Relaxin' at Camarillo

Repertoire: 3 of 965 - Summertime

Ah, Summertime! How apposite -- not only is it incredibly warm, but we have tall cotton, the fish won't sit still, I'm ostentatiously rich and my wife's one hot tamale. With a life as perfect as mine, it's unsurprising I think nothing of flaunting my shoddy guitar playing for all the world to see. Here's another exhibit to submit to that swelling body of evidence, a miscegenated beast that's half chord-melody, half single-note improvisation taken at 175bpm.

Summertime

The breakdown:

Intro: a very easy chord-melody that places the tune mainly on the b string around frets 5 and 3. The ending is mine own creation, a simple descent, the second chord of which is an Amin with a G in the bass (Amin7/G). I'm just telling you now as it's not annotated on the chart as I haven't discovered how to do slash chords on Powertab yet, and didn't want to spend six frustrating hours trying to work it out. The final chord is an E7b9#5, a very tense and altered chord that you've heard used to great effect in the turnaround of Miles' "All Blues." If you're unfamiliar with this chord, finger it by making a little barre for the Ab and F notes with your index finger.

Comping: After trying a variety of different accompaniment styles, I settled on a technique that is barely known in jazz and which I shall call "strumming." That decided, I spent ages trying to achieve the thin sound I like which I can only describe as "straw-like." By that I mean light and fragile, achieved with a supple wrist and no sustain -- the sort of sound you get from a Selmer rather than a Martin, and one whose provenance is undoubtedly the banjos that held down the rhythm in the first big bands. The next step is how to get that to sound nice, subtle and swinging while simultaneously bashing the crap out of your flatwounds with an inch-thick stubby. The secret (for recording at least) lies with your volume levels -- have the volume on the guitar up full, but the input volume on your recording device down as low as you can while still getting a useable signal.

Yet again, I am reminded how little time I spend on comping and how much more I should. It's really hard, so hats off to Freddie Green, Eddie Condon, John Pisano, Bucky Pizzarelli, Hono Winterstein, and all the cats what keep it locked, man.

Solo: Not much to report here. The solo starts with an Amin arpeggio played from the root on the 12th fret, followed immediately by a poorly-controlled attempt at sweep-picking the same arpeggio that sounds like someone's shoved me in the back just as I start. The rest just follows the tune's basic 12-bar blues form around easy arpeggio patterns. One thing probably worth mentioning is that when I play in a minor key, to all intents and purposes I'm actually playing in its relative major. While there's a world of conceptual difference between Aminor and Cmajor or Dminor and Fmajor, it's exactly the same notes, so why make things hard for yourself trying to remember 24 scale names instead of just twelve? As long as you remember to resolve to the root note of the minor scale every now and then (and why wouldn't you, unless you have no ears), you're laughing. This tip came from Walter, my occassional guitar teacher, another adherent of the Joe Pass/Jimmy Bruno "keep it simple" school. The final chorus utilizes the principal of melodic embellishment, i.e. taking the melody and twiddling round it. For guitar players in band settings where they're not the sole melody instrument (a sax or piano or similar), melodic embellishment is one of the best ways to start a solo. If, like me, you're both the melody instrument and the soloist in the band, starting your solo by restating the melody simply sounds like you're playing the melody all over again for want of a better idea. Quite frustrating, and also the reason why Massif Central will shortly be advertising for new players.

That's all that then, so why not sit back, pour yourself a pastis and watch Bireli show us how it's really done (warning: requires French).

An Illustrated History of Gypsy Jazz

Available in October -- pre-order from Amazon or Djangobooks.

Happy 90th Birthday...

...Charlie Christian

29th April, 1916 -- March 2nd, 1942

Here's a Charlie-esque lick... jumping from the 6th to the root to sign off an uptempo blues:

An Hour of Chord Melodies

Some months ago (six to be precise), I decided to get an hour-long set of chord-melodies together. Having taken to heart the old maxim that you can't really play guitar until you can play an hour of unaccompanied music, I collected all the old and partial charts I had, and set about making some new ones. Five months later, I triumphantly entered the living room, imperiously announced my success to my wife and started playing as she furrowed her brow and dug further into her knitting, uncertain whether she'd be able to take a full sixty minutes of noodling without stabbing me in the eye. Fortunately for both of us, it turned out I only had 35 minutes -- 35 minutes that included a free form "Blue Monk" that consisted of the head followed by 8 minutes of a wanging Bb blues. Crestfallen, I had learnt a valuable lesson nonetheless: an hour of chord melodies involves much more than playing the tune through once at lachrymose speed, requiring a quiver of skills that includes walking bass-lines, modulating keys, single line solos over implied changes, and a whole caboodle of things I basically didn't know how to do.

So, while I'm not quite ready to jump on my Vespa and play the Kinky-Balinki Coffee House and Poetry Slam, I'm halfway there at least, and flush with my recent Powertab success, I thought I'd go through and tab the arrangements I had and "weblicize" them for anyone who wants one. Here's the first I ever learned -- cloudy Django classic "Nuages":

(If you're wondering why I don't just offer downloadable Powertab files, the answer is that I'm trying to make these as useful as possible by producing simple charts that just show the chords and melody without all the nuances of arpeggiation, dynamics and fills. Really literal chord-melody charts look like a bewildering array of notes and numbers and are really exhausting to plough through. If chord-melody is relatively new to you, what you really need to see is how the melody relates to the chord choices and their relevant fingerings. In short, the Powertab files sound balls.)

Here's an MP3 of me playing it fingerstyle. You'll notice that I break the chords up a lot and play in very free time: Download Nuages.mp3

And here's a video of Dick Onstenk playing a more complicated arrangement that's much nicer than mine. More charts to follow.

(Poetry night at the Kinky-Balinki Cafe, E14th St., NYC.)

Three More Links

1. BBC Radio 3's "Jazz Legends" has a programme on Jim Hall.

2. "Guitar News Weekly" has posted my review of the Samick JZ4 courtesy of Doc Dosco.

3. Another incredible transcription site.

Creating Basic Chord Melodies

Bearing in mind the apocryphal words of the Hippocratic Oath, “First do no harm,” I thought I’d give some pointers on chord-melody arrangements for beginners. All you really need to know to produce your own arrangements are a number of different ways of playing familiar chords, or better still, knowing how to spell and construct chords yourself. Real Book charts come with chords written up top and a single line of melody notes beneath. Your goal is to unite the two, playing the harmony and the melody at the same time like a pianist.

Here’s the basics:

1. Play the chord that is written in the chart, finding an inversion of that chord that has the melody note on the b or e string. It is preferable (though not essential) to have the root of the chord as the lowest note in the inversion.

2. If the melody note is not a note in the basic chord, then add an extension: 9, 11, or 13. (If there’s suddenly too many notes in your chord, the note first to drop is usually the 5th).

3. If the melody note is not diatonic to the basic chord at all, then make the chord an alteration: b5, #5, b9, #9.

4. If you just can’t seem to make the melody note fit with the chord, or else it just sounds pony, then consider using one of the many reharmonizations -- substituting the written chord and putting another in its place. Here’s a link to the notes I took while watching Joe Pass’ “Solo Jazz Guitar” video, to which I added other reharmonization options from some books. Yes, I freely admit I am an enormous geeky tool: Reharmonization If you want to get more into it, here's a thorough "how to" article from Jazz Improv magazine.

Example:

Here’s the basic melody and chords for “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in the key of C.

So, how do you make a chord melody out of that? Well, the first chord is a C, with a C note in the melody. As I want to jazz it up a little, I’ll play a C6 at the third fret (C6 and Cmaj7 are interchangeble), with the C as the highest note in the chord . The next chord is a C with a G on top, so I’ll play a Cmaj7 at the eighth fret, thus providing me with a G on the b string. Now I need an F chord with an A on top, so I’ll play Fmaj7th at the eighth fret. The reason I’m playing Fmaj7 instead of Fmin7 or F7 is that when you harmonize the C Major scale, we find that F is the IV chord, and that in the major scale the IV chord is always a Major 7^th:

I             ii            iii          IV           V       vi         viim7b7

Cmaj7    Dm7      Em7     Fmaj7      G7      Am7     Bm7b5

Next, I want to play a G chord (a G7, because G is the V of Cmajor, and Vs are always 7 chords), with a D on top. The middle bit ("up above the world so high") uses the same voicings, until we get to measures 7 and 8 ("like a diamond in the sky") which simply repeats measures 5 and 6 except an octave higher, where I’ve used voicings that place the melody note on the top e string instead of the b string where they've all been up 'til now. I did that just to add a bit of variety, but you could just repeat the voices of the previous two measures. There are literally thousands of inversions on the fretboard, some sound sweet, some sound weird, some sound dark, some sound muddy, some sound perky, and many are impossible to reach. Here's the various inversions of the chords I’ve used, all easy and conventional grips.

