Why I teach beginner jazz to my intermediate guitar students.
If you can play jazz, you can play all the other styles of guitar better.
This article takes a look at some of the reasons why I think learning how to understand and play even the most basic jazz chords and improvisation on the guitar, can ultimately improve considerably, the way you play rock, blues and country guitar.
When I started teaching guitar lessons in the middle 1990's, grunge music was all over the radio. Many of my students were interested in learning how to play the latest songs from bands like Nirvana, Sound Garden, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots and many others. Much of this music was fairly easy to figure out, as the popular "Drop-D" tuning was all the rage at the time. Grunge (to me), was quite the departure from the rock I grew up learning in the 1960's, 70's and 80's. Suddenly, it was "uncool" to know more than a handful of chords on your guitar. Well, for me, that was counter-intuitive.
The rock guitar gawds of the 70's and 80's were somehow, not held in such high esteem or coveted by the younger generations of headbangers. It was much more important to release ones youthful anger and frustrations of society by getting tossed around in a mosh pit at a "Rage against the machine" concert. Grunge was the next generations’ rock music. It wasn't part of my life' soundtrack, but I did like a lot of the music.
The only blues I really ever knew was in rock music, in bands like Led Zeppelin and Eric Clapton. Country music was what my parents listened to in the 1970's. To me, rock was rock, blues was blues and country was country, no matter which decade it's being played in. It's all basically the same mathematics, formulas and applications put to melody and rhythm.
Pop-music followed a lot of those same ideas. For most of my beginner students, "open-string" or "cowboy" chords fall into these genres of music. Beginner guitar chords are easy enough to play; and there are thousands of songs that can be played with these types of chords.
I've had a few dozen students over the years who have moved to their next levels of being able to play more than advanced beginner guitar, and have expressed how much they wanted to move onto improving their improvisation skills, their basic understanding in building complex and extended chord structures and progressions, and playing songs in odd time signatures while training their ears to listen to and hear much more difficult-to-play music. Well, for me, the answer has always been jazz.
It can be any type of jazz: Traditional, swing, blues, rock-fusion, mainstream or pop. All of these types of jazz music are more complex and sometimes much more difficult to play than pop, rock, blues or country. Jazz is to eight years of grad school college, as rock, blues and country are to grade school. That may sound a little pretentious, but I think it is absolutely true. If you can play even a little bit of jazz improvisation and understand a few dozen jazz chord progressions and how they work, you will be able to use that knowledge by playing considerably better at the easier material.
The nice thing about jazz is that it is a lot like blues in the way that it is mostly forgiving in its approach to improvisation. If you know even the most basic pentatonic blues scales, you can't really mess it up. There’s no “wrong way” to do it. Jazz uses the same principle, however, it also includes more of the diatonic scales and modes to connect more of the melody in the progression. Jazz adds many, many more colors to your painting of the notes in the canvas of thin air. You just have to know and understand how to arrange those colors on your canvas.
If you go back to the 1970's and listen to bands like Blood sweat and tears, Chicago, Earth wind and fire, and Tower of power - these bands focused on brass in their line up. Brass players really like to play blues and jazz mixed with rock. Many pop artists of the singer-songwriter era, used lots of jazz chords in their songs to promote more thoughtful colors in their music and lyrics. They used a lot of saxophones as solo instruments during the bridges of many of those songs. Unfortunately, a lot of that style of horns in rock and pop music began to slowly disappear from the pop culture, only to be replaced by washing keyboards in the 1980's. If an 80's song required horns, they could just as easily be emulated on a keyboard.
I teach many of my students a lot of the easier-to-play jazz chords that utilize the open strings. I do this so that they can hear the differences in the types of chords they have to choose from when learning how to play the guitar. These chords are usually comprised of simple major 7th and minor 7th chords.
Adding chords to your vocabulary is a never-ending endeavor. I've been a practicing guitarist since 1976, and I am still learning new chords all the time. I find it fascinating to hear how a complex context of chords can come together and sound perfect together. Much of this started when I fell in love with the Steely Dan - Aja album in 1977.
I have learned a lot in the past 26+ years of teaching guitar lessons. Much of this learning came from trial and error, studying music theory, and applying what I understood and could prove, by teaching it to my students. It is a commitment well beyond basic beginner guitar, but if you get a little taste of jazz as a beginner guitar player, it will most certainly improve the way you listen to and play your guitar.
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