All Minor Over Chords

This is a simple test I did for Giles Bowkett last week. I was talking about how Pat Martino had a weird (brilliant?) treatise on using minor arpeggios over every chord you can use in Jazz. I took a simple [Dmaj7 | B7#5b9 | E-7 | A7#5b9] progression and I played entirely minor riffs over it.

It is a cool effect, but the primary purpose for me is that it reduces the amount of things I need to keep track of when playing. Truth is I'm way better at bizarre complex harmonies than I am at playing over them. By figuring out how to only play minor and diminished forms over all chords, I can cut down on what I have to deal with.

The progressions were recorded into a BOSS RC-2 pedal and then I just goofed off on them.

Obviously when Pat does it things work out much better:

What makes this even more interesting is that Pat Martino apparently had a brain tumor removed after he was an already established Jazz guitar badass. When the tumor was removed he found that he couldn't understand how to play, but that his motor system still knew how. This meant that he needed to actually relearn how to play music, and by doing that he devised a system that is potentially easier to understand than what he knew before.

The necessity of relearning guitar after an illness seems to have turned up his way of playing where what he needs to play is simpler and consistent.

Pat is actually not the only guy to figure this out though, another guy who learned later in life name Mickey "Guitar" Baker actually came up with many of the same ideas and simplifications. I've been studying most of Mickey's music lately and he really was a very different player. When you listen to what I did above, it's not really a Pat Martino style I'm doing, but more of a Mickey Baker soloing lesson he has in one of his books. It just happens that they are similar.

I'll have another post about Mickey and also about my favorite scale for screwing with blues guys: the pelog scale.