Can't Get The Music Out of My Head

Here are a number of things guitarist Brad Carter is not doing in the video clip above:

• Trying to get the music out of his head
• Taking a break during brain surgery
• Warming up for a Lady Gaga Concert
• Trying to reduce his health care costs by bartering a free concert with the OR staff

To get the incredible answer, you'll have to watch the video.

How to Warm Up For a Practice Session

Jazz Guitarist Matt Warnock recently posted this picture on his Facebook page (here and, no, I really don't look like the guy in the picture, yet). Matt was asking his followers if they had "Any big practice plans for the weekend." A few of them responded asking for suggestions. I can only pass on what my guitar teacher, Roy Plumb, suggested as a warm up exercise other than 2112 By Rush.

Warm Up Exercises by George Pasdirtz

The idea here is to play the ascending 1-3-2-4 pattern on each string and the descending 4-2-3-1 backwards on the same strings after which you move up a fret and repeat the entire pattern until you've reached the 12th fret (hit the "play" button above the score to here the exercise). As your finger strength, dexterity and technique improve you can, when reaching the 12th fret, do everything in reverse back down to the 1st fret. Another option is to make the shift up a fret when your fourth finger reaches the E-string (on the high E-string, 1-3-2-4 shift 4-2-3-1, etc.).

After this, you should be warmed up and ready to play. And, weirdly enough, I find myself using some of these patterns as scales (for short periods) in a solo. I have also heard jazz guitarist Jim Hall mention that he soaks his hands in warm water before playing. I have tried to play in the morning right after showering and it just rips off my calluses, so I'm not sure how he does this, but I'm not sure how Jim Hall does a lot of things (more on that in future posts).

NOTE: If you find any errors in the pdf file, let me know. You can also find the .pdf file and the .msc file (for MuseScore, if you have it loaded on your machine) here.

Developing Jazz Guitar Sight Reading Skills

In the last post (here), we started with pretty basic material covering scale-tone seventh chords and arpeggios. The angel on my shoulder says "you have to learn this stuff and there are no short cuts or tricks" while the devil on my shoulder is saying "man, this is really boring stuff, yawn". I just read a post by jazz guitarist Matt Warnock (here) that could help with the devil that just wants to start improvising.

Matt's post was about sight reading skills, how generally poor these skills are among jazz guitarists and finding interesting ways to develop these skills. For myself, I'm great with the top two and the bottom two strings, but not so good with the middle two strings. The reason is simple: I've played a lot of charts written out in the correct register for guitar (an octave higher than the standard lead sheet) and those charts largely make use of the top two strings for melody and the bottom to strings for naming the chord changes (e.g., root position G7 can be played in either 3E or 10A--I'll introduce more of this in future posts). The important point here is that we learn by doing. But what you do is important. Although being bored is also important to jazz creativity, playing obscure sight-reading exercises may be just a little too boring.

Matt's suggestion is brilliant. Get a copy of The Real Book, start on page 1 and sight read four songs a day. Don't worry about fingering technique, use fingerboard charts (here and here) when you get stuck, but just plow through this concentrating on reading the notes and playing the tune. Play everything as written without transcribing up an octave. Since you will know most of the tunes (if you don't, find them on YouTube and get familiar--this is part of learning the jazz book), you will also know when you hit a wrong note.

Another way to do this is to print and play four Wikifonia lead sheets (here) every day. When you are just starting, pick songs you have heard before. As you get better, (1) pick songs you don't know and (2) transpose songs into different keys, increasing the number of flats and sharps over time. Don't annotate the songs for fingerings. Just play and move on.

