Learn How To Play Jazz Guitar

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Jazz guitar music has evolved from generations of guitarists’ need to find ways to express musical ideas. Jazz began with African slaves mixing American song and dance forms with the music that came with them from Africa. Jazz musicians have, over many years, found ways of taking a musical genre and making it jazz by adding jazz chord substitution and improvising techniques to the music.

The aim of a jazz guitar player is to make new music using other musical genres or the music of composers from genres other than jazz. A jazz guitarist will have developed his own methods of improvising over a song or instrumental. Sometimes his improvisation will be rooted in the techniques of using the notes in the chord he is playing to give him the material for the solo, or just to use the notes he finds in the melody.

Whatever method the jazz guitar player uses he will always find his own direction away from the melodic structure of the musical work he is improvising over and use melodic figures or “licks” which he has composed or learned from other guitar players. A lick is a sequence of notes which can be utilized in improvising over music in any key. Not quite a melody, lick is like a short tune or fraction of a melody. Listen carefully to a jazz guitar solo that you enjoy. Try imitating some of the licks that you can make out. Imitate them and see how they fit with other licks to take the solo to its ending.

Other jazz guitar techniques consist of substituting chords with more interesting sounding chords, the use of walking bass to make a piece more interesting or changing the rhythm of a song. You can see examples of all these jazz guitar techniques when you listen to the music of jazz guitar players like Charlie Christian, one of the pioneers of jazz guitar, Charlie Byrd, an exponent of latin jazz guitar who developed a genre of his own using classical guitar techniques to play jazz, or Wes Montgomery, a very popular guitar player who ventured into many fields of music.

Anybody who wants to learn to play jazz guitar will be wondering what guitars give you that distinctive jazz sound. You can play jazz on any guitar but when musicians talk about a “jazz guitar” they mostly have in mind a guitar with a “f” holes in the body, an arched top and a piezoelectric pickup. This guitar provides that warm, jazz feeling that people associate with the jazz guitar which is expressed eloquently in the music of Wes Montgomery. Epiphone is the brand name most jazz players associate with this kind of guitar but they are also made by D’Angelico, Gibson and others.

Here is a YouTube video of a Jazz guitar harmony lesson:

To learn to play jazz guitar, even in a comparatively superficial sense entails listening to alot of jazz guitar music. As you listen you need to analyze what jazz guitarists do and what you, as a musician, WANT to do. Maybe you do not want to learn jazz as a genre but just to play in the style of a certain jazz guitar player. This will cut your work load considerably as you can find tabs for the work of many jazz guitar players on the internet.

And for newcomers to jazz here is a video of Joe Pass playing Summertime: