Wolf Marshall's 101 Must-Know Jazz Licks arrived just the other day, and I must say that in spite (or perhaps, because) of the feeling of being musically potty-trained, I'm rather enjoying it. Fundamentally, it's exactly what it says it is: a grab-bag of licks organized according to style from Charlie Christian-style swing to "postmodern" jazz (a truly appalling term, you'll undoubtedly agree). I've only had time to dip in a bit here and there, but already I've copped a few lines that sound like actual bits of solos and not just like me waggling my pudgy fingers up and down a major scale while hoping for a bit of melodic good fortune. It's still early days, but here's a couple of the licks I've liked so far:
(Note: in order to avoid copyright issues and keep Wolf from huffing and puffing and blowing my house down, I've transposed these licks from their original key, added or omitted notes from his exact transciption, and deliberately played them badly).
"Wolf" is a cool name, and if we ever have another boy, it's definitely going to be top of my list. Maybe even "Wolverine", and then you've got the option of shortening it if you want to.
Or at least, easier. You know the difficult bridge to "Have You Met Miss Jones?" and what a royal pain it is to find decent grips without flying up and down the neck like you're having a seizure? Well, to my great satisfaction, I've discovered that the difficult section lays itself out on string sets 1-2-3 and 2-3-4 very nicely when played using three note chords.
...or rather, the old Massif Central re-heated. So we played last night for the first time in about six or seven months and to say we were rusty would be severely under-stating the profound corrosion that has taken place since then. Musically and physically. But aside from the sheer unadulterated pleasure of being reunited with the taciturn and unlovely bastards that are my bandmates, there was a real reason to be excited -- my new guitar arrived. They shipped the EXS-IDH, the two pick-up model (thereby proving that they really don't read the customer service emails), but I have to say that I'm delighted with it and wouldn't want to change it at all. It's a good inch slimmer than my Samick which makes it very comfortable to play, and strung with flatwound .13s has a rich warm tone. The neck is dead straight, the intonation perfect, and there's not a single raised fret or dead spot anywhere on the fingerboard. It's also really nicely finished without the slightest imperfection, putting paid to the idea that they're seconds or even partial seconds. What's more, it took only six days from buying on the web to arriving at my door and it even came with an unadvertised case. The only thing is that it only came with one bridge (tune-o-matic), and I might buy a rosewood one further down the line, but that's neither here nor there -- If you're in two minds, buy one now before they come to their senses.
Here' s what it sounds like - us playing Stolen Moments recorded live in Ramos' basement last night. I'm playing through my Cube 60 with just a dash of reverb. It's recorded using the Zoom H4's on-board stereo mics with a little bit of compression, and if it wasn't for the awfulness of the playing, you'd have to say the quality is pretty good for a handheld recorder. Oh, and the news keeps getting better -- that Fender Princeton that was ruined in the flood -- it works perfectly AND I got the insurance money. Sweet!
Django's Paintings: I totally nicked these off the Hotclub.co.uk forum, but aren't they great? They look remarkably similar to the Anthony Aloisius St. John Hancock masterpieces in The Rebel (1961), one of the greastest movies ever made.
Here's two more goes at soloing over "Just Friends". The first is basically the same noodle as yesterday, though this time I'm trying especially hard to hit those arpeggios, especially that A7 to Am7 change (JF Again). The second is only a snippet, but nevertheless a snippet wherein I may have unintentionally put to practice the maxim "less is more" (JF Again Snippet).
By the way, SheetMusic Plus is having a 20% off sale on all its Mel Bay books. Get me a couple while you're there, will you?
UPDATE: I must've been completely out of my mind when I wrote this. Both clips sound exactly the same.
I've been having a horrible couple of evening's practice trying to solo over "Just Friends." Everything I try seems to sound awful and it's nothing to do with the form of the song, so much as my utterly impoverished attempts to find something engaging to play. First, I tried to cop some lines from a transcription of Chet Baker playing with Stan Getz (see below), but lacked the patience to properly learn them (I've got a real mental block/stubbon resistance to learning solos off the page. They take forever to read and they don't even begin to sound like a solo until you've been practicing them for weeks and weeks, by which time I start to feel resentful for all the time I've spent on it). Then I tried an approach based on arpeggios over the chords, and that was fine, but it just didn't sound very musical, 'til finally, I tried adding some licks in order to lend it the definable quality of a guitar solo, with varied dynamics and a developing structure, but that was an abject failure, as I realize I don't actually know any jazz licks, cliched or otherwise. To this end, it mortifies me to confess, I went to Amazon and purchased a copy of Wolf Marshall's 101 Must-Know Jazz Licks. Now I feel like I've just admitted to wearing incontinence pants.
Here's a brief snippet of me in the paralyzed throes of creative atrophy: JF Solo Snippet
This is so hard -- what's a person supposed to do?
