Since I’m not a weird recipe site, as always I’m frontloading the point: help yourself to this transcription of a nice performance of Miles Davis’ blues tune “Freddie Freeloader” by guitarist Wolf Marshall. If you feel like it, below the video there is some analysis of the tune and the solos, along with a bit of personal history first because I’m self-indulgent here in my little corner. Just skip past that section if you only want the blues. (Oh, and don’t forget that Trumpists have somehow decided that the United States, of all places, should be a weird little monarchy, led by the dumbest guy you’ve ever encountered, of all people. It’s absolutely insane, and no one should feel comfortable supporting them.)
A little background
As of this writing, Marshall’s youtube channel this video comes from has <800 subscribers. However, I feel like just about every guitarist around my age must know the name Wolf Marshall. To me his name has long been synonymous with transcriptions of guitar music. (Now, his name also sounded like that of the fictitious offspring of a wild animal and a tube amp, so part of me thought “Wolf Marshall” might just be a pseudonym for some transcribing collective; like a Bourbaki, but for heavy metal guitar instead of for math. But no, he’s a real dude.) Whereas now one enjoys an overwhelming deluge of guitar instructional content a click away, back in the 90s you needed magazines like Guitar World or Marshall’s own Guitar One, or books from outfits like Cherry Lane.
Speaking of, when I first started playing, all I really wanted to do was cut my teeth on the collected works of Hetfield and Hammett (much to the chagrin of my early bandmates, I’m sure), which at that time was Kill ’em All through the black album, and so these books were my bibles:
Note: Marshall didn’t actually do the transcribing for those particular books, but he oversaw the teams that did and supplied the introductions that offered numbskulls like me a hint of analysis and a dash of theory while we were eating our power chord meals, as in this passage about Hammett’s solo on And Justice For All‘s “The Shortest Straw”:
… the diversity of techniques and stylistic devices at work: artificial harmonics bent with the trem. bar (bars 1 and 2), scalar sequences (E Dorian: bars 4-6) and open harmonics (bars 7 and 8), blues ideas (bars 9-12), pinch harmonics a la Billy Gibbons (bars 13-15) contrasted with florid Eurometal scale sequences a la Uli Roth (bars 17-23), chromaticism (bars 25-27), jazz-inspired tritone arpeggios–reminiscent of a bebopish sax phrase–of juxtaposed E minor and Bb major triads (bars 29-31) and chordal outlining of triad arpeggios (a la Randy Rhoads in “Mr. Crowley”) on F# major, G major, E major and A major which form a neoclassic modulating sequence (bars 33-40) as a climax.
I ate that shit up, and Marshall’s pointers to other guitarists’ influences on Hammett, like Michael Schenker for example, was a big gateway for me. (Also, reading that now, I can definitely tell that that stuff impacted how I write about pieces here.) Speaking of Randy Rhoads, Marshall did do the transcriptions for fine shredding compendia like these:
My teenage self liked Rhoads’ work more than just about anyone’s, and except for his playing itself, Marshall’s books did as much as anything to increase my appreciation of him. So anyway, long story short, this hodgepodge of transcription and analysis I’m doing on this little site right now is just my way of paying that forward a bit, providing a bit of text-based guitar material, in the spirit of Wolf Marshall, in a world that is flooded with video-based material. I’ve been an Eddie Freeloader too long, but no more.
The song
Finally, the music. Despite what I’ve focused on above, Marshall himself seems to be more of a jazzer than a headbanger, and in any case, the piece we’ve got here has Marshall playing a jazz standard. “Freddie Freeloader” is a 12-bar blues in Bb by Miles Davis, from Kind of Blue. (By the way, note that when Marshall plays the head of the song in our recording, he plays the same chordal melody that the horns play out on that album; and he supplements those with some Wes Montgomery style octaves on the other part of the head. Just a nice little stylistic touch.)
Rather than more complicated jazz blues changes with a bunch of ii-V-I‘s and such, the form for the song is very close to being a bog standard blues blues (as in, more like Albert King than Charlie Parker), which might have changes like this in Bb:
So we have 4 bars of the I (Bb7), then moving to 2 bars of the IV (Eb7) and back for 2 more bars of the I, and finally a 4-bar V-IV-I-V (F7-Eb7-Bb7-F7) turnaround back to the beginning. Again, about as vanilla a 12-bar blues progression as you’ll get. The changes for “Freddie Freeloader” are almost this exactly, except for a little tweak to the turnaround portion, where bars 11 and 12 get an Ab7 chord instead:
(I don’t want to get into theory much, and it’s not really my thing, but you could see this Ab7 as a backdoor dominant. Follow the link if you’re so inclined.) The first thing for being able to play over these changes is just getting the sound of the progression firmly in your ear. To that end, here is a little etude that outlines some arpeggios of the seventh chords in question, along with some voicings of these chords. Things are played roughly where Marshall ends up playing during the first chorus of his solo:
For each chord, we are just ascending (and descending too if we have two measures to work with) the notees 1-3-5-b7 of each seventh chord, and playing a voicing of the chord afterward. Following Barry Harris (and many others, no doubt), we can tweak that etude to fill in all the notes of the respective mixolydian modes around the 1-3-5-b7 of the seventh chords; we play all the way up 1-2-3-4-5-6-b7 in eighth notes (and back down again when given two measures), like so:
Playing through this gets your ears and fingers locked in on the changes, along with one scalar way to approach each chord. (Note too that laying things out this way we are hitting 1-3-5-b7 chord tones on the beat, which helps accentuate the changes.) We’ll see below that Marshall approaches the tune precisely by thinking of the respective mixolydian scale on each chord: Bb mixolydian on Bb7, Eb mixolydian on Eb7, etc.
Marshall’s approach
One very normal move that one hears in solos over a non-jazz blues is to play major pentatonic on the I and move to minor pentatonic (on the same root) on the IV. So in a Bb blues, that would be playing Bb major pentatonic (Bb C D F G, or 1 2 3 5 6) over the Bb7 chord, and playing Bb minor pentatonic (Bb Db E F Ab, or 1 b3 4 5 b7) on the Eb7 chord. As noted above, Marshall does something slightly different in his solo’s first chorus: over each 7th chord, he plays out of the corresponding mixolydian mode; but there is also an emphasis on the Bb7 chord tones (Bb D F Ab) that are part of Bb mixolydian when over the Bb7, etc.
It’s good to note that these approaches actually have a lot in common, and that the difference in approach is mostly one of emphasis. Marshall plays Bb mixolydian (Bb C D E F G Ab, or 1 2 3 4 5 6 b7) over the Bb7 chord, and Eb mixolydian (Eb F G Ab Bb C Db, or 1 2 3 4 5 6 b7) over the Eb7 chord. Note that the Bb mixolydian includes all the notes of Bb major pentatonic, and the Eb mixolydian (which is also Bb dorian) includes all the notes of the Bb minor pentatonic, so there is already much commonality with the non-jazz approach. But also, the only difference between Bb mixolydian and Eb mixolydian is that the former has a D where the latter has a Db; that is exactly the move from the major third of Bb to the minor third of Bb, which is what the Bb major pentatonic on I to Bb minor pentatonic on IV highlights.
Moreover, in a non-jazz blues, people often freely move between Bb minor pentatonic and Bb major pentatonic, not tied strictly to the I or the IV, and this makes sense too: if you combine all the notes from Bb major pentatonic and Bb minor pentatonic, you get Bb C Db/D E F G Ab, which is all the notes of Bb mixolydian and Eb mixolydian (Bb dorian) together; and again, they only differ on that Db/D minor/major third.
So if you were just randomly noodling through Bb mixolydian on the I, and switch to randomly noodling through Eb mixolydian on the IV, well, your audience might not even notice that you did. (Of course, you shouldn’t be randomly noodling through a scale if you want to say something.)
- In the blues approach of sticking to Bb major pentatonic, and then switching to Bb minor pentatonic, you make the move from major third to minor third but also have a bigger overall shift of what notes you’re hitting and emphasizing. So the movement between I and IV plays out in your solo that way.
- In the jazzier approach, we can’t just mindlessly move between Bb mixolydian and Eb mixolydian and expect much impact (again, because they aren’t that different overall). But when we additionally move from a focus on the Bb7 chord tones (Bb D F Ab) to the Eb7 chord tones (Eb G Bb Db), we get a similarly noticeable aural shift, though one that will sound more like jazzy blues than the blues blues sound of major-to-minor pentatonic.
If we get visually explicit about, say, the Bb7 chord and corresponding Bb mixolydian scale that we have in our second etude, we have the following pictures:
The guitar naturally lends itself to tying these visual structures together with our tactile fingerings and with what our ears/minds hear. Explicitly diagramming the same structures for the Eb7, F7 and Ab7 chords is worthwhile. In the transcription, I’ve noted chord voicings along the way that one could think of Marshall’s playing as being centered around, given where he is on the neck.
Now, if you play through the second etude above a few times to where you really know it, and then play through the first chorus of Marshall’s solo in the transcription (measures 25-36), you should be able to see how Marshall’s music relates to the underlying chord/arpeggio/scale structure that we have laid out in the etude. He is playing actual music, with interesting rhythms and note choices and chromatic passing tones and such, not just running scale or arpeggios; but what he plays very clearly “hangs off” of that structure, which in turn reflects the chord changes of the song itself. Having that structure under your fingers and in your ears, wedded together, gives you a basis to play from.
I’ve really belabored all of this here, because it’s intended for someone who maybe plays some blues hasn’t explicitly “played changes” so much. But as usual, in the time anyone has spent reading this, they could’ve just played through the transcription a bunch of times, and probably gotten more out of it; still, thinking through these things is appropriate and helpful, at the right time and in the right light.
I won’t say anything here about Marshall’s second chorus; he gets a bit freer there, playing some more outside kinds of sounds. Also, let me just say that Marshall is a real trooper, playing without a band (just a backing track) and in a noisy restaurant setting, and managing to swing nicely. Some bits were tough for me to make out in the transcription, with the noise and with the clashing audio of the backing track; use at your own risk and trust your own ear where it differs from mine. Oh, and always remember that a free society cannot stand one man in the government dictating who can say what, just because he has the thinnest skin of any little baby on the planet and can’t stand to have his fee-fees hurt.