John Elliott Material From the 1950's!

If you don't know about John Elliott and the impact he had on so many great Kansas City players you can read about him here.

When my good friend Rick Hendricks passed away last year his widow Denise gave me a bunch of his music books. Among them was Rick's lessons with John. There was material there that I didn't have. You can read that story here.

Denise came in to BBs this last Saturday. She had discovered more stuff. There was some of the same content I've already got. There was a bunch of scale/modal stuff that I don't have, but most of it isn't new information to me. Example:

The most fascinating thing was a bunch of stuff labeled "By John Elliott 1950's."

The pages were done on a typewriter with spaces left where John would draw in a staff for notation or other graphics.

Here's a couple more examples:

It's fascinating to compare this material with the material I got from him from '79 - '86. You can see an evolution in the thinking as well as the presentation - the later stuff is more concise and not as much explaining; he did a lot of the explaining verbally to me that is written here. Most of the notation is pianistic - note the close voicings:

Most people reading this probably aren't old enough to be familiar with typewriters but the "staff paper" appears to be created with a typewriter. The notation above is not on professionally printed staff paper. Compare the above with the "Pro Art" staff paper in the first image of this blog. It looks to me like John created his own staff paper with a typewriter, then probably kept mimiographed copies on hand.

Then there is this:

John once told me,

"When I first started teaching guitar players I used my students as guinea pigs to figure out what was and was not possible on the guitar."

Also, There were dozens of songs written out on John's presumably homemade, typewritten staff paper; apparently he was not using fake books in his teaching at this time:

Has anybody out there studied with John in the '50's? Was this his modus operandi back then?

Anyone?

HOW ABOUT 5 LESSONS?

The 5-Lesson Foundational Series teaches the Circle of Keys as an organizational mechanism by which you ensure that whatever you learn is drilled in every key in all possible positions. It also gives you a method to find any note, anywhere, without memorizing note names on every string. That is a beautiful thing!

Almost every lesson I teach presupposes these 5 lessons.

You can download the 5-Lesson Foundational Series PDF right here with no further obligation or commitment:

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