The Jazz Blues

Jazz musicians call the blues constantly at jam sessions, and it is not quite the blues you may already play.

The skeleton is the same twelve bars: four bars on the I, two on the IV, two back on the I, then a turnaround. What changes is what fills them. The plain dominant chords get extensions, a ii-V appears in bars nine and ten instead of a straight V-IV, and there is usually a chord in bar eight setting up that ii.

In G, a workable jazz blues runs: G7 for four bars, C7 for two, G7 for two, then Am7 and D7 for a bar each, and G7 with a turnaround back to Am7 and D7 at the end. That last pair is the ii-V from lesson two, sitting inside a blues.

Swap the plain dominants for richer voicings and it stops sounding like rock and starts sounding like jazz.

G13

G13 — use this wherever the chart says G7. One extra note, completely different genre.

C9

C9 for the IV chord.

D7♭9

D7♭9 for the V. The flattened ninth is the tense, slightly wrong-sounding note that pulls hard back to G.

There is no backing track in this lesson, and that is deliberate — the jazz blues tracks in the catalogue don't have their changes transcribed, so the chord panel would sit empty while you played.

Use the metronome below instead. It counts a twelve-bar jazz blues with a swing feel, so you can hear where the bars turn over while you comp the form from memory.

Play the three voicings above through the shape described earlier. Say the bar number out loud as each one passes. Knowing where you are in the form without counting from the top is the actual skill being trained here.

Jazz Blues Metronome

Comp the twelve-bar shape against it. Speak the bar numbers out loud until you stop needing to.