You can hear Grant Green play something like this on "Blues For Juanita" from his 1962 Blue Note LP The Latin Bit. As far as I can tell, as the one non-Latin groove from the day's recording, "Blues For Juanita" was left off the original release...

When I was in school, my friend Victoria had a theory that everyone's sense of humor could be traced back to a single essential influence. In her case, it was Monty Python, and specifically, I think, John Cleese's shambling, not-really-apologetic...

At some point about a year ago, I got really annoyed that I knew almost nothing about Coleman Hawkins except how large he loomed in the history of jazz and how important he was to the development of the tenor saxophone. So I went off hunting down...

What fingerstyle blues sensibilities I possess are more than somewhat the result of two formative sources from my teenage years, Richard Saslow's book The Art of Ragtime Guitar and Stefan Grossman and John Renbourn's second duet record, Under The...

More Stanley Turrentine! The G7 altered part of this lick does not sit quite so obviously on the guitar but with a little doing it can start to make sense.

Generally speaking, it's pretty clear what Turrentine is thinking over each chord, but in...

This week, a lick inspired by the work of tenor saxophonist Red Holloway. Just like I got hip to Jimmy Forrest's badass command of the changes by hearing him on Jack McDuff's The Honeydripper – an album I picked up because it featured Grant...

Stanley Turrentine played plenty of blues on plenty of albums, especially in the first part of his career on Blue Note. For maximum exposure to the twelve-bar form it's hard to beat his 1962 Release That's Where It's At, featuring Les McCann (of...

I've been yelling about Tina Brooks for the past few weeks, so I thought it was time to (A) figure out a few of his licks myself and (B) show you what I'm talking about. So here's a short lick that will take you from the I chord to the IV chord,...

Exotic Is Relative

I spent most of this week in Florida. As a kid growing up outside of Boston, that would have sounded unspeakably exotic to me, only toppable, if that's a word, by the idea of Hawaii or Bermuda. In my twenties, I drove with a...