Week 9 - Melodic Minor

For those of you actually reading, you will notice that this should technically be Week 10. The truth is, the real week 9 I had to study for a test, a big test, so I literally got like 0% Jazz in. There wasn't even a jazz jam for me to listen to, so I thought I'd just continue like nothing has happened.

This was a pretty good week for me, I got all my melodic minors down. That includes (embrace yourself, these names are insane): The Melodic Minor, The Dorian ♭2, Lydian Augmented, Lydian Dominant (Overtone), Mixolydian ♭6, Locrian ♯2 (Aeolian ♭5) and lastly The Altered Scale (learn this one first!). The nice thing about these scale names is that they actually tell you how to play the scale. I.e. The Lydian Dominant is simply the Lydian scale we all know but with a flattened 7, as its the minor 7 and major 3rd that makes a dominant! I made my own scale study sheet for myself, with the help from a professional Jazz muso Keira WitherKay who provided me with the initial information (Thank you), so for those of you who want to tackle the Melodic Minor scale next, use this sheet on the left, it will give you basic theory and the scale fingerings.


Aside from the scales, I also jammed with my skilled friend Josh Prinsloo. We went to the music conservatory on Thursday, found a practice room with a piano, he played the piano and I played the guitar. He is a bassist by trade, so he wanted to improve on his Jazz piano, and boy where his chops fantastic. Real jazzy! Anyway, so we chose a few songs such as Funny Valentine, Blue Bossa, Beautiful Love we played them start to end and both took turns with the head. We improvised back and forth. It was great fun. We definitely going to make a weekly event of it. We also did some ear training, which I HIGHLY recommend. Its very simple, and quite difficult at first, but the ear does get better over time. What you do, is play a 4 or 5 note lick on your respective instrument and the other instrumentalist has to copy the lick... Note for Note. And No, you may not tell them what note you start on, they must figure it out. Even if you hit the wrong first note, it will be a good reference point for where the right note is. Try this. Its really challenging but fun. 
          - - -  The reason why I was with Josh at the conserve is that I want to take bass lessons from him. Why bass? Well, Joe Pass can play the melody, harmony and bass all on his guitar so effortlessly, and its just nice to know that if ever there is no bassist around, you  can play the bass and chords on the guitar. So Josh will be teaching me some walking bass vibes. What he roughly taught me on our first lesson was some Tritone theory. Basically what it entails is that if you see a dominant shape, play an altered dominant chord a tritone away (flat 5). So G7 will be D♭Alt (♭9 and ♭5 sound quite nice). If you actually compare all the notes between the G7 and D♭alt, you will see they are quite similar, except for the root note. 


Lastly, Josh taught me "Harold's Bossa", both the chords and melody. This is a fun fun fun song. And the chords are super easy. Its just quite fast. You must check this video from one of the Jazz jams (before my jazz days) of Ramon Alexander (the master pianist of Stellenbosch) and Lou-Ann Stone (the master saxophonist of Stellenbosch) doing Harold's Bossa. Its tight! I love this recording. Do yourself a favour and listen to it!

Another standard I got down was the classic "Take the A Train" by none other than Ellington. This song also has some nice easy chords, so is a good song to improvise over. There is also an altered chord in it, so my melodic theory will come in use. Cant wait!


        This week coming up I will practice  the melodics, my arpeggio's etc. Maybe get into some of my blues scales. Who knows. I will surprise myself :-)