Week 6 - Them II, V, I licks

Firstly, the jam was cancelled on Monday, so I have no story for you there. It is almost guaranteed to happen this Monday, so I will hopefully have a story for you then.

I must be honest, this was a difficult week for me to practice. I had no inspiration. I do feel bad about it, but at the same time I am only human. I did cover some ground but not as much as one would hope. A friend of mine reminded me of the importance of learning licks, so, what I did this week was mainly concentrate on learning some II, V, I licks. It has been said that no Jazz artist can create an original solo for every song and every night that he or she may play. Eventually the tap will run dry. In situations like that, they learn licks that they practice and make perfect, then when the time comes to quickly do something cool, they rely on the lick. Its not bad Jazz, its very common. The book I'm reading (will get to that) says that a solo may even be 40-90% just licks. So I learnt some licks. There were like 20 to choose from, but I didn't like them all, it's a personal taste after all. So I chose about 3 or 4 of them. Next week I may do the same. Choose another 4 or so from a batch of 20.

I read through that book by Jerry Coker titled "How to Practice Jazz". It is a good book, it's essentially only 43 pages but it covers a lot of ground. Unfortunately the book came too late for me, so I already have a practice system that works for me, but this book is great for someone who has no idea where to start. It tells you exactly everything you should be practicing and it gives you suggestions on how you should divide up your time to practice it. The downside about it is that it was not written by a guitarist as evident by how he kept saying we had to learn a new scale in every key. Now the beauty about guitar is that you need to just learn the fingering for one key, and then you can play it up and down the fret-board. The book also mentioned a lot of other books that I should get which annoyed me somewhat because I just want this book to tell me everything I need to know and not to spend more money on other stuff. Regardless, its a good buy if you are new to Jazz like me, and I'm sure it will be a great resource to my studies.



I re-learnt "Days of Wine and Roses". I forgot it, but now I know both the chords and melody. Its a really great song. One of my favourites actually. Not too many chord changes so might be a good one to improvise over too. I also got a new scale mode under my belt. The Melodic minor's: Lydian Augmented. This scale sounds great for Dom7+5 chords, which are very very common in Jazz. Well at-least in my version of Jazz.

(This version of Days of Wine and Roses by Wes Montgomery is amazing. He is my favourite guitarist. Love his tone and style)

Next week may once again have more licks to learn, as well as another mode of the Melodic Minor scale. I'd like to start applying some of this stuff I have learnt to some songs. Like that Joe Pass solo I transcribed. I'd like to play it note for note to the song, otherwise what is the point of me spending so much time getting it down if I don't learn from it?