Matt suggests going on to comp the chord progressions as if you were accompanying a singer, being careful not to conflict with the singer's melody line (which you already know at this point). If you have the The Real Book (pretty much a necessity if you want to work with other jazz musicians), chord comping works great. The changes are quite accurate and sophisticated (in a future post, I'll provide a simple explanation for how to play any root position chord you might find in The Real Book). If you're using the Wikifonia lead sheets, you might run into some problems here since not all the chords are accurate (John Mehegan has a lesson on page 201 of the Jazz Improvisation book titled 'Sheet Music Conversion' which may be necessary for some Wikifonia lead sheets and I'll cover it in a future post, but we need a lot of jazz theory first).

Matt has a number of other great suggestions and I strongly recommend reading his blog entry on Jazz Guitar Sight Reading Skills. The other suggestion I would have is to write a lot of music, but more on that in a future post. For now, here's an example exercise:

Ex. 1 Download four versions of Sunny from Wikifonia (here). Use the "Transpose" button on the right side of the page and choose "+3 (3 flats)" for the first (key of E flat major),  choose "+5 (1 flat)" for the second (key of F major), choose "-5 (1 sharp)" for the third (key of G major) and finally choose "0 (-)" for the fourth (key of C major). Play the melody for each version without annotation. Play the melody in both single-note and octaves. Play each at different positions on the fingerboard (for the E-flat key signautre, try the third and the tenth fret). Then, return to a question posed in an earlier post (here): Does Wes Montgomery make any key changes in his version of Sunny (here)?

Jazz Guitar Basics: Scale-Tone Seventh Chords

Closed Form Arpeggio Chords by George Pasdirtz

In a prior post (here) I wrote out a simplified Wes Montgomery-style solo in octaves based on the C-minor scale. In my first attempt to play Sunny, forty years ago, I tried to play a harmonized version of the song and failed. I just didn't have enough background information and basic musical knowledge to do what I wanted to do. Even if I had been shown how to play the octave solo, I wouldn't have known why I was using the C-minor scale and what, if anything, it had to do with the song.

In this post, I'll start developing the necessary musical theory. I think that my guitar teacher, Roy Plumb, somehow assumed that I had received some background in musical theory, maybe playing some instrument as a child, but I hadn't. In any event, I would have been way too impatient to plow through all of this. After forty years of playing jazz guitar, I can only say to the person I was in 1970: "You need to do this".

"This" will essentially be working through the first few sections of John Mehegan's Jazz Improvisation book and translating it from piano to guitar. I strongly suggest you order the book. I am only going to provide enough to make it useable by the jazz guitarist. Part of the learning process will be to work through the rest for yourself.

The central argument in Mehegan's book is stated in the introduction to Section V Arpeggios:

The basic problem of jazz improvisation is to abandon the melody and build an improvised line on the elements of the chords in a tune...The chord elements are as follows: (1) Arpeggios; (2) Scales; (3) Chromatic tones (p. 53).

This will involve doing a lot of exercises with arpeggios, scales and chords. Mehegan argues that this is precisely what jazz musicians do and, back in 1970, I would have been skeptical. In future posts I will try to prove this argument by playing video of a Mike Stern master class where he describes how to improvise on the song Autumn Leaves and also a video analysis of John Coltrane's solo on Giant Steps (if you want to skip ahead, the videos are here and here). If you have an ear for jazz, the videos will tell you that Mehegan is right and that he accurately describes jazz played at its highest level.

The sheet music at the start of this post is divided into Figures.  This is a lot of basic, necessary background material on music theory and the briefest way to present it is by describing each Figure for you to work with yourself (you can right-click on the sheet music, "Open Image In New Window," and   print the window out for your personal study).

Figure 1. C Major Scale  Western music has evolved based on the diatonic or major scale (you can read more of that history here). In the C-major scale, there are seven distinct notes identified with consecutive letters starting with C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C. The intervals are T-T-S-T-T-T-S where T is a whole tone (two fret interval on guitar, a major second) and S is a semi-tone (one fret interval, a half step).   A to A would be the natural or relative minor with intervals T-S-T-T-S-T-T (to be discussed below).