And here's the full chart:

A few other things to consider:

• Ballads are best to start with as you can play them in free time and it sounds romantic instead of just off-tempo.
• You don’t need to find a chord for each individual melody note. Usually an arrangement sounds better as a combination of single and chordal playing. Using all chords can sound a bit clunking.
• Listen to the bass line you’re making as well as the melody. Does it follow its own logic? Could reharmonization make the bass line stronger? Once you’ve grasped the basics of chord-melody playing, adding walking bass lines is the next big challenge.
• Don't be a slave to the chart. If you don't like what's on it, change it. Your ears are the ultimate arbiter of what sounds good.

Three classic chord-melody recordings:

George Van Eps, Soliloquy

Joe Pass, University of Akron Concert

Johnny Smith, Moonlight in Vermont

Links to Lessons

There are many great player sites out there that feature free tips and lessons, and two of my favourites are Steve Carter's and Bob Russell's (Bob's even features a breakdown of a solo on the totemic "Relaxin' at Camarillo"). While we're at it, why not take a look at these be-bop transcriptions by a German professor who appears to write books on Theodor Adorno and Frank Zappa.

Repertoire: 2 of 965 - Body and Soul

The next instalment – "Body and Soul" as a chord melody: Body and Soul

This is the consummate beginner’s chord-melody as it's a very basic and literal approach to the original harmony that still sounds reasonably effective. Ballads lend themselves particularly well to this sort of wan rubato treatment, in my opinion, and tend to sound worse the busier you make them. Here's a chart that shows all the straight-forward, common-or-garden chord voicings, each with its root in the bass. I’ve only reharmonized once (at measure 16) where the original chart reads Cdim7 to F7#5#9, but as that’s basically a ii-V harmony that produces a kind of Sus sound in the melody, I’ve gone with Cm11 to Cm7b5 to accentuate the F natural to Eb release. This works because “Diminished Relationships” tells us that ii and V chords are interchangeable, and Joe Pass says that they’re basically the same thing. There’s a mistake too – probably many, but this is the most obvious – the “Em13b5” in the bridge is in fact a plain old Em7b5, where I just got a little over-excited by my amateur adventures in musical nomenclature. Also, I'm not sure if I need a disclaimer to prevent Warner Brothers levelling my house, torching my stables and spanking my children for copyright infringement, but here's one just in case: what follows is the author's own work, meant for educational purposes and is probably wrong anyway (click to enbigulate):

This is the first full chart I’ve ever tabbed out on Powertab, and I was really struck with what a useful pedagogical tool it is. We all know how great it is for learning licks, but this time I really saw how writing something out forced me to pay close attention to note values and chord spellings and making sure that I had the right number of beats in each bar. This is great for someone as bad at counting as me, especially as the “score checker” function tells you what bits don’t add up and where you need to make changes. It's kind of like transcribing, I suppose, and best of all, it’s completely free.

In other news: a new acoustic guitar website has started up. Funny how you can spend your entire life never having heard of Tommy Emmanuel, then all of a sudden he's the best player in the world and the frickin' dude’s everywhere.

Repertoire: 1 of 965 - All the Things You Are

So here it is: my first step on the road to Birdland, a step I almost never took thanks to this piece of maddening crap that decided to spontaneously cleanse its memory after three day's work.

