What I discovered in Gene Harris's blues solo 🎹

Did you miss yesterday's workshop with Arthur Migliazza? Catch the replay at the bottom of this email. ⬇️

Reader,

I'd been soloing using single note melodies using the blues scale for a while, but something didn't sound right. Oscar, Monty, and Gene Harris all played these melodic accents that I couldn't place. It wasn't until I really dug into their recordings that I understood what they were doing.

I call these Bluesy Double Stops, a term I stole from my friend Adam Maness. It's when we add an accent to our line by harmonizing it with another note on top. That gives those notes a little extra punch, with some blues flair.

Gene Harris Example

Here's Gene Harris doing it on Bluesology with the Ray Brown Trio on Live at the Loa. I've highlighted the double stops for you in yellow.

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Download the transcription: Bluesology.pdf​

Note that the transcription above is just the last 6 bars of the 12 bar blues in Eb. Gene is mostly using a C blues scale here. (That's the alternative blues scale I taught you last week.)

Playing Double Stops

The note you use on top matters. The most common choices are the root or the 5th of your blues scale, NOT the chord.

If we were playing a blues in G, that gives us 4 primary options:

• G - The root of the G blues scale
• D - The fifth of the G blues scale
• E - The root of the E blues scale (Some call the "G major blues scale")
• B - The fifth of the E blues scale

Over the C blues scale that Gene is playing, he's using the root, C, as the upper note.

The reason it sounds so bluesy is the tension. The flat-3 and sharp-4 rubbing against that fixed note on top is the same friction a horn player creates when they bend into a blue note and hold it. On piano, we have to fake it a bit this way.

3 Things to Practice This Week

1. Practice playing your G blues scale over the 12 bar blues changes. Put the root on top of every note as a double stop. Then try it again with D.
2. For more color, try the same exercise but using the E blues scale over the G blues changes. Pair the E or B on top as your double stop.
3. Try introducing these double stops into your improvisation as accents.

We'll dig into this together, nice and slow, at this Friday's workshop.

Friday Masterclass: We'll walk through these double stops together, and I'll show you how to practice them and then put them into our songs.

You are on the list.

See you Friday, Feb 27, at 1:00 Eastern.

Happy Practicing,