What should I play on a minor blues, you ask? Quit your damn whining and check out this Eric Alexander transcription: a veritable how-to on the use of sequences, chord superimpositions, and the altered scale -- along with a few curveballs. It's here on my jazz blog: Harder Bop. As you know...

I was lucky enough to meet up with Eric last Thursday while we were both in London, and he gave me a lesson for around an hour 30 minutes and it was well worth the expense. Eric's a generous,(in terms of freely giving his ideas away), but quite a tough teacher and really gave my technique a...