Amazing Chord Melody Without Any Chords?

So Beautiful That Nobody Cares

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It is not often that you come across someone who manages to re-invent a style like this into
something both beautiful and unique, but this take on Days Of Wine And Roses is a such a beautiful
version of the song that uses a lot of new techniques, and actually stuff you can use in your own
playing that isn’t that common in Jazz guitar.

With most Jazz guitarists when you say Chord Melody then they think of people like Joe Pass or
Barney Kessel

Both of these are of course fantastic, but they are what I would consider a more traditional approach
to chord melody, and Jazz is not only a tradition, it is also a style of music that while staying true to
it’s roots also (luckily) keeps changing and evolving.

When it comes to playing chord melody then usually we are already having a hard time just laying
down the harmony and playing the melody at the same time with any kind of phrasing, because that
is already quite a lot to have going on. But what if you could open it up with a completely different
sound an instead of trying to sound like a piano or use traditional drop voicings then you can
explore the independent sound and possibilities of the electric guitar to create something else. I
think that is exactly what Bill Frisell does in this version, and he manages to have a very clear
connection to both Jazz tradition and to other styles especially Bluegrass but certainly also Blues
and even Pop music.

The Blues and Wine And Roses

I don’t think I had this association right away, but if I listen now then to me the intro is really Blues
inspired, and borrowing a lot from what you might hear in an acoustic blues song, something like
Lightnin’ Hopkins, I am curious what you think? It is all pretty much just a playing a good old
campfire C chord with some sparse fills giving you a #9 and a b7 to really make it more dominant
and also make it sound like blues. One phrasing technique that I really connect with Bill Frisell is
sliding down to a note. He seems to do that more than most people I am aware off, within Jazz at
least. I think Guthrie Govan does it really a lot as well, he sort of re-invented what could be done with
using slides to me, but I don’t really consider him Jazz. Here Frisell uses a slide to get to the minor
3rd from the major 3rd, It’s the blues thing. Because C is the V of the key, which is F major, then the
intro still works as a “normal” intro where I think most Blues intros would set the mood up on the I
chord, but Days Of Wine And Roses is of course not exactly a 12-bar blues.

What is also really great about this is that he is starting a Jazz chord melody with something that is
mostly a triad sound, so it is not exactly Bebop tradition, he is almost hiding the extensions and I
think the way he does that is really inspired! I A huge difference in both the intro and really the whole
performance is how the priority for Frisell ito create a beautiful mood around the melody more than a
sort of clear functional harmony based intro or a groove. This is also how he gets to incorporate
some of the very uncommon chord sounds and voicings that he uses, but we’ll get to those.
The Melody Can Stand Alone!

I might get slaughtered in the comments for this, since I am saying that he doesn’t use chords,
because he is playing a chord in the first bar of the melody, and a very basic and simple jazz chord
at that. But he doesn’t harmonize the song the way you would usually work through a Jazz song.
The “standard” way to create chord melody, that I have also taught in several videos, even using this
song, is to put a chord under the melody on the heavy beats of the bar. For Days Of Wine And
Roses that might give you an opening like this:

And that is very solid because it gives you a very clear picture of the harmony and the melody, but
this approach is also very much focused on harmony and making that an important part of it, where
Frisell’s take is much more about giving the melody a chance to shine, something you will see
several examples along the way, and he also talks about it in his masterclass video:
This way of giving priority to the melody also sort of explains why he often prefers to just play the
melody alone, and once that is there and if there is room then he adds things around it. While this is
not the way we usually do things in Jazz, then I do think he has a point, and playing a complete
chords under the melody also sort of takes away from the melody. If you listen to him like this then
you understand what he does a lot better, at least to me it makes a lot more sense. Lets’ check it out
and then also explore what he does with chords instead of playing full chords.

So you have the chords in here which are first an Fmaj7 shell voicing, so yes a very very basic Jazz
chord, and this Eb7 which is really just an interval, but which does give you enough information in
the context to hear what is going on, and if you listen to the melody that adds the 3rd of the chord G,
that completes the picture with the Eb7.

It is Rubato!
A quick side-note about the sheet music: If you are only reading the tabs then you won’t care about
this, but this entire performance is rubato, so I had to interpret it quite heavily when I was writing out
the examples, and I wanted to keep the original structure of the song in there, since he is playing
that song, but everything is actually out of time, so it may be difficult to follow, and I did have to make
some choices to fit everything in there, but to me, it just makes more sense to relate it to the song to
see it in that context.

Turning Chords into Arpeggios

On the two bars of D7 that follows he turns chords into a mix of arpeggios and smaller voicings,
something you will see more great examples of as well. Here there are two voicings put together in a
phrase that makes up the D7 and none of them are complete D7 chords. He is really as much
playing them as a fill as he is playing them as chords. While doing that he makes the fill interesting
with grace notes, open strings and sustaining minor 2nd intevals, and notice that he uses his thumb
to grab a low note.
A Beautiful Gm Voicing
Another example of this is on the Gm7 chord that follows which also is an example of how he uses
the volume pedal to add color to the sound, here it is sort of built around this shape
But he always splits it up also when he uses it later in the song

When Intervals Are Chords

The song moves from Gm7 to Bbm, so subdominant to minor subdominant, and here he fills up the
long notes with shifting 3rd intervals and also adds some slides to add a different dynamic and
sound to what is going on.

