I want to get better at playing jazz.

[IamGroot]

Find a very competent piano player to hang with will have so many advantages to mosthack guitarist. (better yet, play piano yourself) Learn chordal and extension theory. Get and study the Real books. Listen to the American Song book and Jazz standards played by jazz masters countless times. (I grew up with these). If they do not appeal to you on a deep level, maybe jazz is not the best direction for you.

This is great advice!

Good piano players can show you a wealth of practical theory and playing skills. I hooked up with an older bona fide jazz pianist and it was like a graduate course in jazz.

 

[donotfret]

?Just wondering about the transcribing suggestions here and if it would be helpful to me based on my 'mindset'.?

I know all the notes on the fretboard and I understand intervals and scales, and basically map/play them to patterns. I dont have scales memorized by note but I can derive any scale from pattern, and
play any scale in any key by pattern as well, ergo I can change keys just by changing my starting point.
Then I can certainly figure out which notes Im playing. Maybe I have a bass ackward approach.
Thanks,

Bass guitar is nice like that - change the starting point and the transposition is done. I'm doing this a lot. And it's because of this that starting to play upright was a big eye-opener for me, because you try to use open strings whenever possible, so every key is different (well, there are similarities between some of course). I can warmly recommend doing this and learning to play chord changes in all keys this way. This is my personal express way to really internalising harmony on the bass by now. You don't need an upright bass for this, just look up standard fingerings for the major scales on upright and take them to the bass guitar.

One example: my play list for Basin Street in all keys (I play along with this great live recording using Audacity for the transpose) starts in Bb, then C, D, Ab, etc. I suppose double bass players will immediately see why I'm doing this. It's really powerful, at least for me.

Almost all the DNA of jazz song forms can be found in 2 tunes:
12 bar blues and variations
Rhythm changes
Almost every standard shares patterns with these in some way.
Learn enough theory to be able to execute these chord progressions in any key.

I would highly recommend finding a chart for I Got Rhtyhm and putting through the process described in Ed Fuqua's excellent article on really learning a tune

This is a very interesting concept and I believe there is a lot of truth in it. However, having come across this before, I'm sure it needs some elaborating. [Invalid or Expired Link Removed] is a nice blog post about the whole idea.

 

[bassliner50]

This is great advice!

Good piano players can show you a wealth of practical theory and playing skills. I hooked up with an older bona fide jazz pianist and it was like a graduate course in jazz.

Yes that is gold because those true pianists of which you speak are the rare few these days. No more volume wars once you loose the guitar. Playing with a pianist you will find yourself playing in flat keys, (Bb, F, Eb, Db, Ab etc.) These are keys where horns are comfortable. I play my bass like it is an extension of the piano (and visa versa sometimes). I have the pleasure of playing with a Berkeley trained jazz pianist on a regular basis. It has forced me to grow up and refine my game. That said, there ARE jazz guitarists that are knowledgeable, controlled and versatile, but these true artists are a small minority in an endless sea of guitar hacks and wanna bees.

 

[DirtDog]

As a mature player wanting to explore jazz bass playing (and specifically improvisational soloing) after decades of rock and country guitar, bass and drums, here's what I did:

1. Found a good teacher who worked with me on chord theory (as opposed to scales/modes, etc). I already had a very good understanding of rhythm.

2. Bought BiaB to play along with. Nice thing is you can turn the bass track off, still follow the charts and play along with all the other instrumentation for literally hundreds of jazz standards.

3. Got involved with a jazz ensemble lesson/club once a week kind of thing as the "second bass". Learned about playing in ensembles, soloing and how jazz charts work.

4. Got the Real Book Vol 1 to support the activities in 3.

I went from nothing to somewhat competent after a year of this. By the end of the first year, I was often holding the bass down on my own in the ensemble, at a low intermediate level of course.

I kind of stalled after that first year (due to injury) and morphed towards playing pedal steel. But I'll tell ya, having that chord theory knowledge in my back pocket has helped all aspects of my musicianship.

 

[mambo4]

[Invalid or Expired Link Removed] is a nice blog post about the whole idea.

That's a great elaboration, and explains exactly my reasoning when I say
12 bar blues and Rhythm changes are primary in jazz.

That's right— the progression of nearly every jazz tune is either the chords of twelve-bar blues or the chords of "I Got Rhythm."...Surely, I thought, it can't be that simple. Surely one of the most complex and difficult of musical genres couldn't be reduced to just two progressions! But a few years of listening to jazz and messing around on the guitar proved him right. Just as I thought I'd found a chord progression that didn't fit either of these, I'd look again and see that under all the extra chords and notes, the progression remained the same.

It's also why people suggest things like "practice the circle of 5ths /4ths" or "practice ii-V-I" these chord progressions all utilize such motion. But beyond common fragments of chord progressions, Blues and Rhythm Changes also teach the larger 12 and 32 bar song forms - so you get more context than simply doing exercises around the cycle.

Also, given that there are 6+ volumes of the Real book, and probably over a thousand 'standards' , simplifying your choice of what to study deeply helps reduce decision fatigue.