More on the live version of “Triple J Hoedown”
by Josh Smith
COLUMNS LIVE FROM FLAT V
THIS IS THE fourth installment on the live version of my tune “Triple J Hoedown,” featured on my latest album, Live at the Spud, recorded at the infamous Baked Potato in Los Angeles. Last month, we looked at the section that precedes my guitar solo and features drummer Gary Novak and myself freely improvising on the groove with no strict adherence to any chord progression. I’d now like to talk about what I play in the tune’s solo section.
This section is essentially a basic 12-bar blues in the key of G with a ii - V - I
(two -
five - one) turnaround. At this point in the song, the groove shifts to “cut time,”
or
2 2 meter. As a result, the 12-bar form becomes elongated to 24 bars: 8 bars on the I (one) chord, G7, followed by four bars on the IV (four), C7, four bars back on the I, and then two bars on the ii (two minor), Am7, two bars on the V, D7, and three bars back on the I, capped off by a turnaround on D7, which sets up the repetition of the entire form.
I like to throw it all at this solo — blues, country, bebop, country/western swing, hybrid picking, flatpicking, legato phrasing built from hammer-ons and pull-offs, and what have you. FIGURE 1 presents an improvised solo played over the entire 24-bar form.
In bars 1-4, I start off with licks played in “open G,” meaning I emphasize the use of open strings while playing lines based around the G Mixolydian mode (G, A, B, C, D, E, F). One can “boil down” G Mixolydian to G major pentatonic (G, A, B, D, E) or G dominant pentatonic (G, B, C, D, F), and it’s useful to look at the broader Mixolydian mode in this way.
An equally useful approach is to imagine the inclusion of passing tones that are either a half step below or above on
