The blues
Learn the 12-bar form inside out, comp and solo through the jazz blues in F and in every key, build a vocabulary of blues phrases, and handle the minor blues and bird-blues variations.
- Play the basic 12-bar blues and the jazz blues from memory in F, Bb and any other key
- Comp a full chorus with shell and drop-2 voicings, voice-led, with real comping rhythms and space
- Solo on the blues with the blues scale, the major blues scale and Mixolydian, and know when each one fits
- Build two-bar call-and-response phrases into a complete, well-paced chorus
- Recognise and play the minor blues and the bird-blues changes, and choose a soloing approach for each
The blues is the first form every jazz musician learns and the last one they stop playing. It is twelve bars long, it is called at every jam session, and almost every device in jazz harmony (the ii–V, the secondary dominant, the diminished passing chord, the turnaround, the altered dominant) appears in it in miniature. This module takes the F jazz blues as its home base: you will comp it, solo on it, learn vocabulary for it and then transpose everything to the other keys. The last lesson adds the two most common variations, the minor blues and the "bird blues".
Before you start, make sure you can name the notes on the neck without hesitation (fretboard note names) and that you can count and clap swing eighths and syncopations (rhythm reading); every example here is written to be played with a metronome.