Have you heard?

Jazz. You know you want it. I know I want it. How do we get it? The best advice I can give is this: Don't think purely in terms of scales. Scales are good to know, and they're really important, but that's not all there is to playing jazz (or any kind of music!)

Your first port of call should be understanding chord progressions and working your way through changes. If you really understand how to construct chords and how they relate to each other, everything starts to fall into place a lot quicker. If you're not already familiar with your basic 4-note chords, and all the embellishments, now would be the best time to get those basics down.

In terms of scales, if you understand the chords you're playing over you can get more creative. Here are some examples.

Let's say you encounter a CMaj7 chord. What can you play over that, scale wise? Let's look at the notes. C E G B. Root, major 3rd, perfect 5th, major 7th. The first and most obvious choice is to play a C Ionian scale over that (C D E F G A B). Depending on the context, you might experiment with a C Lydian (C D E F# G A B). If you lingered on the F#, you'd emphasise the #4 interval, which may or not be interesting and appropriate. You could also approach it think in terms of arpeggios. Again, the most obvious choice would be a CMaj7 arpeggio. But then, if you did an Em7 arpeggio (E G B D), you've got 3 notes of CMaj7 (E G B) but you've also got the D, which is a 9th. You might also try Am7 (A C E G). Again we see 3 notes from CMaj7 (C E G) but you also have the 6th, again, perhaps an interesting sound. At the moment we're sticking to diatonic stuff, a very "inside", comfortable sound. You can do all sorts of stuff and sound "outside" which can be very hip and cool as well, and we haven’t even looked at chromatic/approach tones, and tension and resolution!

The one thing that I find really differentiates jazz from say rock/shred is that you really want a cool motif, or melodic statement. If you play with enough conviction you could even make the whole band sound "wrong" and make yourself sound "right", although that's probably not what you're going for.

I found that the best way to learn jazz is to actually combine the theoretical with the practical. Sure you can have a bunch of scales that you might use, or a bunch of arpeggios, but it's always how it sounds in context that makes it sound good or bad. Take a bunch of jazz standards and play through the changes first, until you're familiar with how it sounds. The try experimenting with it, reharmonizing some chords. You might find some things that aren't just "take this scale and play it here" that you find sound really cool. Also, listen and cop ideas from great players. Pat Martino, for example, has a way of converting everything to minor, and then playing a minor type idea over the changes. Joe Pass likes to look at a chord and figure out what he can do with in the position he plays the chord in. The possibilities are limitless, and you can certainly take these ideas and make them your own and find your own sound.

To answer your question directly though, the Ionion, Dorian, Melodic minor, Mixolydian, Aeolian and harmonic minor are all very common scales you can use. Don't forget that you can substitute dominant chords for almost any chords. If this is a minor chord, typically you add a major third. If this is a major chord, typically you add a minor third. For example, if you were playing a iii chord, say Em7, you could make that E7. That would change from a Phyrigian scale (E F G A B C D) to what is called a Phyrigian major, or a double Phrygian (E F G# A B C D) which is the 5th mode of the harmonic minor.

The applications of these concepts are near limitless. That, I think, is the appeal of jazz. You can make it up as you go along, because there are an infinite number of combinations that you can choose from. There's a lot of theory that can be used to explain how all these concepts work and how to use them. As Victor Wooten would say, music is a language. You learn all the grammar and the rules, but when the time comes to play, you don't think "Subject verb object", you just shut up and play. Some people develop this understanding intuitively, particularly those who started at a very young age. For others, like myself, it's a long uphill battle of learning and analyzing. I must admit though, that's half the fun in itself!

PS: Almost everything I know about Jazz I've learnt, in some way, shape or form, from Rick Smith. He's a fantastic jazz guitarist who plays at Harry's Boat Quay almost every night. If you want to check out some great live jazz, just head down to Harry's and watch the band. You could probably have a few quick words with him inbetween sets if he's got some time, he's approachable and friendly!

Everything that has a beginning, has a middle

I've been playing guitar on and off (mostly on) for the last 12 years. For the first 8 or so of those 12 years, I was a diehard metal/shred head. It was all riffs and licks and scales, and I hadn't the faintest clue what a ii V I was. About 3 years ago, I decided it was time to take my guitar playing a little more seriously, and made a concerted effort to learn some jazz... and fell flat on my arse. Hard. And that's when I realized a few things that were really, really, really important, and helped me along heaps

1) Know what intervals are and how they relate to chords and scales

The first gap in my knowledge was I didn't know offhand any intervals other than the root, 3rd and 5th. So I sat down with the major scale (G major, for example), and learnt what the intervals were. Then I extended that to all 7 modes, keeping in mind what the intervals were, what they sounded like, how they looked, and how each mode could be used to construct a chord using the 1st, 3rd, 5th and 7th interval of the mode. That's when I started to "listen" to the things I had only "heard" before, and things started to make sense.

2) Become intimately familiar with ways to play 7th chords, in different positions, across different strings, in all inversions

I had the good fortune of having some guidance from a fantastic jazz guitarist who plays out every night, in Singapore. He was kind enough to share with me his own learning experiences, and some of his own instructional material that he was compiling. Of these, what I felt was the most useful was the one that introduced me to playing chords in all inversions, across different string groups, in every position. I religiously studied that for awhile, until I was familiar with the basic 7th chords (M7, Dom7, m7, m7b5 (half diminished), full diminished). Playing this across different string groups, tackling them one at a time, and working my way through all the inversions, in about 6 months I had become able to pretty much play them on the fly as and when I needed to. The next step in the equation was to add all the colour tones (9s, 11s, etc) and extend this knowledge to altered chords. Knowing what chord tone was where in the shapes I was holding REALLY opened the gateway to understanding everything. After a time it stopped being a shape, and instead became a collection of notes, and once I understood how those notes were organized on the fretboard, altering a note here or there to produce the desired effect became cakewalk.

3) Get some basic understanding about chord progressions

My simplistic view of things is that everything can be broken down into its component parts. Looking at a chart for a jazz standard and trying to make sense of things 1 chord at a time was all good and proper, but that didn't really reveal the big picture to me. I needed a little more perspective, and that's when I started to learn a bit about chord progressions. If you've done 1 and 2 from above, by now you'd know the rudiments of scales, you'd know how they relate to chords, you'd know how to play those chords all over the place, and that makes it much easier to see how all those things are related to each other in the grand scheme of things. My own personal experience was that studying jazz standards was a great way to get your head wrapped around common progressions, as well as variations of them and reharmonization. And once you identify what key a certain portion is in, it's a good way to start thinking about what sort of arpeggios/scales/melodic ideas you can use over that. I'm still struggling with this, trying to find creative and musical ways to navigate through all the changes, or indeed, even within something as simple as a ii V I, but it does start to make sense after awhile

4) Play with people. Lots of people. Especially people who are better than you

I threw myself into the deep end and just started jamming with anyone who was willing to jam with me. Every time, it was an awesome learning experience, and it didn't matter whether they were guitarists or sax players or whatever. I soaked in whatever advice I could, and I tried to listen to what other people were playing as much, if not more, than I listened to myself.

5) Apply, apply apply!

This is really an ongoing phase but take steps 1 - 4 and just keep using them, and try and be conscious of it, at least in the beginning, until you have internalized it. It's a lot of information to process, and do it in bite sized chunks so that you can digest it all thoroughly. I really regret not having the fundamentals early in my formative playing years, because I had to unlearn alot of bad habits and resist the urge to fall back on comfortable clichés simply because I felt that I was good at them. Take all this knowledge, and apply it to anything and everything, whether it's jazz or otherwise, because really, there's no substitute for practice!

5.5) Listen, steal, analyse

Ear training really helped me out over the last couple of years. I used to rely heavily only tab, and my sight reading is pathetic at best (although I do try and work on it!) What really helped me in getting happy with the way my playing sounded was to listen to lots of music, find stuff I liked, figure out how to play it by ear, and then once I had copped a particular lick, phrase, or sound, figure out what I liked about it and how I could transpose it to different keys or apply it with different phrasing or note choices. I think this really helps you be inspired by all kinds of music, but at the end of the day, take all that inspiration and make it your own. It's cool to have a huge vocabulary of licks, but I think it's much more cool to have a huge pool of concepts that you can draw from.

That's sort of my little journey from then til now. Best of luck in your musical endeavours!