The title of this blog is taken from a Jazz Album The Blues and the Abstract Truth by Oliver Nelson recorded in 1961, well before I knew what either Jazz or Blues was. One of my favorite cuts on the LP is Stolen Moments (you can hear it here) a sixteen-bar jazz composition where Nelson used a 12 bar minor blues for the solos (an interesting idea I'll talk more about in future posts).
In this blog I will try to put down what I know about jazz after playing Jazz guitar for over forty years. Hopefully, what I have learned will be of some use to other players. When I started out, I was frustrated by the available learning materials. There was a lot of disjointed material that needed to be abstracted into something more integrated. From Abstraction might come Truth, as Oliver Nelson seemed to have learned!
