I've been a fan of jazz for a while, love musicians such as Chet Baker, Michael Brecker, Pat Metheny etc etc....
But I only know stuff like blues scale, pentatonics, not good with theories at all.
What's the good place to start with if I want to learn jazz? And I don't like taking classes.
Any thoughts guys? Cheers
listen and emulate. It'll come.
Start with the basic stuff like Kenny Burrell. He plays a lot of blues based stuff that is all about the pentatonic scale and basic chords.
Stevie Ray Vaughn covered one of his cool numbers "Chitlins Con Carne". It's blues.
My fave Burrell album is "Midnight Blue. It's got a lot of blues. Jazz is an attitude more than a theory.
apart from having a teacher, i learnt alot from Aebersold Jazz Play-A-Long. Volume one takes up alot of small exercises and has a strong emphasis on you playing what you feel instead of just learning stuff. borrow it from a library or something! and good luck :)
Man, Kenny Burrell, I'm listening to his stuff with people like Grover Washington Jr. and Coltrane. So inspiring! Thank you!
And thank you for the book recommendation, I'll try to pick one up and see how it goes, cheeers
Why dont you like taking classes? A good teacher can get you started on some basic chord scale theory and altered scales. Besides, if you've ever sat next to a really great jazz player it can be quite inspirational as well.Originally Posted by Notyethendrix
Great record.
Jazz can get damn technical, and an old dog trying to self-teach can be frustrating. (Been there...)
But the groovin' blues-based stuff like this can make for pleasurable access
"Well, I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused..."
Elvis Costello
Listen, listen, listen...you need an intensive course in hearing changes and hearing rhythm. Listen to standards, jazz 'classics', listen to the best of it; Parker, Miles, Rollins, Coltrane, Monk, etc. You can't play it out of a cookbook of scales/modes/chords/theories; you have to hear it first. Then learn as many tunes as you can...a more jazz-friendly sound (ala hollowbody or something similar) will also be inspiring...
Thank you guys for your suggestions.
I'm really not a good student especially on music, I'd like to bump into problems and ask around, well for the time being anyway.
I've been trying to play along with the standards, and I think jazz doesn't really bound to any scales right? It's the notes you play and the relationship that note/chord has to do with the root note(which the bass player do) Well when I'm playing on my own I use a lot of thumb or pinky to hit the root note so I won't be carried away. 7th and 11th seems to give that jazzy vibe.
Am I doing it wrong?
Besides listen to Kenny Burrell and the other brass musicians, I listen to many bossa nova too. I do play some funk and it's somehow doing the same groove with a different taste.
Anyways, I'm just having fun with my Epiphone Dot 335 directly into a pro jr. right now
Given what you said about not being a good student, I would steer clear of most of the "teach yourself jazz" books. They can be quite demanding and might discourage you at this early stage in your exploration. The Jamey Aebersold material that Bearwolf suggests is great stuff, but I think that you should get a teacher even if only for a few months just to get you into it.
You are going to have to learn some theory - scales, basic harmony and chord progressions - whether you like it or not. Start with very simple songs to understand basic chord structure and sequence and work your way up to standards from the 30s-50s - Cole Porter, Gershwin, stuff like that. The best jazz players have ears like elephants and while it seems like they are "just playing," they really know their theory, and in such a way that their playing becomes intuitive, not technical. The blues-oriented material like Kenny Burrell is perfect for starting (and for later!) because it will take basic blues in directions you didn't think it would go.
I had a student just this week ask about some Django Reinhardt songs. I showed him the basic chord changes and realized that I learned them when I was about 15 from the first 10 pages in Mickey Baker's course in jazz, book one. If you learned only that first chunk you would learn a lot of chords AND chord sequences very quickly.
Yep---those Mickey Baker books are pretty good starter material. What Doc says about standards is very true---those are the changes that Parker, Monk, et al. used as a basis for expanding the harmony and the structure...If I were you, I would go right to that and not halfway with the Burrell/organ trio blues stuff; that's not going to teach you much.
I just had a lesson the other night, and we started with Miles Davis's All Blues.
I knew that tune in and out as a trumpet player, but from a guitar standpoint, the chord progression was rather simple, so you get to learn some good comping fundamentals. The melody is simple, so you can practice reading the line and seeing what notes are used on top of those chords. Finally, this tune is a modal piece, so you have a place start learning other scales and modes outside of blues and pentatonic.
Find other similar level tunes like that and move on to more complicated tunes later. But good jazz means having good time, so practice with recordings or metronomes.
"...pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field;
that, of course, they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little,
shriveled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour."
-Edmund Burke
Mickey Baker's two books are great. I used to wonder how anyone could learn from a book w/out hearing the stuff. That's because I'm mainly a "money-see-monkey-do" kind of student. The Baker books showed me how to do it. Killer chords, & lots of straight ahead strum on the beat stuff.
Herb Ellis had an awesome cassette/tab thingie out years ago called Blues Shapes. I learned more chromatic stuff from that in a few days than I had in all the years previous just stumbling around. I think it's out of print now, though.
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