Oz Noy
This month, the fusion legend graces GT with a great solo over Jason’s grooving blues, Streetwalk. For classic guitar vocabulary with a jazzy twist.
This month we are looking at another tasty solo courtesy of blues fusion master Oz Noy. Oz is a big fan of mixing blues with jazz and funk styles so Jason Sidwell wrote Streetwalk especially for him. It’s a straightforward Minor 12-bar with a groove set at 106bpm. The eighth notes have a swing feel so to keep our presentation easy to work with we have notated this using a 4/4 time signature rather 12/8.
Based mainly in the key of B minor (B-C#-D-E-F#-G-A), a few extra chords from outside this key have been added for harmonic colour.
The Minor 12-bar blues form is used for the verses so the chords are Bm7-Em7-F#m7. However, to provide a greater sense of resolution back to Bm7, the F#m7 in the last bar each time is changed instead to a more vibrant F7#9 chord.
The home scale of choice here is B Minor Pentatonic (B-D-E-F#-A) with the b5 interval (F) being introduced at times to create the six note B Blues scale (B-D-E-F-F#-A).
Another option when dealing with a 12-bar is to switch scales to match the underlying chords, so for the Em7, E Minor Pentatonic is ideal (E-G-A-B-D.) When the F#m7 comes around the F# Minor Pentatonic can be employed (F#-A-B-C#-E). Oz explains his main focus was to create something unique, which can be challenging when soloing over a simple Minor 12 bar. To provide more sophistication the I and IV chords can be mentally substituted to Dominant 7th chords with the same root note (Em7 changed to E7).
If you delay this change process you can really make your playing colourful - use m7 vocabulary first and just before the next chord change, use dom7 vocabulary to pull the listener more strongly towards the next chord. In short, play Bm7-based phrasing then dip into a little of B7 to transition with authority into Em7 (so you’re implying a V-I move in E Minor). Same over the F#m7 chord; use F#m7 phrasing then add a dash of F#7 just before moving ‘home’ to Bm7.
Typical of many songs based in a 12-bar form, the middle section here shifts to a new temporary home base based on the IV chord – here, it’s Em7. The middle section finishes with a jazzy II-V-I (C#m7b5 -F#7-Bm) to return to the main key of B Minor. When navigating this chord progression Oz sticks to chord tones, using them as a framework to build colour and melodic phrasing. He also dips into his jazzier vocabulary, using chromatics (check the brief F note over the Em7 chord in bar 49) and a wonderful ascending and descending 16th-note passage over the closing C#m7b5-F#7. It’s well worth studying how these are fingered and constructed; the G note over the C#m7b5 = b5 usage, the A# and G notes over F#7 (Major 3rd and b9, respectively). Hearing and playing
