🚨 Play a Great Blues in 3 Months – Week 3
Over the first two weeks, we focused on building a solid foundation:
• Clear guide tone movement in the left hand
• A stable and controlled upper voice
• Consistent Charleston rhythm
This week, we start introducing more functional harmonic movement into the blues.
You’ll notice a few important additions:
🚨 Play a Great Blues in 3 Months – Week 2
Last week we built the foundation of our blues comping using guide tones and the Charleston rhythm. The goal was simple: clear harmony and solid time.
This week we’ll start adding a little more movement to the voicings.
Instead of keeping the upper voice mostly static, we’ll move the top note of the chord to create two different sounds for the same harmony. Even a small change in the top note can dramatically change how the voicing feels.
🚨 New Series Alert – Play a Great Blues in 3 Months
Back in January at the World Vibes Congress, I shared materials from my Working on Time series — focusing on pulse, clarity, and guide tone awareness on the vibraphone
A lot of that material centered around one idea:
If your time and your guide tones are clear, the music makes sense.
This new 15-week track builds directly on that foundation — but now we apply it to something practical:
🎵 Playing a great blues.
In Part 10, we bring together the core concepts from Parts 1–9 into a single, musical chorus over Minority by Gigi Gryce. This etude is designed not to feel like a technical study, but like a complete improvised statement — one that clearly implies harmony through line construction alone.
Throughout the chorus, you’ll hear:
In Part 9, we take harmonic implication a step further by incorporating enclosures and chromatic passing tones into our line construction. Applied here to the chord progression of Minority by Gigi Gryce, this exercise demonstrates how carefully placed chromatic notes can add tension, sophistication, and forward motion while still clearly outlining the harmony.
In Part 8, we take the scale and chord outlining concepts from the previous lessons and apply them directly to a jazz standard: Minority by Gigi Gryce. This exercise demonstrates how a thoughtful balance of linear scale motion and targeted chord tones can clearly express harmony within the context of a real tune — without relying on block chords or dense voicings.
In Part 7, we combine two essential approaches to line construction: scale-based motion and chord outlining. These exercises move through ii–V progressions in descending whole steps, blending linear scale passages with clear chord-tone targets to create lines that sound both melodic and harmonically grounded.
In Part 6 of Harmony Without Chords, we expand on previous ii–V concepts by focusing on clear chord outlining and upper extensions over dominant chords, all while continuing the descending whole-step motion. Rather than relying on chord voicings, these exercises show how strong line construction alone can clearly imply harmony, even as the harmonic density increases.
Resolving ii–V’s in Descending Whole Steps
In Part 5, we take the ii–V ideas from the previous lessons and fully resolve each ii–V to its I chord, moving through the exercise in descending whole steps. This type of harmonic motion shows up frequently in jazz standards—How High The Moon being a great example—and it’s an important sound to internalize.
🚨 Harmony Without Chords – Pt. 4: Adding the ii Chord
In Part 4, we expand the harmonic framework by introducing the ii chord before each dominant, turning the previous dominant-focused ideas into full ii–V motion. This adds harmonic depth and forward momentum while keeping the emphasis on linear voice leading rather than vertical chord shapes.