Figure 2. Closed Form Chords in Thirds Diatonic harmony builds chords in thirds with each successive scale tone forming the lowest note, the root of the chord. The notes are described by root, 3rd, 5th and 7th. In John Mehegan's words "Chords of less than a seventh are insufficient for jazz (p. 11)". Chords that contain degrees greater than a seventh (9th, 11th and 13th) are considered complex chords, which I'll discuss in a future post. The Roman numerals under each chord (from I - VII) are called Figured Bass Notation. They are the "Abstract Truth" of music theory for the jazz musician and open up a more general understanding of chord progressions and "where chords come from" (much more about that in future posts). Songs never follow the chords in order from I-VII (to hear this, hit the "play button" at the top of the sheet music above). A common chord progression in Figured Bass might be II-V-I, for example, as an ending to a song. Figured Bass lets us abstract from Am7-G7-Cmaj7 chords and see the underlying abstract structure of the progression. It's important to note that, due to standard guitar tuning, the closed form chords in Figure 2 are generally not playable (more about that below). The chords can and should, however, be played as arpeggios.

Figure 3. Intervals John Mehegan makes the point that "No jazz musician thinks of lettered chords when he is playing; he hears interval steps based on the distance between one chord and another" (p. 8). Figure 3 shows the basic intervals of the C scale with guitar fingerings. The name of the interval is given beneath each interval and below the name is the guitar string where either the second or first finger of the left hand sounds the note. The finger used to sound the upper note of the interval is indicated by the note. The string on which to play the upper note can be found on the Fingerboard Chart (here). You are already familiar with the octave fingering (the 8th) from a prior post (here). The notes for the other intervals are found either within or above the octave. Here is your chance to start playing something that is important for understanding both music theory and improvising. A lot of interest in jazz solos is generated when you play an interval other than a 2nd (chromatic tones) or 3rd (chordal tones). Learn to hear, sing and play these intervals to let your ear tell you where to use them in a solo. For sure, be able to hear, sing and play middle C and then be able to work up to intervals from there (these are the first steps in ear training, an essential skill for jazz improvisation).

Figure 4. Interval Groups Intervals can be further classified into groups: P for perfect, S for secondary, o for diminished, + for augmented, M for major and m for minor. The interval group names are used to describe the qualities of chords (discussed in a future post).

Figure 5. C Major Scale in Two Octaves, A-string Unlike the piano where the notes are sitting in front of you (once you've located middle C) as either white or black keys, guitarists have to rely on fingering patterns and, because of the standard guitar tuning (E-A-D-G-B-E), there are different patterns at different points on the finger board.  The first step in learning the fingerboard and fingerboard patterns is to start playing scales. Figure 5 shows the C-major scale in two octaves starting at the 3rd fret of the A-string. For this scale, I've annotated not only the fret and string (second finger of the left hand on 3A, to start) but the finger to play each note on that string. When you change strings moving up the scale, for example from the A-string to the D-string, the position for the next note is shown at the appropriate fret (first finger at 2D, for example). The last fingering annotation, +4, indicates that you move the fourth finger up to get the final note, which is high D in this case.

Figure 6. C Minor Scale, A-String The fingerboard pattern for the C-minor scale should be somewhat familiar to you since you used the C-minor scale to play the octave solo for Sunny (here). However, to make things more complicated, this scale is different from the one used in Sunny. It is the Ascending Melodic Minor scale (also know as the jazz minor scale) and has only one flat (1 2 -3 4 5 6 7 8).  The scale played in Sunny is called the Natural Minor scale and has three flats (1 2 -3 4 5 -6 -7 8). There is yet another minor scale called the Harmonic Minor scale and it has two flats (1 2 -3 4 5 -6 7 8). And, to top it off, the Descending Melodic Minor scale is the same as the Natural Minor Scale. Confused yet (I'll talk about this in a future post after we've had more music theory)? To play the jazz minor scale as single notes, a different fingering pattern from the major scale is used starting with the first finger on 3A. Notice that the first G-note in the scale is annotated as -4; this means that the fourth finger is positioned one fret lower than normal. This is because we are about to make a pattern shift to having the first finger on 2G for the A-note. Extra Credit: work out the fingering for the relative minor scale (A-minor) discussed in Figure 1. Extra Extra Credit: work out the fingering for the Natural and the Harmonic minor scales in C. Play the Ascending and Descending Melodic Minor scales together. Listen to the differences.

