Jazz music in its roots developed from Blues and Ragtime. One can hear the influence of the blues in the melodic aspect of jazz improvisation. Listening to jazz pianists like Oscar Peterson, Diana Krall, Red Garland, Wynton Kelly, to name a few, you can often hear the influence of blues piano in their melodic improvisation.

In this video lesson, I took the jazz standard Autumn Leaves as an example of how blues in jazz may sound in the context of a jazz solo.

Autumn Leaves is in the key Gm. Therefore the scale of G minor and its modes would fit most of the chord changes. While these notes provide excellent material for melodic improvisation, they are somewhat limited in scope and can sound redundant. That said, it’s an excellent idea to learn to improvise simple motives using scale notes only. Many famous jazz standards melodies utilize only scale notes of their key.

Here are examples of some jazz standards with melodies and motives utilizing only notes of the key they are in: What a Wonderful World, My Foolish Heart, Mack The Knife, Black Orpheus, Blue Room, Come Sunday, Falling in Love With Love, Quiet Nights (Corcovado), It Never Entered My Mind.

Many more tunes do that in the A section before transitioning into exploring notes outside their key. A notable standard is Honey Suckle Rose. The A section is known for the influence it had on famous bebop standards like Donna Lee and Yeah,  as well as standard bebop licks jazz pianists use.

One of the ways to spice up your scale based melodic improvisation is by incorporating blues scales and blue notes in addition to the major or minor scales. In the video, I use both the Gm and Bb minor blues scales. Although this is not straight out blues piano solo, you can hear echos of the blues as a result of the use of blues licks and blues scales in the improvised lines. 

To learn the blues scale lets begin with the scale of the key of G minor.

G minor scale:

In its essence, a blues scale is a minor pentatonic scale with an added b5, which acts as a chromatic passing tone as well as a color in and of itself commonly called Blue Note. The minor pentatonic scale is a five-note scale the distills the 1, b3, 4, 5, 7 from the minor scale.

G minor pentatonic scale:

To turn it into a blues scale, let’s add the b5 (blue note) between the 4th and the 5th of the pentatonic scale. In addition to the G minor blues scale, I also use the Bb minor blues scale to further jazz up the melodic improvisation.

G minor blues scale:

In addition to the G minor blues scale, I also use the Bb minor blues scale to further jazz up the melodic improvisation.  As an exercise, see if you can construct the Bb minor blues scale starting from the Bb minor scale following the steps outlined in this article.

To see how you can put it all together, check out this video.