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Jazz Improvisation 8: Where’s the Zowie?

“Well, I can’t say I did much yesterday.  I had a few tasks to do around the house, then I went down to the grocery store  and picked up a few things.  The weather wasn’t very good, so I didn’t bother to take a walk or anything, I just watched T.V. for a while and eventually, waddled off to bed.”

Nobody wants to hear a story like that.  Its only redeeming feature is the image of the writer ‘waddling’.  This story needs way more features, way more waddling, if it is to fly as any sort of tale at all. The fact is, it is reasonably well put together.  The problem is, it doesn’t have any Zowie.  

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Learning the Whole Guitar Neck

The guitar is a strange and wonderful instrument. It comes in all shapes, sizes and configurations, and is played with a variety of techniques in many different styles. More often than not, guitarists learn the instrument with the requirements of one of these styles as their guide. In fact, I would be willing to bet that most guitar players have gathered their entire understanding of music, and how the guitar is organized, through the lens of the style they play.

This often causes problems when we attempt to annex another style or get to the next level in our playing. It’s at this point that most guitarists realize that they don’t know the guitar neck well enough.

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Swing Chording

I didn’t really ‘learn’ to play swing, I more or less ‘grokked’ it. For most of my early youth, my father was a working stride piano player. He played every swing standard known to man and he swung his butt off. Our house (and my head) was filled with the sound of that piano every day of my life. Needless to say, I had an advantage when I got calls to do traditional swing or dixieland gigs, as I felt I already knew a lot of the tunes, whether I had played them before or not. All I had to do was ‘remember’ the changes.

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