Interject some Jazz runs into my playing..some good players to listen to?

Mr. Dorian and Mr. Lydian are your two new best friends. And Mr. Chromatic is now your new boss.

 

Remember you can really sound jazzy just playing pentatonic and throwing in some chromatics. That´s how I fake it, at least....Works nice to do fills and stuff in funky music, for instance. I´d say copying some Marcus Miller licks could do wonders for that.

 

I've been wanting to do the same thing and recently discovered a scale that's pretty much vanilla Dorian but uses the b6 instead of the major 6th when played downwards, it sounds pretty damn cool. I think the TTS thing denotes whole tones and semitones, by the way.

 

I am constantly amazed at how many brilliant talented skilled bassists can still get a ton of mileage out of pentatonic and blues scales. In the hands of a wanker - eg, me -- those rudimentary materials sound as bereft of harmonic interest as my earliest pre-teen bedroom experiments...but in the hands of a pro, there's a lot of hunt left in that dog.

And yet, you rarely hear a jazz guitarist or horn player afforded that same charitible assessment. They're still required to be harmonically adventurous, or else they're banished to the Banal Department. Why is that, I wonder? Which is why (he says, digressing even further off topic) I find Jeff Berlin's playing so impressive despite his arrogant attitude, opinionated didacticism, and polo shirts tucked into high-waisted trousers. That dude's harmonic/melodic vocabulary is miles above all but a tiny handful of virtuosos'.

Check out John Scofield's use of pentatonics: He's really clever at recontextualizing them by playing what could otherwise be a harmonically cliched lick but offsetting the tonal center. I.e., If the band is playing in D, rather than rattle off a lame-ass D minor pentatonic lick, Sco will play that lick in Eb minor pentatonic . And then resolve it exquisitely, of course.

Um, where were we? Oh right, interjecting jazz runs into your playing. One thing I've learned is that context dictates all. If you're playing in a meat&potatoes rock/blues band, you might not want to interject jazz runs. (Or your bandmates might not want you to, at any rate.) It might seem hip to your musicianly ear, but to most folks in the audience -- as well as the professional musicians who might also be listening -- it just sounds wrong.

 

Yep.

The best way to interject some Jazz into your playing is start jamming with someone who plays it. Otherwise all those fancy passing tones and diminished runs you'll be learning won't sound right!

 

That's what I typically do, along with arpeggios to out line chords. I never really considered it "faking jazz" since I thought thats how jazz players take there approach to it.

Sorry don't really anything useful to add to the post quadrogong.

 

By the way, the S's and T's stand for tone and semitone...
For example:

D Dorian 2b (Dorian Flat 2): D Eb F G A B C D STTTTST

D - Eb is a semitone
Eb - F is a tone
F - G is a tone

etc etc

Just the building blocks or 'formula' of the modes listed above.

 

Whether you fake it or not is mainly a question of how good you are at it. Personally I could never hold my ground - at least as a soloist - in any jazz trio playing standards. But I know some jazzlicks and do somehow have a feel for it. So when called for I fill inn some licks that would make someone who don´t know better believe I was infact a jazz player. And unless you really play jazz, it does the job.

 

My current teacher Kevin Brown wrote a book with every scale and mode... really good reference. You can check that out on www.lemurmusic.com