This Jazz Blues Solo is Perfect And Nobody Is Talking About It

like me you probably transitioned from playing some sort of Blues or rock into playing jazz and often one of the first things that you sort of get when you're listening to Jazz and that makes you explore the genre more is jazz blues now for getting that solar crossover sound then I think this solo is the best there is it's the perfect storm and I never hear people talk about it which is kind of surprising actually it is the perfect mix of Bebop lines and blue slicks and it's much more Dynamic than most yes but I'll explain that along the way your past just mixes that up in a really great creative way which also demonstrates just his incredible range when it comes to the music the tempo the technique pretty much everything in the toolbox is out there some of it is about the notes but that's actually a lot more going on than that Japan starts the song rubato just sort of setting the mood with some simple Blues phrases like this foreign [Music] so really what's Happening Here is of course he's just playing minor pentatonic stuff so [Music] so that's all just keep loose just basic stuff there also maybe just a side note here I think he's playing with his fingers actually I'm playing it with a pick of course but when you hear it like there is to me at least and you can of course leave a comment if you don't agree with me but I think you hear that there is this spot before each note where the finger is touching the string and muting the string and you can just hear that like this and that that's a difference because if you have Peak then that time is not so long you don't really hear that and that's why I think this is actually played with the fingers and then he brings in the Rhythm Section [Music] so this is of course just trying to be clear and set down the tempo and of course they pick it up right away probably it wouldn't have made the record if they didn't and it's just like a [Music] pretty straight ahead stuff kind of blue she still but also clearly in the court nothing sort of super fancy happening here as soon as they come in then he immediately just becomes more free starts floating around more on top of the song and it sounds like this not so much in the groove the Rhythm Section is already there and then he can play more freely on top of that [Music] more stuff that's just really centered around playing some blues phrasing and using some triplets and mixing up the Rhythm not really locking in with the groove and then he follows this up immediately just to get some gas in there with a double time Bebop line really just using more Bebop phrasing really digging into the chords and playing longer lines but of course in a double time feel so playing 16 notes on top of the Swing feel using G diminished like a huffle diminished or octonic on the G7 to resolve to the C7 so this song Joe's Blues of the Intercontinental album is from 1970 and it has Joe playing in a trio with drummer Kenny Claire and bass player Eberhard Weber so to me Weber is actually much more associated with like more modern stuff ECM recordings so to hear him in this setting playing on an album which is just mostly standards is a bit odd but he actually does it really well I really like how he's playing here I've talked about how this is one of my favorite Joe Pass albums in other videos and as far as you can tell they didn't actually rehearse to do this they just had a day in the studio and he Joe passed just called some tunes and that's what we're listening to which actually kind of makes it mind-blowing that this album is as good as it is because it's a really great album the way I was introduced to this song was as homework which was sort of scary my teacher just copied a tape of it and told me to go learn it and at the time I hadn't really been listening to Joe pass that much I'd been checking out West's wool for K news Schofield and Pat masino and this wasn't really a choice on my part it was just just because people didn't tell me to check it out or tell me what album to listen to this was before the internet so I couldn't really Google it this solo was really different from the other jazz blues things that I had heard at the time most the time when I heard yes Blues then it was a lot faster and also a lot more dense with more eighth notes like Parker playing oprivav or Billy's bounce [Music] and at those tempos then the solos are much more Bieber blinds and most of the time the emphasis really more on the Jazz side of things with phrases weaving through the chord changes and that's really not how Joe's Blues Works which is also kind of what makes it great because you wouldn't expect your past to play like this but he really Nails all the floating Blues phrases and really makes it interesting to listen to really digs into the Dynamics and the different flows that are available over this great Rhythm Section but I also want to talk a little bit about the sound on this album because I think this was actually for me personally just an important example of what a great traditional jazz guitar sound should be I always imagined that he was using his es175 into a polytone on this album but I actually don't know what it was what guitar or what ampy was using but it does kind of have that polytone vibe to me could just as easily be a fender tube amp or a music man I think there are videos of him playing both of those in Europe because this album was recorded in Germany and I also don't know actually if polyton existed in 1970 there's also quite a bit of Reverb on the guitar and to me that sounds like a plate Reverb it doesn't sound like the spring reverb that you would have in an amp which is good because I really don't like spring reverb that much and I think in many ways this is also an example of like how I felt I wanted my guitar to sound that's really something that shaped how I wanted to sound and that's also I guess what you hear my sound now I use a fair amount of Reverb and it's never spring reverb and it's kind of a dark warm tone I'm curious what you think he used and you can hear his tone quite clearly in the intro before the Rhythm Section comes in so maybe just give it a listen and let me know if you have a suggestion