I suck at taking solo breaks, always have. In order to work on this, I’m going to work on transcribing and obviously playing some great solo breaks. Phil Woods’ great break on Bud Powell’s “Webb City” caught my ear over the weekend, here’s the mp3.

After practicing this break and similar phrases, a few observations:
- phil delays the resolution by a beat by landing on the A – C – Bb for the first three eighth notes. this sounds really nice.
- it also sounds pretty good to just lay out the first measure, and play something leading in to the I chord. starting on any note in a Cm chord on the first beat of the second measure will land you on some Bb chord tone on the first beat. practicing singing resolutions like that is pretty useful. also, once you have that first note of the second measure in your ear, it’s easy to start your line in the first measure, essentially working backwards.

Here is my transcription of Pete Bernstein’s excellent solo on “Chant”, from his Criss Cross album “Brain Dance”. You can listen here. The usual lazy jazz musician transcription rules apply, I don’t mark any slurs or accents or anything, that stuff is best gotten directly from the source. These transcriptions really serve as more of a reminder of the harmonic and rhythmic material Peter uses over these types of tunes.

The CD this is taken from, “Brain Dance”, was the first jazz guitar CD I heard that made me really excited about jazz guitar. I got it when I was in college, about 19 or 20. I was fairly serious about learning jazz, but had focused my listening on Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the other traditional jazz heavyweights. I didn’t listen to too many guitar players and when I did, I honestly didn’t really hear many recordings where the guitarist was just part of the band, but had equal footing as a melodic and harmonic voice. So this CD really woke me up to the possibilities of the guitar in a jazz ensemble. The other immediate reaction I had was: “Wow, I want to sound like THAT”. I think every musician I know has had kind of a role model, and Peter was definitely a model for me in that way.

I have been lucky enough to hear Peter play a lot since then, take a lesson, and also to make his acquaintance over the years. A few thoughts on his general technique:
- Peter mostly uses 3 fingers, only occasionally shifting to the pinky in his lines.
- he plays up and down the neck quite a bit, as opposed to moving across the strings while playing lines. he shifts positions really quickly.
- he uses a very subtle and distinctive vibrato quite frequently on long notes.

This solo shows Peter’s strong Grant Green influence and has a lot of great lines, and more importantly, showcases his awesome, laid back feel. Notice the flurries of 16ths in his second chorus. A lot of people say Peter doesn’t play many notes, but he does bust out the double time really effectively, especially in medium and slow tempos like this.

Please let me know if you catch any mistakes, as I’m sure I made a few.