Bass Player & Arranger

I've loved the music of Django Reinhardt since I became aware of him as a keen jazz beginner in the summer of 2005. His cheeky style captured my musical imagination and I still play his records if I need cheering up. Don't be fooled though - Django is a guitarist of fearsome technique. He's not much of a 'scale player' and he prefers to outline changes with arpeggios. He also uses 'outside ideas' that tend to work through repetition and sequence (see bar 25). The A# in ba

Jaco Pastorius was a big fan of practising turnaround lines (they tend to round off a chorus of jazz or blues) and making up lines that imposed extended chords on simple harmony so I thought I’d have a go at putting one of my own together. Practice this in all 12 keys and get some of your own together. And for those of you who like to know the theory… This ‘lick’ is in the key of C. It opens with a scale containing two target tones of the chord (3 & 5). The F# creates a m

I’ve been shedding a lot of blues recently and I’ve been exploring new ways of playing over a ‘jazz 12′. I recorded one of my practice sessions and found this chorus that I played and so I transcribed it to analyse and pick apart my new approach… It’s a solo mainly based on arpeggios whereas I would have mainly played blues scale or pentatonics over these changes before. I like skipping onto the ‘blue notes’ such as the b5, b3, b7, and b9 too! The line over the ‘G7 altered