With its complex harmonies and swing feel, jazz is one of the most difficult languages to master on the acoustic guitar. The lessons here cover everything from the very basics of jazz to chord-melody style arranging to note-for-note Eddie Lang and Django Reinhardt transcriptions.
Given the guitar’s well-established role as an accompaniment instrument, it behooves acoustic players to learn a lot about chords. Backing up your own singing or someone else’s means you’ve probably recognized familiar chord progressions that occur throughout popular music. As you add songs to your repertoire, you’ll likely notice that…
In 1917, the pianist and drummer Art Hickman penned the song “Rose Room,” named after the ballroom in the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, where at the time he was leading a band. Jazz aficionados know the 32-bar song through Duke Ellington’s seminal 1932 recording, and also as the…
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Thelonious Sphere Monk was a brilliant jazz pianist and composer, active from the 1940s through the early ’70s. You are, presumably, an acoustic guitarist, playing music in the 21st century. As such, you may or may not be interested in classic jazz. But whatever your predilections are, there’s plenty to…
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Because of the complexity of harmony in the standard repertoire and the freedom of expression inherent within the genre, jazz requires that guitarists develop a flexible and diverse chord vocabulary. In this lesson, I’ll look at strategies for building four-part seventh chord voicings, their inversions, and voice leading through common jazz progressions. Four-Part Voicings The…
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I first heard “Swing Gitan” backstage at a Djangofest jam between some younger players in Seattle, who were playing it as if they themselves had written it! (That’s true of Gypsy-jazz players, many who really get inside every song they play). It’s a great vehicle for the showy, virtuosic style…
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