Selection from Jack Hammonds' METHOD:1
On Soloing Over Blues Patterns...
It's somewhat pointless to overanalyse modes and scales when it comes to blues (and to a large extent Rock and Jazz!) improv. The boundary between major and minor, tonality and atonality, is crossed regularly, and to good end. The use of dissonance is embraced, and unknowingly, and over a long period of time, the public has become able to easily assimilate something that as recently as 50 years ago, was only appreciated by advanced musical minds...
"I'll play it first, and tell you what it is later." - Miles Davis
......one of the coolest things about using the pentatonic scale is that it avoids the two tones that cause the most conflict, so the problem comes up much less then it would if using a full 7 note scale. Other, more doctrinaire, use of scales provide for much less harmonic freedom. This tonal ambiguousness is a key component of what gives modern music it's character, and separates it from more traditional music from the century before last. Blues players have learned to stretch out of those spots, or better, to exploit them for the harmonic tension they create. To use quarter tones (the notes between the notes!) This has opened up vast areas of musical exploration that continues today. The whole of recent musical study has been an attempt to explain what happens when the extremes reached during the fever of improv produce unarguable musical results, but can't be described using traditional musical language. And once you quantify, notate, and give a name to those spontaneous musical creations, you have reduced pure improvisation to composition.
"In composition, you have all the time and resources you need to decide what to say in fifteen seconds. In improvisation, you have fifteen seconds."
-Steve Lacy
"The creation and destruction of harmonic and statistical tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation!) that remains consonant or "regular" is to me the equivalent to watching a movie with only good guys in it, or eating cottage cheese.”
-Frank Zappa.
Download pages from 'Method:1' Free for my students with password.
pg.18..................... Barre Chord Intro (BC-1)
pg. 19................... Other Barre Chords(BC-2)
pg. 20.............Barre Chord Progressions(BC-3)
pg. 33...............Pentatonic (Rock) Scales(RS1)
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