Who's into JAZZ, y mean Bebop etc on non-pedal here?

[Pete Martin]

Mike’s series “A Different Slant” is great, I highly recommend it for anyone looking to study and improve!

I really tried for several months to get Red Garlands right hand chord voicings into my mandolin playing. He seemed to play almost a shell voicing in his left hand while the right hand was playing the melody with two notes in octave and either the fifth or flat fifth between. I use this on mando once in a great while, but usually for just a short burst as it needs the left hand underneath to make it sound good and of course I don’t have enough notes! Mike, I am very interested to see how you incorporate this onto the steel!

Ask me now is my fav Monk tune!

[Tim Toberer]

I wanted to bring this thread back from the dead because I finally took the plunge trying to transcribe a Bebop solo as a true test of my ADHD Lol! I made it through the first 2 chorus at .5 speed. Also transcribing it an octave lower on guitar first and hope to see if any of this will transfer over to steel. Going to take a while if I don't see a squirrel I need to chase. I didn't really intend to do this, I was just listening to one of my favorite recordings and the solo sort of chose me. Here it is, the song is called Kerouac, but it is just improv over the changes from Exactly Like You, a pretty typical fast swing tune from the day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it5SqN3aMuE

It is quite a doozy and one of the few examples of a song where I think the 7 total choruses are completely necessary and I think he could have taken 7 more easily and I would still enjoy. Some interesting thoughts about this song. In 1941 Dizzy Gillespie was 19 years old when recorded and it is probably the first stretched out Bebop solo, if not the first Bebop solo. It is also interesting because you can definitely hear Charlie Christian style phrasing, but Dizzy is doing some things harmonically that Charlie hadn't caught up to and sadly would never have the chance to as he died less than a year later. The rest is Bebop history. Trying to figure out what Dizzy was thinking is really challenging and it isn't quite what I expected. Dizzy was a master of getting that outside sound that is especially associated with Bebop. The crazy thing is this is a very approachable solo compared to his later stuff which I wouldn't have a clue on where to even begin!

[J D Sauser]

Great example Tim.

Jazz Blues. 19 years old. The years it all “blew up”!
I try to hammer that into my 15 years “old” piano pumpin’ son’s head; “play the blues”.
From Satchmo on up, Dizzy, Parker even Miles… the all jazzed up that Blues.
And guess who else started via Jazz Blues and always came back home to it… Buddy Emmons of course!

YouTube Jazz Guitar teacher Jens Larsen had a few Jazz Blues shorts out with just one comment: “If you can’t play Jazz Blues, you can’t play Jazz”.


There are a handfull of “standard” 12 Bar Jazz Blues “forms” out there.
I prefer the following because it has all, except minor ii.V.i, one needs to build upon and later venture into minor centered Blues, like Blue Bossa (maybe via Autumn Leaves):


I , IV , I , v/I7 ,
IV, #IVdim, I , iii/VI7 ,
ii , V , I/vi , ii/V

evidently the iii/VI’s can all be subbed out to Dominant or jut the VI7 played to lead into ii-

The v-minor/I7 is a ii-/V into the IV.

Triplets! Quarter and 8th note triplets… and the smooth transitions in and out of them from regular “Bebop” swingin’ 8th note playing.


I think of BB King more as a JAZZ Blues player… he’s a good source.

Bebop language, “bebopisms”, are easier to learn and apply in a form (Progression) which is constant than learning Donna Lee.


… JD.

[Tim Toberer]

Great example Tim.

Jazz Blues. 19 years old. The years it all “blew up”!



… JD.

Thanks JD, I have always gravitated towards the blues and they are an endless source of inspiration. I remember reading that BB credits Charlie Christian as his biggest influence. I don't hear it that much in his playing which sounds all BB to me, but that is the ultimate goal, to sound like yourself. My favorite "Blues" guitarist is T-Bone Walker, another Eddie Durham student. It is pretty obvious these guys were all stealing from each other. Crazy thing is how close Bob Dunn was to Eddie Durham, T-Bone Walker, Charlie Christian in Texas. They could have easily crossed paths.

Another tune from this record, Swing To Bop which is Topsy changes, has a strong Gypsy Jazz flavor even though it was written by Eddie Durham (also Charlie Christian's teacher) and I have felt for a long time Django Reinhardt's playing had a big influence on these guys in the development of Bebop. Django was such an adventurous soloist and had such a strong grasp on the tension resolution thing using very dissonant chords and holding the tension right up to the last note of the bar.

