Stop 3 of 8
Jazz
Swing, comping, seventh chords and the bebop language.
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Stop 3 of 8
Swing, comping, seventh chords and the bebop language.
The tour reaches a small club with low lights and a double bass in the corner. Jazz is the style that has asked the most of the guitar's harmony: four-note chords, fast changes, improvisation over every chord and a rhythm that sways. Here you will put to work almost everything from the fretboard labyrinth and the harmony observatory, but with a new question: how does this sound with swing?
Jazz was born in the early twentieth century in New Orleans and other cities of the American South, out of a mix of blues, ragtime, brass bands and the music of African American communities. Within a few decades it changed shape many times: big-band swing in the thirties, in the forties, cool, hard bop, modal jazz, fusion.
The guitar started out in the rhythm section, replacing the banjo, and could barely be heard among the horns. Amplification changed that.
Listen to the harmonic heart of jazz, the ii–V–I in C, with seventh chords:
In jazz, two eighth notes are not equal: the first is lengthened and the second shortened, roughly like the two parts of a triplet (long-short). The second eighth also tends to carry a slight accent, and beats 2 and 4 are the strong ones, marked by the drummer's hi-hat. By convention plain eighths are written and the musician swings them: writing triplets all the time would be unreadable.
Listen to this line twice: first straight, then swung. The notes are the same.
Swing isn't a fixed ratio. At slow tempos it approaches a marked triplet (two thirds and one third); at fast tempos the eighths become almost even, and what remains is the articulation: accents on the off-beat eighths, some notes slurred and others short. Each great jazz musician has their own swing, which is why you can recognise them in a few seconds.
Jazz guitar avoids open six-string chords. It uses movable three- or four-note shapes with no open strings, which keep the guide tones clear and move with little effort.
The is the chord's skeleton: no fifth, which adds very little colour. Watch the guide tones in the ii–V–I: the seventh of one chord falls a half step to the third of the next.
takes a close-position chord and lowers its second voice from the top by an octave. The result fits on four adjacent strings and sounds balanced. In this ii–V–I each voice moves a whole step at most:
comes from accompanying and also from complementing. The guitarist doesn't strum a fixed pattern; they play short chords in rhythmic spots that talk with the soloist and the drummer, and they leave silence.
The best-known rhythm is the : a chord on beat 1 and another on the "&" of 2 (dotted quarter and eighth). Hear it swung over the ii–V–I:
And the reverse Charleston, which starts off the beat and leaves beat one empty:
The opposite approach is Freddie Green's: four on the floor, one quarter note per beat, with very short three-note chords and beats 2 and 4 slightly accented. It is the big-band way of comping.
Improvising over fast changes starts with knowing where the chord tones of each bar are. A useful rule: land on a chord tone on beat one of every bar, and if it's the third or the seventh, even better, because those notes define the chord.
This original line travels through the ii–V–I in fifth position. The first bar is a Dm7 arpeggio; the second descends through G7 and ends by surrounding the target note; the third lands on E, the third of Cmaj7:
String 6, Fret 3: G2 · 1 · Root
Bebop took shape in the 1940s in New York clubs, with musicians such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. Fast tempos, dense harmony and long eighth-note lines that chain chords together. Two devices from its vocabulary are easy to hear and to use on guitar.
A reaches a chord tone from a half step below (or above), on a weak beat, so as to land on it on the strong beat. The passing note isn't in the scale, but it sounds like a path, not a mistake.
An surrounds the target note: one note above and one below before landing on it. In the line above, F and D♯ surround E, the third of Cmaj7. In this example, the first bar encloses E and B; the second reaches D and A from a half step below:
The bebop dominant scale adds a passing major seventh to Mixolydian. With eight notes instead of seven, if you descend in eighths starting on a chord tone on beat one, every chord tone falls on a beat:
G Mixolydian has seven notes. If you descend in eighths from G on beat one, the octave lands on the "&" of 4 and the chord tones get pushed off the beat. Adding F♯ between G and F gives the scale eight notes, one per eighth of the bar, and G, F, D and B (the G7 chord) fall on beats 1, 2, 3 and 4. It is a metric idea, not just a melodic one.
In a guitar trio (guitar, double bass and drums) there is no piano and no horns: the guitar is both soloist and harmony. When the bass solos, the guitar comps sparingly; when the guitar solos, it sometimes mixes single notes with chords so the harmony doesn't vanish. Wes Montgomery played melodies in octaves and then in block chords; Jim Hall turned his dialogue with the bass into an art of listening.
While someone else solos
While you solo
Jazz's shared repertoire is the standards: songs from musicals and the American songbook, plus tunes by jazz musicians, which everyone knows and everyone improvises on. Many follow the 32-bar AABA form; others, the . A method used by generations of musicians:
To listen to: Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, Wes Montgomery, Jim Hall, Joe Pass, Kenny Burrell and Pat Metheny. Choose a short solo you like and learn to sing it before you play it: it is the most direct way to get jazz swing and phrasing into your hands without sounding like a copy.
Goal: Play the drop-2 ii–V–I with the Charleston rhythm for four rounds at 120 BPM, with short chords and without losing the swing.
Goal: Improvise for two minutes over the ii–V–I, landing on a third or seventh on beat one of every bar.
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