Playing Skeletal Minor Blues Sequence with a playalong using lower voicings

Well, I hope you found that a bit more convincing.

Work on your playing of “Moanin’” especially on your own, so there’s something, at least, you can play to other people if there’s no rhythm section or no playalong track available. Now, the point about “Moanin’” – why we looked at it – is because of this bluesy ambivalence between major and minor. In fact, with “Moanin’”, in a sense, the tune is in F major 7 or F7, and the jazz, the chord sequence, is in F minor 7. OK. When we’ve been looking at the blues, we’ve been thinking of the chord as the seventh chord which has a major third. So, for example, if you have a blues in C, then C7 is the first chord.

Is there a minor equivalent to it? The answer is “Yes there is” and all we do is we take our skeletal blues sequence and replace, in the case of C, C7 by C Minor 7, F7 by F minor 7, but we leave G7 alone. We leave G7 alone because when you’re

doing a V-I with the dominant 7 to the home chord: C major is that,

C minor is that. Then, 95% or more of the time, people use a major dominant 7. So the G7 stays the same. Let’s have a look at, first of all, at playing this with our lower voicings in C. In that case, the first bar in C minor 7, and we play the first inversion. And in the second bar – if we want the enhanced skeletal sequence – we go to the third inversion of F minor 7, and then home again. Then F minor, F minor, home again. Then we have G7, and the nearest G7 is the 13th shape. And then …

So let’s have a go at just improvising on the Dorian mode for C and the Dorian mode for F using a playalong – an Aebersold playalong – this is from volume two, “Nothing But the Blues”, track 11, C minor blues. A little bit of improvising …