more scrittles

I've been putting in a lot of practice time, going through the first Real Book tune-by-tune to work on reading, comping, and soloing. It's a great way to start to see commonalities in tunes, and take some of the mystery out of changes.

I've also been surfing the Net for articles on jazz harmony, just trying to find clues to help me along. There sure are a lot of crappy lessons out there; I went through the entire index of Guitar Player magazine and only found one or two helpful articles...the rest were all focused on either learning licks for this or that situation, or were hopelessly myopic, consisting of things like using a pick and fingers simultaneously ("Stairway", anyone?) or playing false harmonics (why only 12 frets above?), with a scant handful of examples that barely illustrated the simplistic point. I found a lot of guitarist's sites, many of which had lessons, most being similiarly dreadful. Not to mention lots of taglines like "Fingers of Velvet" on album covers featuring a honey-colored Gibson superimposed over another goddam night city skyline. Please.

Then I jumped onto a jazz guitar newsgroup. I read back through the previous few week's postings, and felt more and more alienated...3/4 of the posts were about equipment, the other quarter were silly discussions like "this-and-this famous guitarist said that if you don't 'have it', all the work in the world won't make you great', is this true or not?" Besides being too depressing a thought to deserve printing, it just seems so patently ridiculous in view of the legendary work ethic practiced by, say, Coltrane. Obviously he was born with talent, but he was no child genius. He worked his ass off to get where he did. I'd rather bear him in mind, practicing eight hours a day before going to his gigs, than, say, Mozart.