You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Blues Clues

Episode Date: November 23, 2022

Adam and Peter take an in depth look at how to shake up your blues vocabulary.Have a question for us? Leave us a SpeakPipeCheckout courses from Adam, Peter and more at Open StudioLet us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Twitter | Instagram

I wanted to hit this question by Alex on our speak pipe. Check this out. Hi there. My name's Alex. I live in the UK. Really? I was wondering if you would help out with just generally playing the blues. I seem to be a little bit stuck in just sort of doing minor third stuff,

flat five stuff. It hitting the seven. And I just wondered if you. you've got some ideas on how to make playing through blues change is much more interesting. Perhaps you can go through some nice demos on your podcast. That'll be amazing. Thanks a lot. Cheers, guys.

And thanks for the podcast. It's great. Cheers. Bye. Thanks, Alex. I hope you listen to, I hope you watch the Jazz Helpline Live because that's where your question has ended up. Caleb, maybe we could put this on the podcast as a special episode.

Is this a podcast? The Helpline Live. This isn't going out for audio. I need a podcast helpline. You do. This is a podcast helpline, isn't it? Yeah. Why isn't this the podcast?

This would be such great content for the podcast. Because we don't like to do that kind of stuff. That would be too efficient. We'd rather smoke weed and listen to McCoy. Yeah, we really would. Big shout out to the miners listening. We are just joking. Okay, blues.

So I totally know what Alex is talking about. Like this is perhaps, because blues has a tendency to be cliche riddled that you can get a little bit stuck in those clichés. So I think that it's both a matter of finding some other things to play. Of course, other vocabulary that's still bluesy or blues-esque or blues-adjacent or blues curious. I realized I was side-door I was talking with the lovely Kelly Martin last night. I was joking with her. I said, are you pickleball curious? Oh, yeah. She's like, I am not. I said, I think I'm pickleball curious yeah we're Heather and I were talking we're not Buddhist but we're

Dharma curious your Dharma adjacent but we want to be blues curious we want to be beyond just blues curious and I think what happens is when we get certain things that sound good the blues look is just a fun fundamental foundational beautiful gift to the world that really that has so many just you know congruent musical sensibilities built into it. That's why it's become so influential, not just with the blues, but with blues inflections in popular music. I mean, there's hardly any popular music around the world that hasn't been touched somewhat by the blues. And so the dark side of that, or not the dark side, but one of the the pitfalls of that is that it's kind of like pickleball. Is there really

purity still in pickleball? Or has it become bastardized by suburban couples playing it on tennis courts? I don't know. That's why I'm pickleball curious. I mean, if the Webster Grove's recplex is any indication. It is incredibly popular. So wait, bastardized by suburban, isn't it a suburban couple's sport? Well, I should say it's tennis bad. I think tennis players feel like. Oh, they definitely.

Well, is like tennis like. As a tennis player who's played next to pickleballers, it is, I mean, it sounds like people are just having a gunfight next to you. It's just like, D. Right. Trying to hit, you know, the graceful game.

So I know David Robinson. So it's kind of like with the blues. We don't want to become like, if tennis is the blues, we don't with the blues as tennis we don't want to become the pickleball of blues playing where we take certain things and kind of miniaturize it and I'm like I'm going to stop talking about things I don't even understand the rules

no I got Alex I got something for you so we were just talking about this today so there's one little thing that I've noticed Oscar Peterson among many others do but Oscar Peterson makes it so in his own run I might bet it's like he could pickle a ball

but so we often get hung up on like the blues scale or blues licks or whatever, but what you've got to realize is like it's not just some kind of blues scale or blues sound. I mean, it is a bending of notes, but there's a certain thing, especially for straight ahead jazz that you hear all the time. And it's this. It's the, it's the Bacy. Bacy knew something about the blues, right? But this idea, if you break that down, right? Here we have the two chord, A minor seven. The tonic diminished. G diminished to the tonic.

right those three chords can be the basis of so much and you hear Oscar do this a lot so first of all you'll hear like you'll hear him answer himself with this resolution and then even go down to it right that tonic diminished right so in the key of G the G diminished seventh to that a minor seven shape a C E and G not only is it that great like but check all over the place now What you'll also notice is Oscar actually uses this melodically, like this. Right, bassi two, bassi two, right? That is the tonic diminished. Riffin.

