How to nail a Jazz standard!

Sussex Jazz Guitar school is this Sat 11th! 11am at the Brunswick. We are up in the little room so advanced booking preferable to be sure. We will be looking at how to really nail a jazz standard so that you embed the harmony, melody and other important aspects of the tune so that you will never forget it!

We’ve learnt so many concepts over the time the Jazz school has been running. This week we will be analysing a tune and pulling together concepts previously learnt plus some new ones of course 🙂

We shall look at the traits of a jazz tune and which other jazz standards share these traits. Working in this way will help you improvise more freely, be able to transpose into any key, play the melody anywhere on the neck and plenty more giving you a real sense of achievement that you’ve actually mastered a tune.

We’ll basically look at loads and loads of angles of things to practice over a tune. You could spend weeks working on these and choose which concepts you are weakest on or would like to improve the most to get the most out of your playing.
Here are the prep steps!
Again, everyone can take it at their own pace so don’t worry if this looks a lot.
same goes for in class, there will be plenty to work on with students working at their own level.

Step 1.
Revise all major scale positions.
Make sure you can play all these in Bb (shift all 2 frets down)

Step 2.
Listen to the melody of Cherokee, from any version on spotify or youtube or my video below. Sing the melody at home along with the recording and without. It’s really singable with a clear melody!
Then play the melody as below, the A section is more or less based on Bb major scale.