The Steel Guitar Forum

The finest jazz guitar player I know, with 50 years of professional experience, seriously took me to task when I started studying with him. I would ask him things like "What scale goes over that change.", and he would go nuts.

That's too bad. Knowing which scales apply to which chords is considered a fundamental concept by many jazz players. How it is applied is a personal and musical thing, but IMO to simply dump the entire idea is contrary to what many traditional jazz players feel is basic knowledge. And to paraphrase a fairly commonly stated point, while many players may not have formally learned such things, they know these things by ear, and you can hear it in their playing.

Jeff - this fine jazz guitar player knows how various tones and melodic fragments fit over chord progressions and so on. He has an innate sense of this, and is a fine traditional straight-ahead jazz player. What he takes exception to - and I pretty much agree with him - is the idea of learning to do jazz improvisation by playing scales directly over changes. I have seen many books that advocate this. To many, this sounds mechanical, and even to me - who thinks mathematically about everything - moving away from the whole-linear-scale idea and more into permutations of smaller scale fragments to create melodies, as David Mason argued, makes more sense.

This guy further argues that one should spend enough time just playing and listening to get this intrinsic, innate sense of things instead of relying on the linear scale concept. In other words, he argues one should rely more on the ear than on what is, essentially, a mathematical concept. I know not everyone agrees with his approach, and I have no beef with either approach - I guess that's what makes for diversity in music. Still, I found what he said makes sense for me.