Jimmy Bruno is not only a fantastic jazz player but also a renowned jazz teacher. His approach to learning jazz improvisation is a completely practical one. He simplifies chord scales by basically doing away with the traditional approach, which is to assign a chord scale to every chord (E.g. A ii-V in C is C Major to D Dorian to G Mixolydian).

Jimmy’s approach is to learn a set of basic, easy-to-play major shapes in order to learn how to alter scale tones without getting bogged down in rote scale memorization. It makes for more interesting improvisation because you’re not locked into specific chord scales. It’s beautifully simple and an approach I’ve long endorsed in rock guitar.

And Jimmy Bruno is also a nice guy. I traded emails with him years ago when I wrote the Ultimate Guitar Chord Trainer, which uses a technique for drop-2/3 chords similar to what Jimmy teaches–once you learn 4 basic major chord shapes, 1 for each inversion, learning all the others is easy because you know which notes to raise or lower to turn a major 7 into anything else. (He doesn’t endorse my software. I’m just stating my opinion).

These days, Jimmy teaches online via the Jimmy Bruno Guitar Institute, a site rich with videos and students of all abilities communicating. One of these days I’ll join, as I’ve always wanted to improve my jazz chops, which are, sadly, terrible. Here’s a sample of the kind of teaching Jimmy does:

Jazz News posted a nice bio of Jimmy yesterday. Check it out.