Figure 7. Arpeggios C Scale Fingerings Within the pattern for the C-major scale, we can find patterns for arpeggiating each of the chords in the scale. In the annotation, I have just indicated the string on which to play the chord's root and the fingers to use in playing the other chordal tones. I leave it to you to find the correct string without shifting position. For reasons I will discuss below, once you learn the various finger board patterns for playing each chord, you will find it easy to simply annotate the fret, string (3A, for example) and the left-hand finger to use, 2 for example.

Figure 8. Arpeggios Octave Fingering Since you are already familiar with octaves from playing Sunny (here), thinking in terms of octaves generates some very easy finger board patterns to play and remember. Once you know the fingerboard, you can use these patterns to arpeggiate any chord at any point on the fingerboard. For now, concentrate on identifying the pattern you are playing and where the notes are located on the fingerboard; your goal is to read the notes, not to read the fingerings.

Figure 9. Ending Example I With the knowledge you've developed so far, you can play a simple improvised ending. The progression in Figured Bass notation is I-II / III-IV /V-VI-VII-I / I6. I will leave the fingering to you but first play it starting at 2A and, as extra credit, try to play it again starting at 8E with different fingering. The C6 final chord is a great jazz guitar barre chord played by pressing down multiple strings with the first and second fingers (work at this chord until you can sound all the notes cleanly as a prelude to block chord playing, to be introduced in future posts).

Figure 10. Ending Example II To confirm my initial statement that very few closed-form chords can be played on guitar, I've provided another ending example that uses two closed-form chords, D flat maj7 and C6. At the end I provide another C6 chord that can be played at 7D with an open A-string annotated with 0 (zero). Extra credit: Why can't we play all the closed form chords as block chords?

Figure 11. Name That Tune For extra credit, here's a progression that I really don't expect you to be able to identify but that I will reveal in future posts: VI / II Ix. For now, use it as a brief sight reading exercise.

Figure 12. Guitar Range There are two effective ranges for guitar depending on the type of guitar. For a classical guitar, the effective range stops at high E (or slightly above it for single notes). The electric jazz guitar with a cutaway can go all the way up to high B or slightly higher.

Figure 13. Double Octaves To round out your ability to play octaves, you can also play double octaves as Wes Montgomery does on the song Bumpin' on Sunset (starting at 1:48 in the video until about 2:50--this may well be the ONLY recorded, prolonged playing of double octaves in the history of jazz guitar and you can find the solo written out in the Wes Montgomery Jazz Guitar Method which may now be entirely out of print and unavailable).

Figure 14. C Major Scale in Two Octaves, E-string Here is the answer to the extra credit question in Figure 9. It is also important (particularly for writers and arrangers) to realize that you can play the same named note in at least two different places on the guitar. The notes are in different registers and sound different, that is, have a different colour (for example, play middle-C at 3A or 8E and listen to the difference). For this reason alone, annotation is very important. If the score isn't annotated, the guitarist will have to make some decisions about which register to play chords in and do the necessary annotation before playing.

Figure 15. C Minor Scale in Two Octaves, E-string Here is the fingering for the C-minor (jazz minor) scale. Concentrate on reading the notes and learning the pattern.

The reason that these exercises are subtitled "Creativity Through Boredom" is that the path to jazz improvisation is through the boredom of arpeggio, scale and chord exercises. The necessary path to really understanding a lead sheet such as Sunny is through playing the melody, arpeggiating the chords, trying different scales (such as the C-minor scale), playing accompaniment chords (comping) and developing chord solos. All these will be covered in more detail in future posts. But the idea is always the same: play these as exercises until you know the song by heart. The minute you start becoming bored, abandon the exercises and do something you find more interesting. At this point, you have the  necessary intimate understanding of what you're doing to start being creative. You hope that your audience also finds it interesting!

NOTE: If you find any errors in the pdf file, let me know. You can also find the .pdf file and the .msc file (for MuseScore, if you have it loaded on your machine) here.

"That Doesn't Work, Does It?"

One of the questions raised by my last post was: How does a Jazz musician come up with chord progressions that are somehow "better" or more interesting than the ones provided in a commercial lead sheet? In future posts, I will use this question to motivate a detailed look at Jazz harmony--a topic about which I knew nothing when I started trying to play Jazz guitar. But first, I want to play my favorite clip from the movie Amadeus (above) since it provides a wonderful illustration of Jazz improvisation.

In the first part of the clip, the composer Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) is seen composing a "March of Welcome" to be played by Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II (Jeffrey Jones), a patron of the arts and amateur piano player, at the Emperor's first meeting with Mozart (Tom Hulce). Salieri is seen noodling around at the piano trying to come up with a melody line which, when it falls into place, he thanks God for the inspirational moment.

The scene then cuts to the Emperor trying, not very successfully, to play Salieri's March as Mozart enters the room not knowing that it is the Emperor at the fortepiano. As the Emperor continues to play, Salieri beams with pride over the accomplishments of his illustrious student. Upon finishing the piece, the Emperor offers the manuscript to Mozart as a remembrance. Mozart claims not to need the manuscript because he has already, on one hearing, memorized the piece. The Emperor asks him to prove it and Mozart sits down at the pianoforte and plays it through once flawlessly.

On the second time through he starts critiquing the piece and starts improvising over a more sophisticated harmonic line, transforming Salieri's "trifle" into the "No more gallivanting" march from the Marriage of Figaro.

Essentially, this is the process of Jazz improvisation:  try to get the composers intent from either hearing the song (if you have great ears like Mozart) or reading the sheet music. You are probably going to find the sheet music a little boring, as Mozart did,  so you go about adding chord changes "that work better" and a more interesting melody line. It helps to have a good understanding of Jazz harmony so you don't have to sit at the piano, as Salieri did, and pick out notes until you figure something out.

Amadeus is one of my favorite movies. It sets up the conflict between genius (Mozart) and mediocrity (Salieri) so beautifully. Salieri is a good enough musician and composer (he was quite good, quite popular in his time and his music is still played) to know genius when he hears it and to know that he isn't at the same level. One can be sympathetic!


NOTE: If you can't wait to find out the answer to the question posed at the beginning of this post ("How do Jazz musicians come up with chord progressions that work?), start reading Lesson 76. on page 201 of John Mehegan's Jazz Improvisation: Tonal and Rhythmic Principles. If you get lost, back track to the beginning of the book and work your way back to page 201. If you are a Jazz guitarist, in future posts I will work my way slowly through Mehegan's book, which was written for piano, and translate the main ideas to guitar.

Wes Montgomery -- Sunny

Sunny by George Pasdirtz

I'm going to skip a bit ahead and layout an octave solo with a re-harmonized chord progression for Sunny (the first song I tried to play on jazz guitar--the background for this lesson is in earlier posts, particularly here). You can compare the octave solo and re-harmonization to the original lead sheet (you can download a MuseScore file here, but you will have to change the key to Eb/Cm). I'll explain how to play the chords in a harmonized solo and the music theory behind the reharmonization in later posts. For now, I'll just describe the octave solo and give you a challenging assignment to work on once you can play the octave solo.

