Ah man, Eric is really one of the best on here. The only guy who isn’t pretending it’s all easy, and he’s the best, and creativity comes easily. It’s hard work, and difficult choices about what you invest your time in have to be made. Real talk, but the feel good version!
This is timely. My teacher is a very experienced and "classicly" trained/taught jazz player, but he can play pretty much anything. He can totally teach someone all of the theory you would ever want. But, I came up another way over playing for 30+ years. I know a TON of chords and pieces of patterns. I know a tiny bit of theory. I basically know the notes on the fret board. I asked him a few months ago rather than blowing my mind my theory, can we work with what I know - chords and patterns. He has totally embraced that with me and I feel like I am finally learning how to improv, trust my ear and slowly learning to play some changes. It is NOT the classical way of learning jazz and improv, but it is working for me. I am never going to play in NYC and don't need to know everything to do that. It is basically what you are showing here - know the 7th chords and 9th chords and where are the arpeggio patterns associated with them. It has been a lot of fun and light bulbs are starting to turn on in my brain. If I ever played a jazz gig with a NYC musician, they would laugh at me, but I don't care. I am having fun with it and my teacher is very encouraging.
Wow! This is a damn fine direction to go. Just want to put my two cents in. I love that you are bridging the gap between "rock" and "jazz", I finally realized many years ago that the rock music I loved the most had very lush sounding chords. Turned out to be "jazz" chords. Not just Steely Dan, but Pink Floyd, etc.. Can't wait for the next lesson, these are songs that I am excited to work on! Also, I love how you tell what the I chord is, the IV etc., what key we are in. That's what I really need! to understand the chord movement...THANKS
Somehow when I was still pretty fresh on guitar as a kid, I found the chord chart for Duke Ellington’s Caravan. I never really learned to play jazz, but having the chord layouts to just that one song enhanced my songwriting so much.
I really appreciate you not "blinding us with Jazz science". Thank you. So many want to DOMINATE the "student" (is it really a legit study if all you feel is overwhelmed? I think not) I'll muddle through these Jazz For Rockers uploads while convalescent from a serious illness.. Cheers
This is excellent. Most "intro to jazz" goes through Autumn Leaves, which is an important tune but maybe not the most exciting to rock guitarists. I really enjoyed the Dan and Bowie examples. You've definitely found a niche for introducing jazz that isn't really out there. I look forward to the next videos in the series.
I've been away from RU-vid for a while and have just come back to this. This is EXACTLY what I'm looking for: beautifully presented and exemplified as always. Great stuff!
Thanks Eric, this is something I've always been interested in. A lot of youtubers put a lot of effort into making videos that will raise their statistics, you seem to think about ways to improve our playing, that's why you're the best. Thanks again!
Such an authentic breakdown. Robben Ford is the guy I keep going back to as my poster child of finding a backdoor into jazz from rock and blues. I really enjoy his playing. If you listen to the live stuff he did with Larry Carlton, it's quite fascinating to them together, Robben as the guy who stepped into jazz from blues, and Larry as the guy who stepped into blues from jazz. They're so different, and they sound so good together, treading common ground, but approaching it from different starting points.
Thank you for the lesson!! I feel like I keep getting stuck in the same ruts and videos like this really give me ideas on how to branch out! Keep putting out the excellent content!❤
I have the same opinion and couldn't agree more on so many things in this video, which shows me again that you are my favourite (perfect for me) guitar teacher on youtube!
Oh man! I just stopped my Jazz lessons for this exact reason. I was learning heads to Rhythm Changes, Oleo, Doxy, etc and was like this is challenging and cool but the next step to improv I have gone, nope, not now. Time to consolidate all the excellent knowledge I gained(as I am from the 80s genre of music ie Cure, Police etc) and see how I can blend. This is perfect timing for me, let’s go!