That's blues riffin. And the A minor. Yeah. Right. Tonic diminished A minor, tonic. Right. Tonic diminished, A minor, tonic. So when you hear like, that's the tonic diminished, the A minor, and the tonic.

And it happens. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. You're just like, oh my gosh, this is like, tonic diminished. A minor tonic. Like, it's everywhere. It's all you hear. It's part of the language. So I'll do, I'm going to do a YouTube video on it sometimes.

It's like, it's too good of a thing. I do some YouTube videos, but it's too cool of a concept. Like I said, once you kind of see it, you're like, oh my gosh, this is like in plain sight. It's everywhere. This. And it's just the bassy thing, right? It's just the, yeah. It's just that thing.

But it is the basis for that language that you hear so often, especially in straight ahead, especially, you know, what you would call a bluesy sound. It's not just a. Like it is a it is a tonic diminished two-cord tonic. No, it's great. And I think it's just a great way

to pull you out of, you know, the more pentatonic blues scale kind of, you know, because it gets you into a little bit of a diatonic kind of the situation. It is, I am. So, I mean, not that it's just more variety and more places for you to go in and out of in terms of song.

And you can do it like you showed, the one, the four, the five, the two, you can even do it over the two. And then, you know, it kind of is connected with some fourth movements. And Oscar Peterson would do this a lot melodically or whatever. To the three dominant, to the six. That's all four. So, I mean, it's like three different prisms that which you can look at the same blues. And then always connected, of course, with the blue scale, with that major minor duetual.

which is sort of the foundation. Tonic diminished, two chord. Absolutely. That's just that. That's just that. And back. Another thing too on the blues that is pretty obvious with some players. And for sure, Oscar Peterson did this, but maybe not as much as we think.

But other players, for sure, did Charlie Parker. But it's sort of a bebop approach to it, you know, in terms of like how the harmony works. Oscar Peterson kind of had his, Oscar Peterson played a lot of fast stuff, and he was very bebop influenced, but no more so that I would say he's blues influenced. So in terms of his melodic content, once you get several different influences,

it's hard and they're all strong. It's hard to say like, oh, he's doing this or he's doing that because they're overlapping. They're flowing on top of each other, which as it should be. But if you look at like kind of the strayed bebop blues, you know, especially, you know, tunes like Blues for Alice.

Blues for Alice. Written for the wonderful sitcom in the 70s, Alice. Yeah, somehow Charlie Parker is Ahead of his time. Foresight. So we can just look at the most time we're sitting on anything is for four Bs, but almost everything is for two Bs, right? So instead of abandoning the blues sound, we're looking at filtering it through the B-Bob stuff.

So even the turnaround, we might do something like that, 16, 25. but we could also be like, well, we're on a blues. So we're starting out our lives. We're starting out blues, then going Bop, or maybe we're going BOP, or maybe we're going BOP, and then coming out of it. You've got a lot of different choices, and I think...

And we'd like to thank you for choosing pickleball. Pickleball. No, you know, actually, to your point here, I'm going to... I'm going to go to YouTube. I'm going to go to Open Studios YouTube channel. Jeffrey Kieser. as an amazing.

Really, while he's pulling that up, you know, learn some Charlie Parker souls over a blues. Like if you want to get a different kind of vocabulary or learn like a Charlie Mingus bass soul or bass line over a blues. You know what I mean? There's so many different reference points we can take. I just put in the chat a link to Jeffrey Keeser's Open Studio YouTube video

where he goes through a blues and he'll do like pure, he'll start with a chorus of blues, right? Where he's playing what you consider more traditional blues. This is a great, especially if your advanced players, is a great way to practice this. You would do like a... You know, even if you just stay on the blues scale or whatever, one chorus of that, and then one chorus of like pentatogics.

McCoy-Tiner style. And then one chorus of like, bebop. And then one chorus of what he calls like pure melody. Right? And sort of just keep shifting that idea. So each chorus, you're doing something different. Blues, bebop, pentatonics, pure melody. It's a great way to practice it.

It kind of gets you out of your idea. It's restricted practice. It's restricted. I mean, that's what the name of the video is. It's restricted practice. Right, right. That's great.