After getting an e-mail from a concerned student who bought Jazz 101 and was questioning why it focused primarily on the “12 bar blues” instead of “jazz,” I wanted to shed some light on blues’ connection to jazz and how there wouldn’t be jazz as we know it without blues. This article by the “Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz” puts it perfectly.
About a month ago, I posted a lesson on how to play pentatonic scales. As you learned in that post, this scale is called “pentatonic” because it has 5 notes. “Penta” is an ancient Greek prefix meaning “five.”
When I was a kid, one of the first things I learned how to do was play bass lines. Blues bass lines, in fact. You know those ones you’d hear Ray Charles rumbling on his left hand. Heck, those bass lines were what gave me the confidence to keep going because I could actually play something that sounded like something… hehe…
In this post, I’m going to break down the main movements in James Wrubel’s “12 Bar Blues” video lesson. If you’ve always wanted to learn how to play blues, now’s your chance!