He sort of uses the same idea in the second half, but the he is playing it with 10th intervals
You already saw in the first bars of the song how he also just plays intervals as chords, and this is a
part of the open sound that he uses.

There are also some really unusual dominant sounds and chords that are relying on interval
structures, but I will get those in a bit together with an amazing ending chord for the song.

Bill Frisell
To me, Bill Frisell is one of the 3 most important Jazz guitarists of his generation with John Scofield
and Pat Metheny being the other two, and I have listened really a lot to all 3 them.
I am aware that this may be a polarizing opinion, and it is certainly an opinion more than anything
else, so you can always run amok in the comments with complaints about leaving out Mike Stern or
John Abercrombie or maybe someone else that you like more. Frisell is probably the least famous of
the 3, but like the others he has really managed to stay true to himself and keep on creating new
music and new sounds, and he still does. The last year or two I have seen both his trio and a
bluegrass project of his live, both concerts were fantastic, I can only recommend that you check him
out if you get the chance, his playing is truly impressive and actually a lot more technical or flashy
than the example I am covering here.

In Polyphony Less Really Is More

You have already seen how Bill Frisell uses a lot of voice-leading and is very creative with that. The
next part of theme shows how he will sometimes take out a single voice and leave out almost
everything else to let this voice shine next to the melody. In this case, it is very effective and he is
really just using one simple melody to move from Gm7 to C7 and continue from Eø to A7

It is really just a guide tone line, and it is simple but also really used in the right place. Notice how
this also means that he relies only on the melody and just leaves out most of the chords for this
section.
There is another spot later where he does something similar but here the voices are really moving at
the same time and there is a bit more going on also in the harmony, even if he is still just spelling out
the harmony with one or two notes at a time. Beautiful minimalism using intervals and arpeggiating
chords while having a top melody and a 2nd voice moving down. Playing this with full chords would
not have the same effect.

Let’s look at some more of those strange dominant chord sounds.

Frisells Funny Dominants

Before the 2nd half of the theme, Bill changed the C7 into an Gb7, so a tritone substitution, fairly
straight forward, but as you saw on the D7 in the beginning then chords are turned into a
combination of arpeggios and intervals.

In this case he is using that a Gb7(b5) is the combination of 2 7th intervals: Gb E and C Bb, I know I
am being a bit liberal with the enharmonic spelling here.
And then moves on while sustaining some notes to add a simple fill on top, and keeping it all
practical and playable.

The D7 chords are, maybe except from the ending, the chords which are most surprising. This next
example is first an example of a place where the melody is block harmonized (sort of) and then it
disappears into a dissonant incomplete A diminished voicing that works as a D7. In this example,
you also hear how the extensions and intervals within the chords are more important than a clear
picture of the harmony, which is especially on the first two chords that don’t contain a 3rd and the
first one is really just a Dm triad. It is actually funny that being vague is also a statement in music.
The Song and The Sound
Days Of Wine And Roses, is a Jazz standard that Bill Frisell really likes to play, since there are quite
a few versions of it on YouTube and he also uses it in his masterclass video as an example for chord
melody, I thought this was from there, but I am not sure about that anymore, since this is a different
guitar? What is great about it is not only all the different things he is using borrowing from other
styles and playing surprising things. It is as much how he manages to make that into a complete
piece of music that doesn’t sound like things put together with copy-paste licks and gimmicks. In that
respect he really reminds me of Hendrix.

This video of Days of Wine and Roses has him playing an SG, which is not the most common jazz
guitar, but which I found out was his main guitar for quite a long time after he had stopped using an
ES175, and in fact he was at one point playing in a band with Vinnie Colaiuta, this is a bit random
but I thought it was very funny that they had been in a band together since they are so different. In
the video, It sounds like the bridge pickup through a fender amp to me, but I can’t really tell for sure.
Frisell often uses solid-body guitars, mostly telecasters and strats. I have also seen him play a 335
type guitar quite a few times. He also had a period where he played a Klein solid-body. In the video
you hear quite a bit of reverb and delay which is probably a lexicon LXP-1 for reverb together with a
digital delay. He was one of the people I saw using an LXP-1 that made me decide to get one. I had
also seen Scofield, Rosenwinkel and Ben Monder using LXP-1 reverbs. You can even see his
settings for the lexicon here if you want to in this clip:

In the song, you also hear a fair amount of volume pedal, plus that and I am pretty sure he is also
using a compressor of some sort.

A Suspension that more people should use

The ending of the song shows a few things that I think deserve to be highlighted, and actually we
should all steal the ending chord!
First you get a C(b9) and then a typical very simple F triad melody, played largely with the left hand
thumb!

And then he comes out on (yet another) strange dominant sound, in this case a phrygian chord:
Fsus2/E. He switches to playing with his right hand thumb to get the a different sound and the chord
then resolves by letting it ring and playing the low F with the thumb on the left hand.