Soloing with intervals
THE CROSSROADS
Lage Lund: Soloing with Intervals
Down at the Crossroads this month, John Wheatcroft checks out an incredible Norwegian virtuoso, and one of the brightest stars from today’s world of jazz guitar.
VIDEO & AUDIO https://bit.ly/426nebY
New York based Norwegian guitarist Lage Lund was awarded the prestigious Theolonius Monk International Jazz Guitarist award in 2005. And from that moment to this he has carved a remarkably successful career as both bandleader and in-demand sideman, with an ever growing portfolio of album releases to his name. Lund’s playing is both beautiful and complex. He expertly balances a cerebral approach to music with a heartfelt emotional intensity, but never without a lyrical and expressive quality to his sound.
TECHNIQUE FOCUS
Melodic Material From Chord Shapes
A simple but effective conceptual approach you can adopt is to generate lines explicitly from chord forms. Guitarists from Django all the way up to Lage have used this device to generate motifs and melodic patterns that are clearly derived from a chord shape relating to whatever harmonic sequence they are improvising on. While arpeggios and chord shapes are clearly related, two advantages to thinking about an actual chord shape to illuminate the fretboard are, first, the immediacy and clarity of available strong notes and, secondly, due to the guitar’s tuning it’s quite likely that any notes found within an actual chord shape, rather than an arpeggio, will be organised into an interesting and less predictable intervalic order. But you’re not just limited to just using these chord tones. If you treat them as intended melodic targets, they can be approached from semitones either side, scale tones above and below, and any number of other combinations. This shift in mindset away from scales and modes and more towards the harmony at that specific time can make you play in a completely different way. One of Lund’s approaches to the intervallic potential of a mode, say F Lydian (F-G-A-B-C-D-E), is to think of this like two 7th chords sounding consecutively, such as Fmaj7 (F-A-C-E) and Em7 (E-G-B-D). We’re covering the same seven notes, but each approach will doubtless give you a different sound, which is entirely the point.