I cannot believe my freaking luck. If you've paid any attention at all to the various jazz-related newsgroups of the world, you can't have failed to notice that the D'angelico Excels have been dramatically reduced from around $1500-2000 to $800. No one seems to know exactly why - they may be partial seconds, they may be discontinuing the line to focus on the New Yorkers, or they may just have gone mad from sniffing too much varnish - who can say? But the closeout started around late October and since then so many punters have taken advantage of the deal and posted their never-less-than ecstatic reviews that it's truly sick-making.
However, I was looking at them yesterday and telling my wife what a once in a lifetime bargain this was and bemoaning the fact that they weren't on sale in May when I was shopping for an archtop, and she said, "oh, go on then, you can have one if you want." "Are you shitting me?" I asked, but she insisted no, and deciding to take immediate advantage of the somewhat medicated look on her face, I put my order in there and then before our brief sojourn in reverso-world came to a sudden, sobering halt. Now debilitated by giddy euphoria, things didn't go that smoothly from that point, as I initially ordered a EXS-IDH -- the two routed pickup model that's closest in theory to a much-lusted-after Gibson ES-175 -- but having pressed the submit button, I decided I actually wanted the one routed pickup EXL-ISH (probably because the puff said it would make you sound like Wes Montgomery, and despite holding a PhD in critical and cultural theory, I felt that in this particular instance it wasn't advertising so much as a true and objective statement of fact.) I sent them an email explaining I'm more fickle than a teenage girl, but as their customer service is notoriously bad (presumably because they're swamped with corvine bargain hunters) now I have no way of telling what I'll actually get if and when it eventually arrives. But you know what, I don't care. Either one would be fantastic and it all adds to the anticipation and surprise. Plus, I'm so blissfully happy that I've stained the seat. I knew marrying her was the right thing to do. Knew it!
In other news, Le Massif Central (who are incidentally considering a name change, so send in your suggestions), had a meeting to discuss strategy. Little was decided, except that practice resumes next week and we unanimously agreed that our new sax player should either look like Anita Ekberg or be a seriously militant Nation of Islam dude. A combination of the two would be ideal.
The word has gone out for a horn player to join Le Massif and tomorrow we meet as a band for the first time since playing to an attic full of sausage dogs last June. With the blissful thought that soon I'll no longer be the sole melodist, I've turned to my attention to practicing comping in a band setting. Having just looked at two note chords, this weekend I've been playing about with triads. These three note chords omit the root, but include the 3rd, 7th, and a.n. other note, depending on what you think sounds good. Having courted the opinion of the Yahoo Jazz Guitar group, most kind respondents said to add 9ths or 5ths, and Steve Carter of Frogstory records offered the following handy little rubric for deciding what goes in and what stays out: "First, play the 3rd and 7th on strings 3 and 4," he says, "then add the root or the fifth...on string 2." Next choose your substitutions: 9 for 1; b9 for 1; #9 for 1; 13 for 5; b13 for 5; #13 for 5.
(If you aren't already familiar with it, you must check out his site, undoubtedly one of the best for free jazz guitar lessons on the web. I've been working with his bassline etudes for a while, and was pleased to be reminded of his several 3-note chord studies.)
Anyway -- to practice the 3 note approach, I started comping "Just Friends", and here's what I came up with. Unaccompanied, it sounds like this: Unaccompanied Comp; which when you add bass and drums, goes a little like this: Accompanied Comp. I thought it sounded alright, and was pleasantly surpised at how well the fingerings came together, and how relatively simple it is to get a nice bustling little accompaniment out of the middle voice of the guitar. I also made a PDF chart of what I was doing. As you'll see, the three note thing is not rigorously applied to every chord, and while it shows the fingerings, it doesn't reflect how it's actually played at all as it omits rhythmic effects like bumps (those bits where you jazzily move up or down a fret for effect), and the other notes I occassionally add for a beat (like when you used to add that note with your little finger on an open D back in the days of pot and mullets). As Relaxin' at Camarillo readers are not utter morons, I'll leave it to you to work it out.
The next step is improvisation, but as I'm feeling utterly destitute when it comes to soloing ideas, this time I've decided to copy significant sections of someone else's and see if that opens any doors, sheds new light, etc. It has to -- no one has ever professionally recorded a solo that sounds worse than mine. And I include Tony Iommi in that.
To leave you, here's a clip of Jim Hall and Sonny Rollins playing "God Bless the Child", from Sonny's album "The Bridge", named in honour of the period he spent practicing at midnight on the Williamsburg Bridge, blowing nightly into the chill Gotham wind -- a studied piece of modernist Bohemianism if ever there was one. That album is a must-listen for would-be compers, as Jim's accompaniments are sublime. In this one, he manages to sound like a piano. Respectfully offered to the memory of Michael Brecker and Alice Coltrane.
I don't know about you, but I'm completely frazzled by this YouTube thing. Yesterday, I watched a seven minute video of an Italian woman parking badly. The day before, I watched teenagers fall off things and hurt themselves. Life under the Taleban has never seemed so appealling. My new new year's resolution is to watch nothing but Bob Erwig's Jazz Films.
