What to play, when to play it.
The subtitle is a great summation of what is to learn to play music: what to play, when. When you are learning it all, this is the real, driving, fundamental question and purpose of what we’re doing here. We’re learning what notes to play, under what conditions and when those conditions occur.
There are lots of ways to do this. You could do what the great ones did. Go buy everything Charlie Christian recorded and listen to it religiously. See what you can pick up. And if you want to have some later influences, listen to Barney Kessel, Grant Green, Wes Montgomery. Oh, and you can’t forget Kenny Burrell. Listen, internalize and externalize.
It’s not that easy, is it? You should still listen to these cats and internalize it. It’s a lot of fun to listen to, the music will move you. Here’s a playlist that Apple put together, and it’s pretty good!
<iframe allow="autoplay *; encrypted-media *;" frameborder="0" height="450" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;background:transparent;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.music.apple.com/us/playlist/jazz-guitar/pl.f91b3bb6744846cd8e7570df4a30429c"></iframe>But wait, there’s more.
Anyway, there’s a cool method you can use to train your ear, which is to associate melodic phrases with harmonies. Whenever you hear a chord, your brain will automatically know that certain patterns are available to you, your hands will respond automatically, seemingly, as if my magic, without you having to think about it. It’s a way of learning not dissimilar to how they teach traditional martial arts, like boxing or jujutsu. Your body feels an opening and you go for it before your conscious mind can recognize it.
This is the theory behind Jerry Coker’s Patterns For Jazz. You work a lot of patterns that will show up in jazz music, you learn to associate phrases with different chords and chord sequences. You start with simple major chords and arpeggiations, and move forward to more complex harmonies and phrases.
My approach is to play these as written, with one modification. Because I play with my fingers and on a seven string guitar, there’s no way I could match the recommended tempi that Jerry wants you to use. I just can’t do it, no way. Feel free to slow them down.
There are two Unbreakable Rules of Using Jerry Coker’s Book:
Play them through, as written, with a metronome.
Play them with backing tracks so that you can hear the chord associations.
The second rule is slightly more flexible. You can use these as warmups or finger exercises that you can use while doing other things, if you want, but you’ll get the most out of it if you use backing tracks.
Here’s how you use them.
Play through each one climbing up and down the neck one string at a time, and find all the places you can play it like that. I like to move from lower strings to higher strings.
Play through each one skipping around strings. Make your skips close, at first, then far. You may get a lot out of replicating three note scale patterns when you do this.
Once you can do this, you are free to have one with editing them. Remember, a note, as written, is something like a class. There are lots of ways to play a C, for example. You can change the octave relationships between notes in the pattern. Listen to it and see how your experiments change the way you relate to the pattern.
Good luck!