Truefire Fareed Haque's Soul Jazz Survival Guide TUTORiAL

Soul Jazz is rooted to the 60’s and 70’s when musicians combined blues, soul, jazz, gospel, swing, and R&B funk to create "an earthy, bluesy melodic concept” with "repetitive, dance-like rhythms.” Organ trios were very common with Soul Jazz featuring legendary guitarists like Grant Green, Kenny Burrell, George Benson, Pat Martino, and Phil Upchurch.

Soul jazz lives on today in the music of contemporary artists such as Snarky Puppy, Medeski Martin & Wood, Questlove, D Angelo, and Garaj Mahal. Garaj Mahal’s bandleader, and one of TrueFire’s most popular educators, Fareed Haque presents a comprehensive Soul Jazz curriculum here in the Soul Jazz Survival Guide.

”Jazz and Blues and Rock and Funk all come from the same roots. American music is American Music. It’s my mission to embrace this truth in my music, in my playing, and in my teaching. Soul Jazz is as American as folk, pop, and other dance traditions - it is living music! This course is an attempt to continue the dialogue about what living music is all about, and how jazz is an essential part of that dialogue, regardless of what styles of music you choose to play. Plus, Soul Jazz is fun to play, easy to learn, and a great way to build your jazz chops!”

Fareed organized The Soul Jazz Survival Guide into two sections. In the first section, he guides you through 22 key concepts and techniques: Recommended Listening, Embracing the Blues as a Foundation, Major & Minor Pentatonic, Adding The Blue Note, Mixing Major & Minor Blues, Adding Major Blues to Minor Blues, Adding the Major 3rd, Adding the Major 6th, Adding the Major 9th, Adding Minor Blues to Major Blues, Using a Single Blues Scale, Adding Chromatics from 3rd to 5th, Adding Chromatics from 5th to 7th, Adding Chromatics from 7th to 9th, Bringing it Home, Dealing with Chord Changes, Soul Jazz Tricks & Licks, Double Stops, Octaves, Embracing Your Inner Chuck Berry, Swingin’, Laying Back, and Rhythm & Comping Approaches.

If you already play the blues, and/or are already familiar with the pentatonic scale, you’ll breeze through Fareed’s curricular approach for learning Soul Jazz, which is based on the pentatonic scale. In fact, you’ll be able to apply these key principles to play any style of Jazz.

”The 5-note pentatonic scale, NOT the 7-note major or minor scale, is the essential building block of jazz and, frankly, most music from around the world, certainly most American music. Jazz, Funk, Gospel, Bluegrass and other American music styles all come from or are related to the blues. The Blues at the same time. You can solo with Blues scale and hit all of the essential notes in most jazz chord progressions. Once you can do this, then you’ll start to add chromatic notes to connect the 5 notes together… and that starts to sound like… Bebop!”

In the second section, you’ll play through 4 Soul Jazz performance studies and apply all of the key concepts and techniques from the first section. Fareed will demonstrate both rhythm guitar comping approaches and soloing examples.

”I’ll show you a rhythm and lead performance over a two-chord organ trio-style vamp.Next, we’ll play rhythm and solo over a track with slightly more chord changes based on Grant Green’s Flood in Franklin Park. We’ll solo over a slightly outside sounding blues in A, and finally, a lead and rhythm performance study over a laid-back New Orleans-style groove.”

Fareed will explain and demonstrate all of the key concepts and approaches along the way. You’ll get standard notation, tabs, and diagrams for the key examples and performance studies. Plus, Fareed includes all of the rhythm tracks for you to work with on your own. In addition, you’ll be able to loop or slow down any of the performances so that you can work with the materials at your own pace.

Grab your guitar and let's get our Soul Jazz groove on with Fareed Haque!



home page: