Are you really comfortable playing shells, both rooted and rootless?
I.e. R 3 7 or 3 7 .
I don't have time to draw lots of pictures of how these work but
you can figure them out.
For the rooted, some are on 3 consequtive strings and some have
a string skipped between the root and the next two voices.
Most people that play jazz guitar cannot do these even though they
have heard about them and will tell you that they know them. I was
playing piano for a big band one night and when I got there the
guitar player said that he was going to just play 3/7ths all night
so he wouldnt get in my way harmonically. Well I don't think I heard one
shell all night, it's something that guitar players have learned
to say sometimes because their teachers might have told them that.
Try playing through fake books and voice leading using this
concept. Put on band in a box, turn off the piano player, and
practice these.
First do it with the fakebook in front of you.
For some tunes you know without the music, try not having
the music in front of you.
These are incredibly hip but most people think it's a big joke or
that you are cheating them if you tell them to work on this or
they want to work on them for two practice sessions and then say
they know them.
If I play rootless shells with a bass player and don't tell you
that I'm doing it, I guarantee that you'll want to know what those
hip chords I was playing are.
Once again, one of my main messages about playing jazz is that you
don't need alot of information to do it and the number of things that
will actually work in practice are very small. You just have to
know what they are and avoid all the noise created by books which
need to create large volumes of information so that when people buy them
they won't feel cheated.
reed
Reed Kotler
reed@justjazz.com
http://www.justjazz.com