Learning and playing stuff

Not necessarily the Miles Davis song, although, perhaps, the Miles Davis song, which is a killer Miles Davis song.

We’ve talked a bit so far about tools and some patterns, but not about what we’re trying to do when we say we want to learn to play jazz guitar, which, big surprise, is a fraught topic with a lot of heat and not always a lot of light. But, to go back to the subtitle, that is a pretty killer Miles Davis song, from the same album that, one song later, had Big Bad Benson on the guitar.

So, light, heat and jazz. The big problem here is that people want to fight about what is and is not jazz. Is it a repertoire, is it a tradition, is it a method, is it a term that means, “improvised music” ? It’s easy to get hung up, here, and it’s also not a good idea. This kind of hangup is what software developers call “bikeshedding”, in that it’s a trivial problem, without much of an obvious solution and it’s a great way to take up time, seeming productive, smart and insightful, while accomplishing nothing.

So, how do we decide what to learn, how to learn it, and what to play? Let’s start by putting some good limits on things to make decisions possible.

• Whatever “jazz” is, “jazz guitar” is playing jazz with and on a guitar.

• We treat jazz as we would any other style of music, meaning that it has, but is not exhausted by,

  • repertoire/canon

  • technique

  • style

  • tradition

  • learning methods

• We have a pretty good idea of what jazz is by looking at the consensus over time

  • Players

    • Musicians

    • Groups

    • Orchestras

    • Composers

  • Recordings

    • Songs

    • Albums

    • Live performances

The latter point is critical. We don’t have to worry about edge and corner cases, like Pat Metheny or Shakti. We can just enjoy what everyone already agrees on is jazz. And it turns out that there’s a lot of documentation on these consensus entities.

So, what are we going to learn and practice? We’re going to learn jazz by learning the songs that make up jazz.

In learning to play these songs, we’ll be working to learn the songs as songs, straight ahead, but, also building a sense of vocabulary that comes from them. Most of these songs are in a canon that we call “standards”, meaning that it is part of the standard repertoire that we are expected to know. And, by know, we mean that we should be able to sit in with a band playing them or play them, using a reference, like a lead sheet.

This set of standards can be described as having many sub-sets, and you’ll find that subsets can be defined in lots of ways. There will be many songs that are based on similar chord progressions, for example, because jazz is not unlike any other music this way. There’s an entire grouping of songs that are based entirely on the changes for “I Got Rhythm”, by George and Ira Gershwin.

1These changes are so common that they’re just referred to as “rhythm changes”. Here’s a sampling of what Spotify has on it.

Then you’ll find songs that follow a II-V-I progression (see footnote), which I always think of as the “Autumn Leaves” progression.

There are many, many more subsets, but these are two very common ones.

So, picking songs. How to pick, what are the criteria? Here are some things to consider.

1. We want the song to be relatively easy.

2. We want the song to teach us a lot about jazz by teaching us something that many songs will have in common.

3. We want the songs to be fun to play.

4. We want the songs to easy configurable and able to be played in many different ways.

I recommend not trying to learn more than a few songs at a time. Focusing on just one is hard for me, but it is a good idea. Looking at a few at a time, or in close sequence, may help.

Here are some that I think will work well.

1. Satin Doll (Ellington/Strayhorn)

2. Sweet Georgia Brown (Bernie/Pinkard)

3. Autumn Leaves (Kosma)

Every one of these songs has been played by many, many different people in many, many ways and can show us lots of great things. They’re also songs that I happen to like quite a bit, and there are lots of arrangements available. Moving forward, practice sessions will be about these songs.