I blame COVID…

Or maybe it’s a guitar player mid-life crises…

Anyway, somewhere in 2020-2021 during the pandemic, I found myself unable to play music with other people and needed to fill my musical needs. I came across Josh Skaja - amazing writer and musician - and started reading his blog, working through some of his courses, and participated in a 30 day solo challenge. It was awesome. This got me really thinking about my playing and how and what to improve.

Somewhere along those lines I start listening to Josh Smith talk about to play through the changes. He mentions at one point - “you have to know what you can play over different chords or parts of the songs”. Well I thought - what better way to learn that then playing Jazz? Maybe I can learn Jazz, and then “forget it”. I enjoy performing in cover bands and occasionally taking a solo, or performing an instrumental tune. Adding some spice to my solos would be awesome!

Little did I know that thinking I can learn Jazz to add a “little spice” to a solo was more than naive. We’re talking about “what on earth were you thinking?”. First of all, what does Jazz even mean? Charlie Christian “Grand Slam”? Pat Martino “Joyous Lake?”. How do we go about learning a new genre of music? Well, in all of this I got bit by the Jazz bug and I definitely want to sound more like Grant Green and Kenny Burrell.

I’m kicking off a series on my approach to learning a new genre. I want to answer questions like:

As a working adult with kids, how do I make time to practice?

What should I practice - with so much content out there it’s so easy to jump around

I’m still very much in the “middle of this” so I hope we can exchange ideas.

Cheers