POST # 006 Barney Kessel on Starting Out on Jazz Guitar

"I always felt like a real stumble-bum, I remember when I learned to play the six-string barre F chord, my fingers bled from working so hard at it.”- Barney Kessel



“I learned major, minor, chromatic, and augmented scales, I learned how to read; I learned how to build up to four-note chords, and how to build diatonic scales. I also learned something that is a veryimportant part of fingerboard study that I don’t see being taught a lot today. My teacher insisted that as we learned to play each chord, we had to learn the name of each note inthe chord, and we also had to know in which part of thechord each note was. Like, which note was the 5th of the chord, or the 3rd." - Barney Kessel

“They were trying to tell me,” Kessel recalled to Gitler, “‘Play like a horn.’ I didn’t know that they meant to play a melodic, single-note line, to try and play like a tenor saxophone or a trumpet. I recall my very earliest, feeble attempts were to play either chords, likea ukulele, or to play single notes, but I would tremolo it as though it were a mandolin. They would say, no, play like a horn. I didn’t know what they meant. Finally, when I did heard Charlie Christian it had an enormous impact on me... His style was very reminiscent of Lester Young to me. And then I could see what they were talking about.” - Barney Kessel

(The musical Journey of a thousand notes starts with a single F barred chord....Ed)






http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqgwVpCTAf4