Why Swing to Bop?

For the last year or two I’ve been trying to ‘convert’ over from being a largely rock-based guitarist to someone who plays music with more of a jazz style. In the past I’ve tried to make progress but have become bogged down or stuck several times frustrated by just how much had to be learned and by what seemed like a steep learning curve.

So, when I tried again a couple of years ago, I decided to start a historically informed learning process rather than trying to jump straight in. Contemporary jazz guitar and jazz harmony & theory can be intimidating, difficult and cluttered with terminology: everything is altered scales this and tritone substitions that and it’s never clear to the beginner what is being altered (and from what?) or what is being substituted and why.

So, I decided to go back to the beginning and start with the basics, with jazz as it was first played on the guitar in the 1930s and then working forward historically, picking up the new harmonic innovations as they evolved and became incorporated into jazz playing instead of trying to learn them all at once, ready-formed.

The idea being that a newly introduced harmonic innovation would make sense to me when placed in the context of what had gone before. Often a particular way of improvising over a particular chord or set of changes seemed mysterious to me — why do it this way? I know it’s a substition, but a substition for what? — but became clear once I’d learned the antecedent technique or harmony.

One great side effect: a lot of the guitar music of the 1930s and 40s is really great. Gypsy jazz, classic small group swing, western swing, early RnB and rock’n’roll, jump blues, etc. often feature really swinging, aggressive playing that’s idiomatic to the instrument, the guitar doesn’t sound like a poor cousin to the horn players or pianist and the musical vocabulary employed plays to the guitar players’ strengths rather than weaknesses.

So, this blog, I’m going to try and document some of the stuff I’m learning or have been learning and maybe link to some musical clips, videos or sheet music as I go.