About This Course
Learn to play swing and jazz melodies and classic solos from jazz legends like Lester Young, Miles Davis, and Django Reinhardt, as well as swing mandolinists like Tiny Moore and Jethro Burns. For each song, you’ll learn the melody and a solo, along with tips on technique, phrasing, and improvisation.
Try a Sample Lesson
Django’s solo on the original 1937 recording of “Minor Swing” is spectacular. You’ll learn the first 32 bars of the solo (two choruses). Joe walks you through the first chorus in this video.
Meet the Instructor
Joe K. Walsh
Hailed by Nashville’s Music Row magazine for his “lickety-split mandolin work” and by Vintage Guitar magazine as “brilliant,” Joe K. Walsh is one of the best mandolinists of his generation. Walsh is known for his exceptional tone and taste, and his collaborations with acoustic music luminaries, including legendary fiddler Darol Anger, flatpick guitar hero Scott Nygaard, folk legend Jonathan Edwards, and pop/grass darlings Joy Kills Sorrow, have taken him all over the musical and figurative map. An avid mandolin educator, Joe is a mandolin instructor at the Berklee College of Music and teaches regularly at music camps throughout North America and beyond.
Peghead Play-Along Tracks
Peghead Nation is creating a
library of accompaniment videos (and downloadable MP3s) for songs and tunes that are taught on the site, classics that you'll find at many jams and picking parties. As a subscriber, you have access to this library and can use the tracks to practice playing tunes and songs at a slow or medium tempo with guitar accompaniment. New songs will be added regularly.
Swing and Jazz Mandolin Source Material
Check out these songs featured in the Swing and Jazz Mandolin course.
The Swing and Jazz Mandolin Subscription Includes:
- Transcriptions of solos by Lester Young, Miles Davis, Django Reinhardt, Tiny Moore, Jethro Burns, Don Stiernberg, Paul Glasse, and more
- Advice on soloing and improvising
- Chord and arpeggio theory and practice exercises
- New lessons added every month
- High-quality video with multiple camera angles so you can see close-ups of both hands in action
- Detailed notation and tab for each lesson
- Play-Along Track videos and audio downloads so you can play along with Joe
$20/Month For One Course
Additional courses only $10/month each!
• Save 20% with an annual subscription
and get your first month free or $20 off an annual subscription.
Learn to play swing and jazz melodies and classic solos from jazz legends like Lester Young, Miles Davis, and Django Reinhardt, as well as swing mandolinists like Tiny Moore and Jethro Burns. For each song, you’ll learn the melody and a solo, along with tips on technique, phrasing, and improvisation.
Swing and Jazz Mandolin Course Outline
Arpeggios and Closed-Position Scales - New Lesson
Joe shows you essential arpeggios and closed scales you’ll need to know to play swing and jazz mandolin. He starts by showing you two fundamental major arpeggio shapes, and then shows you how to modify them to play minor and dominant seventh arpeggios and variations of those like minor seventh, major seventh, minor sixth, major sixth, and minor seven flat five. He also shows you two closed-position major scales and how to modify them to create Dominant, Dorian, and natural minor scales.
Minor Swing
“Minor Swing” is one of the most popular tunes recorded by Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grapelli, and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, and Django’s spectacular solo on the original 1937 recording of “Minor Swing” is a classic.
Lady Be Good
“Lady Be Good” (also known as “Oh, Lady Be Good”) is one of the most popular swing and jazz tunes, and one of the first tunes that bluegrass-oriented mandolinists learn when they’re first exploring swing and jazz. You’ll learn the basic melody and chords to “Lady Be Good” as well as Lester Young’s famous 1936 solo, which has influenced generations of jazz and swing musicians.
All Blues
“All Blues” is one of the most popular tunes from Miles Davis’s classic album Kind of Blue, which features a raft of jazz legends: John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb. “All Blues” is a 24-bar blues in 3/4 in the key of G with a D7♯9 and an Eb7♯9 where you would usually find a V7 chord. In addition to learning the form, you’ll learn the melody as played by Miles, part of Cannonball Adderley’s solo, and how they approached playing over ♯9 chords.