The notation here is similar to the last post that showed the fingering for playing the C-minor scale in octaves (here with fingering charts here and here). To avoid clutter in the fingering above, I've just provided notation at the start of a sequence of notes that are played on the same strings. For example, we start the song playing an octave using the first finger on 5D (the fifth fret, third string up from low E) and the fourth finger on 8B, skipping the G-string in between. I don't change the fingering notation as long as we stay on the same string. When we change strings, for example in the second half of the second measure, the new fret position is annotate below (since the 1-4 fingering pattern stays the same, it is not changed). If you need help at any point with the fingering, go back to the C-minor scale in the previous post (here) where every position is identified for every note. The finger notation will eventually be reserved for difficult passages or where you want to make sure to start at a particular position on the finger board (since there are multiple places to play most notes). Right now you should be concentrating on learning where the notes are on the fingerboard.

Hopefully, while you are learning the octave solo you are also listening to the Wes Montgomery version of Sunny (here). Listen particularly to the jazz guitar approach which is hard to capture in notation (to play the stilted midi version of Sunny, hit the "Play" button in the upper left-hand corner above the score). Try to move your solo closer to Wes' approach. Also notice that the last two measures of the song are used as an introduction and as an extended vamp (or ostinato) after the first two improvisations.

Once you can play the octave solo, start listening to Wes improvise on the second and third times through the tune. Here's your assignment: does Wes continue playing in the same key or are there any key changes? If so, how many key changes and to what keys does he change? In a future post, I'll return to this issue as well as to the extend vamp after the first two improvisational choruses (HINT: Wes' entire approach to this tune can be described as a vamp or ostinato).

NOTE: If you find any errors in the pdf file, let me know.

"Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use."

Wes Montgomery Jazz Guitar Method: Octaves

The exact path I took to learn how to play block chords as Wes Montgomery did on Too Late Now is a little blurred after over 40 years of studying guitar. My guess is that after hearing Too Late Now I realized that I would have to start out with a simpler tune and purchased other Wes Montgomery records, most of which were in my collection until very recently. My guess is that I bought the album California Dreaming which was released in 1966 and maybe a few other of Wes' pop records (although critics consider these songs pop fluff, they are great for learning Jazz guitar). In any event, my search for a simpler tune ended up with Sunny by Bobby Hebb (Sunny is one cut on California Dreaming you can download from iTunes or listen to Wes play here). I also, at some point, purchased the Wes Montgomery Jazz Guitar Method.

With sheet music for Sunny from Patti Music (in Madison, WI) and some instructional books, I somehow figure out how to play enough chords to get about 3/4 of the way through Sunny, but then got stuck or at least realized that I needed help. I started asking around about guitar teachers and everyone pointed to Roy Plumb. I played 3/4 of Sunny as my audition and told him I wanted to play like Wes Montgomery. Roy must have had an opening (I had to be available at a specific time every week during the day) and what I played or said was good enough to get me in (I have heard that he turned away some Rock musicians who would eventually become his students).

What I'd like to do in the next few posts is look back on that period with what I know today and fill in some of the stumbling blocks that faced me in trying to play a Jazz version of Sunny. What I'm going to assume is that if I got anything useful from instructional books, it was from the Wes Montgomery Jazz Guitar Method (last I checked there was one used book available on Amazon, but it is probably quickly going out of print and out of circulation), so I'll start there.

C Minor Scale in Octaves by George Pasdirtz

The book starts out explaining how to use your thumb for single-note playing. The sample given is the break from Tear It Down. I doubt that I even tried to play the excerpt (I still can't play it at speed with my thumb)! The book moves on to octave playing with some simple exercises. I probably worked on these since Wes plays mostly octaves on Sunny (I'm not sure if I actually played octaves for my audition). The technique is illustrated in the photos above. From the guitar fingerboard (here and here) you can see that octaves (the same note, one octave higher) can be found either three of four frets higher (depending on the string) if you skip one string in between. The left-hand technique involves playing the lower note of the octave with the first finger, deadening the next string with the first finger and then finding the higher octave note on the next string either with the third or the fourth finger. The right-hand technique can either involve playing with the thumb, playing with the first- and third-finger using Classical guitar technique (sometimes called parallel octaves), or with a pick.

