ALESSIO MENCONI

This month the young Italian maestro stops by to share five exciting modern jazz licks, designed to work over the ubiquitous II-V-I change, with Jon Bishop as your guide.

In this feature we welcome Italian jazz guitar master Alessio Menconi. Genoaborn Alessio is a well-respected musician and has a fully-stocked website of resources for the aspiring jazz guitarist. In the accompanying video Alessio demonstrates his licks along with backing tracks. The licks are played slowly first, and then at performance tempo. They are all designed to fit over the classic II-V-I chord progression, a key component of the jazz repertoire. For a II-V-I in C Major the chords are Dm7-G7-Cm7. To keep things simple we are using the C Major key signature for this progression. This will allow you to clearly see where the ‘outside notes’ are, and how they relate to the underlying chords. In the Minor version the chords are Dm7b5-G7-Cm7, and for this one we’ll use C Minor key signature. The eighth notes are all played with a swing feel and again we have used a 4/4 time signature in order to keep the notation and tab as straightforward as possible.