of what it was or maybe you know or you've read somewhere what he used one of the things that I think Joe Pass does so well in this solo is how he's taking simple blues melodies and then mixing it with guess Harmony and there are a few places where he does this this first one I want to show you is how he's taking a very basic Melody and then harmonizing in two different ways using Jazz course check this out [Music] that's just a simple phrase that's repeated so you get [Music] and the first time he's harmonizing with G7 and a57 so and then C7 and d flat seven which is a really nice way to just take a very simple Melody and then add a lot of color to it from here he sort of continues with another chord phrase and then into some six and then he kind of goes into comping mode so you have sort of these two layers towards what he's playing first he's playing some solo phrases like this and then he starts comping himself foreign [Music] so he comes out on the six intervals and then really playing a lot softer with this and just sort of filling it up [Music] and also it's nice chromatic phrase on the C7 another great example of how Joe Pass is mixing blues and Jess Harmony is in bar 9 of the form so of course Joe's Blues is a blues and G it's a jazz blues and normally in benign you would expect to hear like an A Minor 7 chord but a few times in the solo he's actually changing this to an A7 which is fairly normal to do it's not super strange that he does this but he's actually using that to create an altar dominant but then using deep blues melodies on top of it to do so and that means that he can actually play some G also sorry A7 altered phrases that are not really just the standard Jazz lines but really using G Blues phrasing on top of it that sounds amazing check this out foreign of course he's playing that A7 so we kind of have that happening in our ears and then he's playing this which is of course using flat 9 and sharp 9 on top of that A7 this is of course something he's also continuing with on the D7 he keeps playing sort of a deep loose line that creates some tension also on top of the D7 like this and then to get a contrast out of that he goes into a more Straight Ahead G major line actually he's not playing G7 really playing like tonic G major in the next phrase [Music] so really what's Happening Here is as he goes into this really Straight Ahead Bebop line really arpeggio based using some Bebop drills and that's just a nice sort of shift he keeps shifting between having the blues faces and then the Bebop phrase is happening and I think that's a really great example of how he does this [Music] so here he's really just continuing from that Bieber phrase with another way of creating some variation and actually also kind of some tension the material that he's playing the notes are really really basic so he's just playing which is just it's almost just G7 chord tones there's nothing happening with that but the fact that he's actually playing straight eighth notes on top of the groove is really making it more light giving it a lot more energy compared to if he just returned to the groove and then we'll be playing like compared to so then I think one thing that's very important about this is also to point out that this is only really possible because the Rhythm Section is playing the way that they do so they're really not doing a lot they're quite soft in volume the drummer is only playing brushes all the time and the bass player is really mostly supporting what's going on and giving Joe Pass a lot of room to do different things yes guitar is not a super Dynamic instrument so very quickly as soon as stuff gets loud I mean if you compare this to like I talked about the Charlie Parker playing a jazz blues then the drama was playing with sticks and everything is just a lot louder and the jazz guitar Trio like this quickly kind of becomes a chamber music example so the volume is a lot lower than the drummer is really just staying very much in the background but still interesting you can hear him also kind of going a little bit along with the with the even phrases on on this uh supporting that not getting in the way and not pushing the volume up which makes it possible for Joe Pass to have that dynamic range to do a lot more things so that he can go into sort of these phrases that are comping himself which otherwise you just wouldn't hear it at all and I think that's an important thing to be aware of it's something that sort of comes into fashion and goes out of fashion again when it comes to gestures like if you listen to Julian large or Gila hexelman trios then they are really embracing sort of this chamber music volume and playing really soft but then also getting to the point where the guitar player has dynamic range to really do different things that wouldn't be possible if they were just so the playing full out heavy Jazz like you would expect from the Rhythm Section playing with John Coltrane the next place that he's taking because now he's playing all these dense lines and he wants to change that up is at the top of the next chorus check this out [Music] a court with the high e in the melody all the time and then going to um C7 of course in Batu back to G7 and that way just making like the opposite of a beaver phrase but still introducing something we haven't heard before keeping it interesting another guitar player I think is really good at this that has some really strong melodic ideas uses riffs and motifs and also uses chords is with Montgomery and if you want to check out how he does this then check out this video where I talk about both his single node lines and his core solos

Channel: Jens Larsen

Views: 211,745

Keywords: blues guitar, blues in f, blues jazz, eberhard weber, how to play jazz, how to play jazz guitar, how to solo over a jazz blues, jazz blues guitar, jazz blues guitar lesson, jazz blues guitar licks, jazz blues in f, jazz blues lesson, jazz blues licks guitar, jazz blues solo, jens larsen, joe pass, joe pass blues, joe pass blues lesson, joe pass intercontinental, joe pass lesson guitar, joe's blues, joe's blues joe pass, Kenny Clare

Id: PBOpRy6ghJs

Length: 12min 38sec (758 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 26 2023