The tune Chitlins Con Carne is a great tune to learn soloing or improvise on a (jazz) blues.
Kenny Burrell plays a “chord pattern” while soloing with short licks and melodic ideas mostly using the C blues scale. He is backing himself this way and it’s a great way to learn the structure of the blues very well. It forces you to stay “inside” the rhythm and play melodical and rhythmically meaningful sentences.
First get the accompagniement / chord pattern right and after that start to play small / short (can even be 1 or 2 notes, eb and C for instance) sentences in between.
You should start your solo BEFORE the first beat, in the last bar of the “theme”. Your solo pick-up replaces the melody “pick up sentence” (he first sentence of the melody in fact.
Start to solo on the second beat of the count- off. “Land” /stop with a note on the first beat and play the “chord pattern”. Continue this way “filling the blanks” between the chords.
But first of all, get the chords “right” so you can play the accompagniement even while you are “asleep”. In a later lesson we will learn to play a little lick you can insert between the chords.
This is the chord pattern that’s used for the solo part:
printed copy : Chitlins Con Carne
