All That Jazz: My Approaches to Soloing on “Out of the Blue”

The following content is related to the September 2013 issue of Guitar World. For the full range of interviews, features, tabs and more, pick up the new issue on newsstands now, or in our online store.

In my last column, I presented the melody of the A and B sections of my tune “Out of the Blue,” a track from my latest release, All Over the Place (Heads Up International). This month, I’m going to show you a few different approaches I like to use when I solo on the tune.

First, let’s look at the form over which the solo takes place. Similar but not identical to the melody, or “head,” section of the tune, the solo section is more along the lines of a standard blues in that it is 12 bars in length as opposed to the 14-bar sections played for the head and B sections.

The twist for the soloing section here is provided by unusual chord changes that occur in bars 9–12: at bar 9, instead of going to the V (five) chord—D7 in the key of G—the progression moves to the fVII (flat seven), F7 (actually an Ef-F ostinato, or repeated, figure), which is played in bars 9–11, followed in bar 12 by the fII (flat two) chord, Af.