Blues Scale

Should young and beginner improvisers use the blues scale? No, and yes!

Here's why, in my opinion, it can be a bad idea.

1. It is often the path of least resistance for amateur jazz educators. How to begin improvising -well, you can just use a blues scale all the way through a blues, they say. But hang on. Exactly how many professional jazz players do that -use nothing but a blues scale in a blues solo? Hardly any, if at all! It is really unusual. When students want to learn how to play jazz, they want to know how to play the kind of stuff they hear US playing, not be fobbed off with some lazy lie about "just use a blues scale, man". If you want a simple, lazy approach, try my jazz pentatonic scale idea, a few posts below.

2. We are teaching beginners, so of course we just give them a three chord blues to play on. The blues scale has notes to clash in the worst way with every single chord in the progression. The 4th and b5 of chord I; The b9, and 4th of chord IV; The 4th, b6 and Maj7 of chord V. For what ever reason, kids gravitate towards these notes, in a bad way, and too often sound terrible.

However, the blues is also a key sound in jazz, and many of those dissonances are important, and can be cool. However, they are usually only cool in the hands of an experienced player, who has done plenty of listening.

Think of the blues scale as something that is added to other sounds to create a different colour. It is like decorations hung on a christmas tree. The tree is the main thing -without it, the decorations are just a pile of shiny rubbish lying in the corner. Blues scale is like that -without other stuff going on, it can just be rubbish.