Manfully, I soldiered on, though I can't guarantee that many significant moments of transcendent genius weren't forever lost. What remains is here: All the Things You Are

In honour of high summer, I took the tune at a wilted 120 bpm, setting BIAB to "Bass n' Brushes" and accompanying myself (having sacked Bill Evans' left hand after I found his right one in the till.) Before I began, I studied these videos at Jimmy Bruno's site. It looks as though Jimmy is testing out some distance learning software. More intriguingly, he also appears to be fluent in Latin. So here's my thinking:

Comping: I tried various approaches to chording this tune, including playing four-to-the-bar with the three-note chords Jimmy Bruno recommends, as well as a couple of rootless shell voicings that keep out of the way of the bass. But comping a slow tune well when it's played four-to-bar is extremely tricky (as Bucky Pizzarelli attests in this month's issue of Downbeat), so I gave up on that fairly early and tried something much looser and more arpeggiated. It's really steamy here, so I went for languid and chiming to accompany the melody as fluttering pennants accompany the stately progress of a yacht, an occasional note wafting from the background like the scent of Oleander far inland. Or something. They're bog-standard voicings on the 1-2-3-4 string-set, and because most contain the melody note on either the E or B strings, it sometimes (unintentionally) echoes the melody. One thing that surprised me was how much my hand hurt every time I played it through without stopping, which just goes to show that either I have maniacal hypertension, or I very rarely play a whole tune through when I practice.

Solo: Nothing special going on here, except the usual struggles to come up with a single decent melodic idea. I managed to stay in the correct key pretty much, even resolving to the Cmaj and Gmaj that come at the end of the A and A' section respectively. At 1.45, the bridge features the "Diminished Relationship" idea I came up with a few days ago (seemed a shame to waste it), immediately followed by a similar idea in Emaj that is a combination of an Amaj arpeggio and Cdim arpeggio that resolves to the Emajor scale. At 3.20, euphoric, and disbelieving that I'd made it that far without cocking up, I forgot myself and cocked up, and was forced to improvise a bit of the outro. Yet the really ropey bit comes at 2.08 at the long turnaround where the chords descend chromatically. I begin by playing this sort-of Wes Montgomery lick that I stumbled across:

(which is a nice lick, even though this wasn't the best place to play it) then flounder. Anyway, make your own minds up, and please do feel free to leave a comment.

A big thanks also to Lee at The Jazz Guitar Blog for linking to Relaxin' at Camarillo. Cheers, Lee. Next up, I think I'll have a pop at "Body and Soul." Finally, let's not forget what guitar playing's really about.

Johnny on Django

Johnny Smith on meeting Django Reinhardt:

A funny thing happened with Django. He was staying at the Hudson Hotel in Manhattan, and I would go up in the afternoon and we'd mess around together, or maybe I'd take him round the city. And at this time Les Paul was at the Paramount Theatre so Django and I went down there to visit him in the afternoon. After that, Django invited me to join him at this club where he was working, the Cafe Society, up town and a real hoity-toity place. I didn't even have on a tie and he hadn't shaved, and I didn't want to go in but he insisted - I had to be his guest for dinner. So we go into this restaurant and the place was full of people in dinner clothes and looking immaculate. They put us at a table way over in the corner - I guess to get us out of the way. So we sat there and all of a sudden Django picked up his knife and started banging on the table. People started looking around because by now dishes were falling off the table, and waiters ran over to try to quieten him down. They spoke French, so finally we found out the reason for the commotion: he was insulted because all the other tables had a little glass vase with a flower in it and our table didn't. And he's just tore up the joint because that was an insult!

We played together, but really, I was just listening because I'd heard him on record and I idolised this man from when I was younger. I'd save up my nickles and as soon as a new record came out I'd be right there. I used to play along with his solos and on the old record player they wouldn't last long and I'd wear them out, so I kept having to get new ones of the old ones too. He really made me realise that the guitar was a musical instrument and not just something to scrape on.

But I never heard him in his true surroundings, which would have been a French night club, and I'm sure he would have been better there than on record. I think Django was not comfortable in America with the people he was working with - it was all organised quickly. He played beautifully, but I'm sure that wasn't the true Django. A short while ago I had a letter from Don Gibson, with whom I've done a couple of records; and with the letter was a big newspaper write-up about how he had purchased Django's guitar and now he owns that Maccaferri guitar that Django used - all authenticated - and it's a really outstanding guitar.

(From an interview in Guitar Magazine,  August 1976. Transcribed on Dave Gould's Guitar Pages.)