50 Jazz Blues Licks: #2 Kenny Dorham I-IV on “Riffin”

50 Jazz Blues Licks is an exclusive series of video guitar lessons by David Hamburger covering the jazz blues styles of historically great guitarists like Geoge Benson, Kenny Burrell, Joe Pass, and many others. A new lick will be released each week, so be sure to subscribe and check back often!

Trumpeter Kenny Dorham has two of the highest-contrast bona fides imaginable in jazz: he was a working and recording member of Charlie Parker’s quintet, and at any given moment his composition “Blue Bossa” is being massacred by thousands of perplexed high school jazz students worldwide. (I say this with authority because I have walked the walk, duly massacring that lovely tune myself on more than one occasion in more than one classroom in my checkered, jazz-essaying past.) Less well known, certainly to me until recently, is that he led a group of his own with the fabulous sobriquet the Jazz Prophets, a group which included no less than Bobby Timmons on piano (composer of another great if somewhat less-frequently massacred classic, “Moanin’”) and, sitting in for a live 1956 recording at New York’s Cafe Bohemia, one Kenny Burrell on guitar. Kenny B. kicks off the track “Riffin’” with an extended solo on the blues, but this great chromatic lick comes from Dorham’s trumpet solo which follows. Read on for the full video guitar lesson…

Video Guitar Lesson

If you like these guitar lessons, be sure to also check out Frank Vignola’s Jazz Up Your Blues, which showcases essential jazz blues vocabulary and techniques, Mark Stefani’s Jazzed Blues Assembly Lines, which takes you on a sonic learning tour through the funky rhythm and blues stylings and fretboard concepts of top jazz blues players, and of course all of David Hamburger’s courses.