Harmony

🚨 Play a Great Blues in 3 Months – Week 9

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been expanding our line vocabulary using real jazz language:

• Guide tones
• Chromaticism
• Augmented sounds

This week, we take another important step by focusing on two essential dominant sounds:

👉 Whole tone
👉 Diminished

These sounds show up constantly in jazz improvisation, especially over dominant chords, and they create a strong sense of tension and forward motion.

🚨 Play a Great Blues in 3 Months – Week 8

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been building lines using real jazz vocabulary—starting with guide tones, then expanding into phrases drawn from players like Milt Jackson.

This week, we focus on one of the most important elements of that language:

👉 Chromaticism

These lines are built using phrases from Milt Jackson transcriptions and other bebop sources, but the main idea is how chromatic notes connect and shape the line.

You’ll hear:

🚨 Play a Great Blues in 3 Months – Week 7

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been working with phrases drawn from Milt Jackson’s vocabulary, building full choruses from short melodic ideas.

This week, we continue that approach—but with a specific focus:

👉 Using augmented triads over dominant chords

You’ll notice that certain moments in the chorus highlight the sound of the augmented triad (1–3–#5), giving the lines a bit more tension and forward motion.

🚨 Play a Great Blues in 3 Months – Week 6

So far, we’ve been developing lines using guide tones—focusing on 3rds and 7ths to clearly outline the harmony.

This week, we take that idea one step further.

👉 Instead of creating lines from scratch, we’re working with real vocabulary drawn from Milt Jackson transcriptions.

I’ve taken a few short phrases and used them to build a full chorus etude, showing how a small idea can be developed across an entire blues form.

🚨 Play a Great Blues in 3 Months – Week 5

So far in this series, we’ve focused on building a strong comping foundation:

• Guide tones in the left hand
• Smooth voicing movement
• Consistent time and rhythm

This week, we shift the focus toward line development.

👉 Using 3rds and 7ths, we begin outlining the blues with single-note lines, helping you connect harmony in a clear and musical way.

🚨 Play a Great Blues in 3 Months – Week 4

Up to this point, we’ve stayed in F and focused on building a strong foundation:

• Clear guide tone movement
• Controlled upper voice motion
• Consistent Charleston rhythm

This week, we take a big step forward.

👉 We move to the key of B♭, one of the most common blues keys.

🚨 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.

🎵 Harmony Without Chords – Pt. 10: Putting It All Together

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: