Ted Greene Blues Study - July 7, 1985
Compilation pages with notation by David Oakes

Ted's Original Lesson sheet
TedGreene_NightWes_1985-05-07.pdf

My compilation page, changes and comparisons
TedGreene_NightWes_DavidOakes.pdf

A note from David Oakes:
Night Wes is one of Ted’s original compositions. Anyone that knew Ted was fully aware of Ted’s love for the guitar playing and musicality of Wes Montgomery. Ted told me that he was inspired by two of his favorite Wes songs to create the composition. The first one was Joe Zawinul’s tune “Midnight Mood” and the second was “Bumpin on Sunset”. That is where the “night” reference came into play.

Again, anything by Ted that I have really learned came about by deciphering those chord boxes and putting them into proper music notation. I know of a few other students of Ted’s that felt the same way but not many.

One thing that Ted and I discussed on this composition was the use of the V as a minor chord. He played some Wes style chord melody to show me how Wes used this sound. Ted was very comfortable with this concept adding the minor V chord into almost any chord melody improvisation. An example would be in bar one with the Bmi7 chord lingering in the E7 bar or the Emi7 chord lingering in the A7 bar in measure five. I think that hearing the V minor was one of the educational thoughts behind this composition. Ted wanted to get his students to hear this sound.

The turnaround in the last two bars is quite demanding but very beautiful. What he did was to harmonize an E minor pentatonic scale adding a blues note on the triplet in bar 11. The top melody note of all those chords is that very simple pentatonic scale. The bottom notes are only two shapes but the same voicing. The shape changes only because he changes strings. Track the melody and then add the harmony below. I hope that you have a nice cut away guitar for the turnaround or you are in trouble.

I hope that you enjoy this post,

David Oakes
April 1, 2010