Very interesting. I have been starting many years ago with too hard jazz concepts and without the basis (major scales, how to build a chord and so on) . I try today to fill the gaps 😄
I just bought a new (to me) Ibanez jazz guitar last week as I love those full buttery tones. I’ll be following this series of your videos closely buddy.. perfect topic for me on my current guitar journey.😊
Yoooo Eric you always seems to have a telepathic rhythm with mah brainz. Perfect timing on this for me. I wants yer jazz perspective. Also I really liked the way you intro’d this particular video calling out jazz in pop history
please more jazz videos!!! i'm doing a song with jazz turns and hopefully one day i'll make a comlete jazz banger. This has helped me so much! PD: if possible and interested i'll like to shared you the song when finished
Love that progression from Four on Six. I love you for taking a stab at this topic! It is not easy to teach something like this. I will say though I have a bit of criticism, but nothing crazy! I think starting with that steely dan song is a bad choice for starting with jazz. I think swing is such an important part of jazz, and even more important than that is playing on the AND. I've never heard a jazz musician start every single phrase on the downbeat unless they're playing a cover of something or a pop tune. That tune, especially the part you played, has every phrase start on the downbeat. I can't stand that. I'm not that good I'll be honest, but I can at least pretend my way through jazz. When I first started, I played every phrase on the downbeat and quickly learned I was really sounding terrrible doing that. I spent months trying to always start on the AND, and honestly, and it has made me so much better as a guitarist and as a musician. As someone who has really devoted themselves to learning Jazz over the past 2 years and playing jazz with pro jazz musicians, I have learned this to be the best thing to learn in the beginning. Again, this is just a note of critique, this video is EXCELLENT, and I will learn much from this series I am sure. I am excited to watch the rest of these videos, so I am excited to see what else you have in store for me to learn. Cheers, thanks for the great video!
@@EricHaugenGuitar Thank you for the reply!! As a former music teacher, I can tell that you have put a lot of work into organizing your thoughts and your videos. I love your videos, and I wanted to share my experience learning jazz. Mainly, because I was in the same boat as some of the people watching this series, this was a critique I received by jazz musicians (of starting every phrase on the downbeat). So I just wanted to share that experience with you. There is a lovely video on youtuve of Barry Harris talking about playing on the and. You may have seen it before, but I recommend checking it out! Thank you for reading my comment and replying. and THANK YOU for this series!!!!!
Nice choice of guitar for this video theme! Firebirds ended up in rockers hands but were aimed to jazz cats when first produced (they were supposed to compete with Fender offsets on this public)
Punk rocker, Mike Krol, has a record titled "I Hate Jazz". Ha ha. I'll listen to the jazz station 89.1 FM or classical 89.9 FM here in Portland Oregon driving to/from work. I just don't like listening to singers or boring modern music a lot of times. I like punk, but a lot of radio DJ's suck, IMHO. Keep on, luv you!
I'm a fan of jazz. Of course, as a child listening to Steely Dan played on a granite slab turntable, through my father's hand built speaker arrays, I was *enchanted* and I suppose that is jazz for rockers. But true jazz, a problematic term 4 sure, makes me feel emotions, which after all this time, I've finally figured out about myself, I'm an emo (not an emu), or the more contemporary version of emo. I left the guitar music world in 95, only to return in 20 seventeen, and just discovered Mineral, End Serenading a year or two ago, and was and am blown away, it has been my favorite album since I first heard it, but imagine my surprise when I found out that that album is considered (mid-west) emo. It's not the emo that was around when I left in 95. But to my point: Steely Dan, all the way through to Mineral, they make me feel things. With Mineral, maybe a parity is reached, an equilibrium between my inside world and the outside world, like an agoraphobic in WWII London, set free from their self imposed confinement by the V2, the terror of the interior space now finding parity with the terror of the external space. The point being the intensity of emotion experienced, it is existential in depth. With this first episode of "Jazz For Rockers" I didn't feel any emotion in any of the jazz licks that you played. This is a soft barbless hook for rockers, or now retro midwest-emos, there isn't much to draw us in, as we're seeking emotional, experiential impact, and the jazz you played was ersatz ephemera, not that the jazz itself wasn't authentic jazz, but the jazz itself in its original form was ersatz ephemera, dissipating the instant the radio was switched off. Anyway, thought this feedback might have some value to you in your endeavors to communicate with your audience, but probably not, in retrospect. Apologies . Let's see what Episode 2 has in store, hopefully some feels. Thanks as always for your teaching here, oh, and more critique, I liked your more in-depth episodes of yesteryear. Perhaps your channel has reached its point of parity within your life? I hope not, I hope you can give more, but of course, you haven't gotten a dime from me. Apologies again.
what i find hard to understand about jazz is how it is separate to blues and vice versa. obviously jazz tends to be more complex harmonically and it utilises instruments a bit differently, but to my ear it just sounds like 'different' blues? It's partially why I agree with you that Jazz Improv isn't the way in, because you could play a blues solo over a jazz progression and it will sound just fine. In fact, it will sound like Jazz. That's where I'm lost when trying to separate the two. I feel like either Jazz or Blues can work great in either context.
