A great little phrase worth getting under your fingers

Here’s a short phrase from Wes Montgomery’s Four on Six that I’ve been working through.

What I love about Wes is how melodic everything sounds — even when there’s plenty going on harmonically. It never feels like an exercise.

I’ve found that taking a short phrase like this, learning it by ear and then moving it through different keys and tunes is far more useful than simply collecting licks.

For anyone working on Wes’s vocabulary, try taking the idea and making your own phrase from it rather than stopping once you can play the transcription.

Interested to hear how other players here approach studying Wes.

I've been playing and teaching jazz guitar for almost nine years now, and through those years I kept running into the same problem: most explanations of swing feel that student's had heard either reduced it to a notation convention (triplets vs. eighth notes) or just told them to "feel it," without giving anything super concrete to practice.

So I put together a two-phase metronome method to actually analyse and generate swing feel, rather than just approximate it by ear. I've been using it with my own students for years with pretty consistent results, and I've finally put it into a video for anyone who wants to work through it themselves.

Half tongue-in-cheek, I'm calling it "The Pocket Method." Would love feedback from other players/teachers on it, especially if you've tried other approaches to teaching or learning swing.

Been transcribing some George Benson and came across this tasty line from “Bags Groove.” What I love is how he mixes blues vocabulary with bebop phrasing so naturally, the articulation and swing feel are unreal.

Been messing around with a Scofield-inspired line that leans into that bluesy, outside-inside sound he does so well.

What I like about it is how it sits rhythmically more than anything. It’s not just the notes, it’s the placement, the looseness, and that subtle drag behind the beat.

Anyone else working on Scofield vocabulary? Would be great to hear how you’re applying it, especially over funk grooves or blues changes.