Solo Jazz Guitar: A Course in Harmonizing Melody with Cell Voicings

The quote on the cover by the one and only Joe Pass is something I took to heart as a guitarist. To be able to sit down and just play the guitar with the freedom Joe Pass

had was a goal I wanted to achieve. Whether it be for a 3 hour and well paying Solo Jazz Gig at a winery, or the dreaded “Play me something” us guitarists all too often hear when we are sitting around with a guitar in the presence of company, I wanted to be able to rise to that moment as a guitarist. And hopefully put my own improvisations and interpretations into the music as well.

My previous studies as a classical guitarist gave me the run down on how a classical guitarist would be able to sit down and “play something”. Hours of rehearsed/

learned pieces involving a lot of repetition and attention to detail. This process definitely works if we are going to play the same pieces of music over and over, almost identically each time. I would carry this approach over to learning intricate and dense Jazz Chord Melodies that would take a lot of hours of practice, to only end up with less than 2 minutes worth of music just playing the arrangement of the melody. It became clear to me, quickly, that I need to either learn about 60 of these intricate chord melodies to fill two sets, or I would have to improvise a couple Choruses to fill out the tunes and only learn about 20 tunes to fill up two sets. And most importantly, I wanted to keep the Spirit of Jazz in my sets by improvising and trying to really get inside the music and have some fun.

This book started as a personal handbook for me to practice directly for the goal of playing an hours worth of music on guitar with “no rhythm section or anything”, and to lay a foundation to comfortably improvise. And of course, to get some gigs and pay some bills! A system started to appear that blended the benefits of repetition for Muscle Memory and Etudes for Musical Memory that tune the ear to hear the melodic/harmonic potency of these Cell Voicing Structures. It is important to recognize the process of building Muscle Memory first so we can free our mind up to simply Listen and Observe what our hands are doing and what possibilities are available to us. This will also keep us in the state of mind necessary to truly improvise and not get caught in “thinking” as we are playing.

There is light theory, but it is honestly secondary to everything else in this book. The enharmonic notation is written poorly to really emphasis relying on the Fingerboard for working out and understanding these Cell Voicing Structures. We don't want to be “thinking” about theoretical “why’s”, we want to be “singing” what our Ear is hearing while being aware of what our possibilities are. This is where the Muscle Memory and Musical Memory developed from the Cell Voicing Overviews, Chord Quality Studies, Tune Etudes, and Chord Melodies presented in this book make this a refreshing and attainable goal. Our Goal in this book is to fulfill Joe Pass’s quote, freely play and improvise over these 10 tunes without the need for any other accompaniment, and of course go out and get some gigs!