One very important point about octave playing comes from Jesse Gress in a Guitar Player article (here):

The trick with octaves is to focus on either the lower (my personal preference) or upper notes only and let the higher octaves “shadow” the lower notes, or vice versa. 

I have tried both concentrating on the lower and the upper notes of the octave when playing and typically I concentrate on the lower note in descending lines and the upper note in ascending lines. Symptoms that I have lost my concentration are usually not playing a clean octave, that is, sounding the strings that are supposed to be deadened or playing a 7th interval rather than an octave. If you're having these problems, concentrate on playing one note in the octave and let the other note take care of itself (let it "shadow" the primary note).

The staff above has some better notation. The fingering is shown to the left of the notes and the fret and string for the first finger is given below. The first note of the C minor scale (in the Key of E flat) starts at the third fret of the A-string and the octave higher C is played on the G-string (skipping the D-string) on the fifth fret. Notice that when we get to the D-string, the first and the fourth fingers are used (the right photograph in the picture above). I've also added a few more extra notes in the last measure to complete all the notes you would need to play the Wes Montgomery version of Sunny in octaves. Also notice that if you start in the second measure with E-flat and go to the second note of the last measure, you have the E-major scale. Why the E-major scale is contained within the C-minor scale (or actually, vice versa) will require an understanding of some music theory which I didn't have when I started playing but will explain in future posts.

Octave playing is a great initial exercise for learning the keyboard and building hand strength, speed and precision playing. Play the C-minor scale linearly from C-to-C and then try to skip notes and create improvised ideas. Try to find other notes from the C-minor scale at other places on the keyboard and try building them into your solos. Learning the guitar keyboard is no trivial matter. The white and black keys are not sitting there staring at you along with middle-C on the piano. Try writing out your good improvised ideas and note the correct fingering.

The reason I chose the C-minor scale in the key of E-flat is that it is the scale Wes Montgomery used to improvise on Sunny and the key he plays the song in. The first four measures of Sunny are displayed above. You should have enough information now to play these measures. When I explain block chords (the symbols above staff), I will provide notation for the chords and get into not only chord solos but also single note solos, which Wes does not use on Sunny but which we could try to imagine and play for ourselves. In future posts, I will also discuss what to do with sheet music when the chord notation is incomplete or even wrong (see the lead sheet for Sunny at Wikifonia here, change the key using the "Transpose" feature changing it to "+3 (3 flats)" and compare the first four measures above). These are all the problems I ran into when I started playing. Now they look easy, then they were insurmountable without help.

For today's aspiring Jazz guitarist, there is a wealth of information available on the Internet: YouTube videos of great players (Wes Montgomery, Pat Martino, Kenny Burrell, George Benson,  George Van Eps,  Barney Kessel, Joe Pass, Larry Coryell, Lee Ritenour, John McLaughlin, Emily Remler, Steve Kahn, Pat Metheny, Gabor Szabo, Attila Zoller, Jim Hall, John Pizzarelli, Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, Ximo Tebar, Graham Dechter, Bireli Larene, Philip Catherine, John Scofield,  Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana,  Stevie Ray Vaughan, Mike Stern, and many others) video Jazz guitar instruction (here), Jazz guitar solo transcriptions (here, here and here) sites devoted to music theory and analysis, sites that make sheet music available (wikifonia), etc. etc. Some of the instructional material is similar to what was available 40 years ago when I started, unintegrated tidbits from a complex topic. If given enough time, I will try to present what I know in an integrated manner.

NOTE: If you find any errors in the pdf file, let me know. You can also find the .pdf file and the .msc file (for MuseScore, if you have it loaded on your machine) here.