I’ve been working on the ideas shown in a video I found on youtube:

The melodic minor use is quite interesting; playing the minor a fifth away from a dominant seven chord I’d heard of (so playing E melodic minor over A7), but the other use that’s shown, where you play the seventh mode of the melodic minor over a chord that I guess is functioning as a V, is something I’d not really got under my fingers before.  However, the thing that I really like the sound of is the (admittedly fast and showy) run he uses around 9min20 over the vi chord.  One of the comments says it’s a harmonic minor, though I’m stuck on exactly what he’s up to.  If it’s the same scale he describes at 4min20, it’s just plain weird:over a F#min7#9 he plays C# B A# G F# F E D C# (descending, obviously).  Which looks like… B harmonnic minor but with added chromatic stuff.  Lots of added stuff.  Which all sounds rubbish when I play it.  There’s a real gap between reading, “Hey, play this scale over this chord!” and being able to do something interesting with it.  I think it might be time to get a couple of lessons again.

While browsing Amazon I discovered a jazz guitarist called Fareed Haque, who has a few lessons on his website.  One of them that caught my interest is about how to play jazz chords; I’m interested in voicings of chords with a reduced number of notes, firstly for ease of playing, and secondly because between me, the keys player, the bassist and couple of horns players, there are probably enough notes flying around already.  How many people really need to play the fifth anyway?  So recently I’ve been experimenting with things like this:

   Bb7  Eb7
E ----------
B ----------
G --13--12--
D --12--11--
A ----------
E ----------

This nicely ties up with my liking for moments where two chords require very few finger movements to alternate between, e.g. on For Once In My Life.  The downside of this technique is that my practice is sounding less and less like the actual song I’m playing along with: once you take out the root and fifth, things don’t sound quite right.