In this special feature Andy Saphir says grease your hair back, get your dancing shoes and zoot suit on, and grab your guitar for some vintage-style jump jive and wailing!
Jump blues was a style of music that developed in the 1940s and was an offshoot of the big bands of the day. It was essentially an uptempo swing combining jazz, boogie and blues that was a popular in dance halls. Predating rock and roll by a few years, jump blues bands were smaller than their big band counterparts and tended to consist of vocals, drums, upright bass, piano and a small horn section of saxophones and trumpets. Sometimes there would be an electric guitar too. The lead singer was often a horn player, and the horns usually played the instrumental melodies and solos. The style was pioneered by artists like Louis Jordan And His Tympany Five (Jordan was the vocalist and lead sax player) with songs like Choo Choo Ch’Boogie and Saturday Night Fish Fry. Roy Brown, another jump blues artist had a hit with
Good Rockin’ Tonight (recorded in 1947) which has been argued as perhaps the first rock and roll song, while Louis Prima’s Jump Jive An’ Wail is an absolute classic.
As the development of the electric guitar allowed the instrument to be heard and compete with louder instruments in dance halls, it’s no surprise that it too became a lead voice, and in the late 1940s and into the 50s. Artists like Tiny Grimes, T-Bone Walker, Bill Jennings, Peppermint Harris and Hollywood Fats played wonderful guitar licks and solos incorporating Major and Minor Pentatonic-fuelled blues lines, often combined with jazz phrases too. Notable guitar players of later years and today have carried the torch of this infectiously appealing genre; virtuosi such as Brian Setzer, Duke Robillard, Junior Watson and Britain’s own Chris Corcoran.
In this feature, I have written two jump blues style pieces; one in a Major key and the other Minor. Although jump blues tunes are much more commonly heard in Major keys due to the upbeat, dance orientated nature of the genre, if you hunt for them, you can find some Minor key tunes such as Peppermint Harris’s, I Cry For My Baby, and Louis Jordan’s Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby. In addition, I have tabbed out five Major and five Minor jump blues licks to introduce the type of vocabulary you will encounter on entering this fascinating world.
Our two pieces go beyond regular 12-bar blues style chord changes and are therefore more harmonically challenging, drawing on the jazz influence that can be heard in many jump blues tunes. So, as well as containing staple Major and Minor Pentatonic lines, you’ll also find a number of jazzier elements here, such as chromatic lines and altered notes like the b5th, as well as techniques that might be more associated with rock and roll and electric blues guitar, such as doublestops and bends. Happy jivin’