Another thing about all these guys, their solos seem to almost tell a story. I think that is the true hallmark of a great soloist. I have a lot to learn! Hopefully this process of transcribing gets a little faster and easier, because it is exhausting. It does seem to be the best way to learn however.

[Tim Toberer]

This chart shows just some of the options for arranging a 12 bar blues

[J D Sauser]

Great example Tim.

Jazz Blues. 19 years old. The years it all “blew up”!



… JD.

Thanks JD, I have always gravitated towards the blues and they are an endless source of inspiration. I remember reading that BB credits Charlie Christian as his biggest influence. I don't hear it that much in his playing which sounds all BB to me, but that is the ultimate goal, to sound like yourself. My favorite "Blues" guitarist is T-Bone Walker, another Eddie Durham student. It is pretty obvious these guys were all stealing from each other. Crazy thing is how close Bob Dunn was to Eddie Durham, T-Bone Walker, Charlie Christian in Texas. They could have easily crossed paths.

Another tune from this record, Swing To Bop which is Topsy changes, has a strong Gypsy Jazz flavor even though it was written by Eddie Durham (also Charlie Christian's teacher) and I have felt for a long time Django Reinhardt's playing had a big influence on these guys in the development of Bebop. Django was such an adventurous soloist and had such a strong grasp on the tension resolution thing using very dissonant chords and holding the tension right up to the last note of the bar.

Another thing about all these guys, their solos seem to almost tell a story. I think that is the true hallmark of a great soloist. I have a lot to learn! Hopefully this process of transcribing gets a little faster and easier, because it is exhausting. It does seem to be the best way to learn however.

I fully agree, B.B. King also “knew” Django’s playing.
In my view, Django wasn’t really a “Gypsy-Jazz” or “Jazz Manouche” guitarist in the way we tend to use those terms today. He was simply one of a small handful of early jazz-guitar co-conspirators helping to invent the language of jazz guitar itself. Django reportedly discovered jazz after hearing about a certain “Satchmo”, and that changed everything for him.

What later became labeled Gypsy Jazz is really the rhapsodic character of traditional Gypsy music that filtered into the playing of Django’s musical descendants. That flavor was already present culturally, but the jazz language he was working with was very much part of the broader jazz world of the time.

Django clearly caught the attention of American jazz musicians. After the war he was invited to the U.S. and spent time in New York, where he sat in with Louis Armstrong and other greats who were curious to meet and hear him.

Today his legacy continues strongly in the family. David Reinhardt (one of Django’s grandchildren, through Django’s son Babik) has become a phenomenal jazz musician in his own right. He spends much of the year in a camper near Samois-sur-Seine, just south of Paris, where Django spent his last years. In the summers many musicians gather there for the Django Reinhardt Festival.

From various interviews on YouTube it’s also clear that B.B. King originally thought he would become a jazz player. He studied the great jazz guitarists before him and could often be heard referencing them in demonstrations — saying things like “Django would have done this…” or “Wes would do it this way…” and then playing the examples.

But since jazz itself descends from the blues, B.B. discovered along the way that people were noticing him primarily for his blues playing. The rest, of course, is history — and in many ways it helped define what we now think of as Jazz-Blues.

Besides the harmonically expanded progressions around the traditional blues chords (I, IV, V), there’s often a common structural idea in Jazz-Blues: the “head” is sometimes built from a simple phrase in the first two or four bars — occasionally even ignoring the ii-V leading to the IV in bar five the first time around — and then the improvisation opens up and the players “jazz” or bebop their way through the rest of the form.

It’s interesting that Django himself, coming from a musical environment often centered around minor-key Hungarian-rhapsodic Gypsy music and Musette, wrote two of his earliest jazz tunes — Minor Blues (in Gm) and Minor Swing (in Am) — in minor blues forms. Those tunes already hint at harmonic ideas like the #I (the tritone substitution of the V) and the #V, sounds that later became very familiar to swing players — including steel players in the Jerry Byrd era.

The stylistic roots of Gypsy Jazz — and even Django’s Hot Club years — trace strongly back to Louis Armstrong’s approach to improvisation: outlining arpeggios, weaving in scale tones on up-beats, and resolving to chord tones on the strong beats.

In Gyspy-Jazz, that concept is still how the style is traditionally taught: first learn the chords, then the arpeggios, then add approach notes (often a half step below), and eventually enclosures. That approach is probably why the stylehas remained melodic and accessible to such a wide audience.
Today Gypsy Jazz has become a worldwide scene with festivals, dedicated guitar makers, and a thriving vintage market.
As Hyman Roth famously said in Cuba in The Godfather — “bigger than American Steel!” Ha!
(And as a side note: the “Cuba” scenes in that film were actually shot in Santo Domingo, and the hotel — the Royal Hideaway Embajador — still exists.)

And in a way, the core idea behind the style — thinking in terms of chords and arpeggios rather than purely scales — would seem especially natural for players of an instrument that is literally tuned to chords… like the STEEL GUITAR is.

... J-D.

[Twayn Williams]

J D, re: gypsy jazz — I’ve been taking my E13 6-string to my local gypsy jam, and I couldn’t agree more! Though I tend to sound a little more Western swing than I might prefer Switching back and forth between guitar and steel is a bit of a challenge at times though…

[J D Sauser]

This chart shows just some of the options for arranging a 12 bar blues

Thanks for that, Tim!



A great evolution of reharmonizing the Blues.

The “key”, in my opinion, is learning to place basic Blues language against all these evolved progressions. You can hear players like Wes, Christian, Greene and others doing that throughout the years. Sometimes to the point where, when trying to transcribe, you scratch your head — because they seem to be playfully juggling an increasingly complex progression while still navigating it so well that it can almost sound like they are ignoring the changes altogether.

Ever since Jazz — and even Blues — started being marketed as something “teachable” by schools popping up like mushrooms everywhere, the teaching often fell into the hands of either people who weren’t really deep players of the style, or players who were great musicians but struggled to explain what they were doing.

That’s when scales and near-modal shortcut concepts started being marketed to unsuspecting students: the idea that one could “just play these five or six notes” without really knowing where one is in the progression — without understanding chord tones, common tones, and the movement of the harmony. At times it even went as far as joking (or maybe not joking) about the existence of an “OBAIL” scale (Jeff Newman's “Oh Boy Am I Lost”-scale (for the rest of the wold, the Major Blues Scale)) which supposedly allows one to sound like they’re playing Jazz or Blues.

In my opinion, nothing could be further from the truth as an approach to learning. It’s reverse engineering.

Yes, great Blues and Jazz players often play with their eyes closed and appear completely detached from theory or even concepts like ii–V–I. But they learned those things so well that the knowledge simply floats in the background.

At one point I asked Buddy Emmons the classic question: “What are you thinking when you play?” Apparently I wasn’t the only one who asked him that, because it even comes up in his biography. And like others, I received the somewhat surprising answer along the lines of “I don’t really know” or “I’m not sure I’m thinking.”

But Buddy also said something important: “I’ve got pockets.”

On the steel guitar those “pockets” are chord positions tied to specific string–fret intersections. You can be pretty sure that Buddy practiced those positions while very much knowing where he was harmonically. He practiced them so much that eventually the knowledge became completely natural and just came out in the music.

When we teach ourselves, we’re really teaching our brain. And the brain works on patterns.

That’s why our brains can recognize musical styles even if we don’t play them ourselves. If someone played Bach on an overdriven electric guitar, we would still recognize the patterns and identify it as classical music — just on the “wrong” instrument.

So what we should be learning are patterns — patterns that are constant, reliable, and movable. Almost like a geographical map. Think of directions between cities, or the route from home to school, work, or the post office. Once those connections are clear and reliable, you eventually develop a mental map that lets you get from any point to any other point.

Only then can you start taking shortcuts, alternate routes, or even cut through the forest and still arrive without needing GPS.

The same thing happens in music. That’s why I strongly believe that Jazz-Blues is an ideal platform for developing patterns, shapes, and connections. The brain keeps a clear picture of the landscape, clear enough that you can wander a bit, get “lost,” and still instinctively find your way back home — which is where freedom comes from.

Every time I find myself running into a dead end — realizing I’m not quite ready for something I was trying to do — I come back to Jazz-Blues. I organize what I’ve learned, work it out there, maybe move into tunes like Autumn Leaves or Blue Bossa, and then return to the original challenge.

Each time the Jazz-Blues gets better, and I come back better equipped.
This year I’m planning to add Rhythm Changes into that cycle as well.

Anyway… I’ve wandered off again. I should probably be practicing instead... JD.