Was just thinking of The Smiths. 7th chords galore...couldn't have Moz's melancholy without it. Never really thought of them as particularly jazzy ... but yeah. Something a bit showtuny about things like Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now...Half a Person...
Jazz is actually simple. It can still be hard, but so can rock or pop too. Just take a look at the Chorus for Madonna's 'Borderline' and you'll find more chords than a lot of jazz tunes. Unfortunately, it is taught quite badly most of the time....and people typically try to jump in at post Kind of Blue era jazz, not realizing those guys took decades to slowly build on previous musical norms, but a bunch of dorks at Berklee try teach it through a totally foreign method that none of the guys who played it used or even thought of.
I was watch Barry Harris video talk down Miles Davis and John Coltrane. He’s was like , that ain’t jazz. He was really upset. I’ve been trying to understand Barry Harris theory and my brain hurts a little. Great video , love the channel.
Barry is just being a purist snob in that video, but he was talking about their stuff starting at 'Kind of Blue', which was making some breaks from the historical norms. He'd no doubt call what they did before that jazz. A lot of folks go crazy over his teaching method, but I don't care for it myself...unless you are already competent in playing jazz already. You kind of have to work through the historical process that the guys who made jazz walked (obviously you don't have to take 100 years to get through it) to get behind the their 'thinking'. 'The Living Jazz Tradition' by Steve Tressler lays out the development probably better than any other book I've come across.
The way I look at it is I’ve never learned something on the guitar or about music I wish I didn’t know. Always good to hear others play and not let our ego’s get in the way.
@@dananthony6258 Yeah. Van Morrison, who was pretty much my gateway drug to jazz, is kind of the same as Barry Harris in that when asked if there's any good ne music says "no". It's just grumpy old man syndrome.
Great video.👍 For me as a rocker, trying to understand jazz is like trying to cut down an alien monolith on the moon with a plastic spoon. Daunting and very slow....!
maaaan i love bowie :( speaking of motown, people gotta get turned on to marvin gaye's last album. everyone gets exposed to 'aint no mountain high enough' and 'lets get it on' etc but nobody out here casually hearing stuff like "is that enough"
Great, but you failed to mention what notes you're NOT playing as much as what notes you ARE playing in the chords. And the right-hand technique is very different from blues or rock. Perhaps this is just a lost leader to your (paid?) lessons online but those are very important aspects to the jazz style of playing.
Respectfully disagree that 7th chords are the first thing that characterize jazz. according to Miles Davis "jazz" was the commercial name for a loosely-defined tradition, much like bluegrass was coined by the country music industry to refer to "hillbilly music". In his autobiography he states that the early jazz pioneers never call it "jazz" they just called it music (it was considered a "white" term). Nowadays jazz denotes multiple styles from blues, swing, ragtime, "gypsy", bebop, fusion, etc. I'd say if you looked at all those styles and picked out the common traits i'd argue that you'd end up with the main definitions of jazz. And those traits would include blues, swing feel, improvisation, and the knowledge of "standards" (such as 12 bar blues, i've got rhythm) and certain forms (2-5-1), call-and-response, etc. that form the language of the tradition. I think I know what you're saying because the minor 7th is part of the blues scale, but i'd disagree about defining jazz as a collection of chords instead of looking at it chronologically and as a musical tradition.
I’m guessing Eric’s intended audience does not include aspiring musicologists, but rather, guitar players familiar with rock styles who wish to mix in some jazz influences. If that’s the case, then I’d argue learning about 7th chords is a great place to start.
I am definitely no expert and there is some very valid criticism here! Jazz music is indeed a complex and special thing brought to us by the African American community. The last thing I'd want to do is white-wash it and say "Billy Joel is as Jazzy as Mingus..." I think in my desire to create a simple title and make it easy for dummies like me, I over-simplified. "..what musical concepts us rockers can successfully absorb from jazz.." would be more accurate.
