modulation that Noteboat said. It is very fun to me try to analyze the song for detecting those key changes. As I said they are usually ii-V-I progressions that change from minor to major or to different keys.

And try to listen as many jazz albums you can. Guitar jazz and also horns, saxo, piano and all the substyles that Chris said. Sometimes the harmonies are not easy to follow (I am thinking of Monk, for example) and your ears must get used to.

I'd add one standard more to the David's list (which is awesome and includes many standards that I already play or I will play) and it is Blue Bossa by Dorham. It is easy, too, and it has a very beautiful melody.

Have fun and enjoy!

Well I made a start yesterday and today...... though it might be one that is one shakey ground, I've been learning "Misty" a fingerstyle jazz piece and I downloaded the video from youtube to my pc, I have been working out all the notes and writing it down in tab - I have also been trying to add the chord names to the chords using J-guitar.com so I don't know how accurate that element of it is but I really like this piece and I want to play it so that's a start. I'm 30 seconds in so far, going to try and write a bit out day by day then try and memorise it.

Here's what I thinkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk oh sorry, I got thinking about all the jazz heads I used to jam endlessly and I passed right out at the keyboard. Just kidding (sort of) break a leg.