Why I Suck.. Series 5, Episode 9 - Jeff Healey!

 It's a theme I've noticed over the years running this series that all too often, incredible talent is fused with heartbreaking tragedy. The untimely deaths of Hendrix and SRV are well known, but regular readers will have read the same fate with Freddie King, Gary Moore, Rory Gallagher and Shawn Lane..  amazing musicians gone long before their time. And this, sadly was also the fate  of Canadian blues virtuoso Jeff Healey.

To be fair, Jeff's entire life story reads as if it were written by the blues itself. Born March 25th, 1966 in Ontario, Canada, Jeff was adopted (so, for whatever reason, abandoned by birth parents) - and then before he was even one year old, he contracted retinoblastoma, a rare form of eye cancer leading to his eyes having to be surgically removed.. you couldn't make this up. 

Despite this start in life, the young Jeff began playing guitar aged 3, developing his characteristic approach of laying the instrument flat on his lap and reaching over it with his fret hand. During his primary school years he attended a boarding school for blind children and by aged 9 made his first TV appearance on the TVOntario children's programme "Cucumber". By 1979, at 13, he was performing in local rock bands and by 1984, aged 18 and attending Etobicoke Collegiate, he was playing with the Canadian Stage Band All Stars. 

Influenced by Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Buddy Guy and Albert Collins - as well as jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong - Jeff was fast building himself a reputation as a blues prodigy and in 1985 was invited to join Albert Collins and Stevie Ray Vaughan on stage at Toronto Albert's Hall. That same year he would form the Jeff Healey band and release "See The Light" which was subsequently used in the Patrick Swayze '80s classic action movie, "Roadhouse". This was Jeff's breakthrough moment, culminating with the major hit "Angel Eyes" which made No. 5 in the Billboard Top 100. 

The Jeff Healey Band had a consistently successful run through the 90s, and in 2000 Healey began to focus more on jazz, forming the Jazz Wizards, but ultimately cancer would come back to haunt him in 2007 and in 2008, aged just 41 he was dead of sarcoma. 

So a cruel start, and a cruel end, but he certainly accomplished an incredible amount with the short time he had. Stories like that serve to kick things very much into perspective - and also to serve as inspiration. So it seems a fitting way to memorialise an incredible talent and will by analysing Jeff's playing and stealing whatever we can!

The first two examples are from the breakout hit "See The Light", a funky 12 bar blues in D minor, and Jeff is absolutely on fire in the solos here. This first example is drawn from position 4 of D minor pentatonic (which you can visualise as being based around an A minor shape Dm chord) up at the 17th fret, kicking off with a powerful whole tone bend from C (b7) to root (D) on the high E string, followed by a blistering run through the scale positions' top three strings in a demonstration of tension and resolution. The really interesting part is Jeff's deft control of string bending in the second bar - bending from the G (4th) on the 20th fret B string up to first the Ab (b5 from the blues scale) before resolving to the A (5th). This control of the intricacies of string bending brings to mind Albert King as a powerful influence on his playing.

In this second example we can see Healey using a fairly stock "3 Magic Notes" based format but adding the root notes on the 10th fret E and 12th fret D - notice his use of rhythmic displacement, playing the same phrase in different parts of the bar to ensure that different notes fall on the beat - often creating the illusion of there being more going on there than there actually is! - a trick we've seen before on the blog called a hemiola. The stars of the show here though are the chromatic passing notes, Healey navigating his way through the scale using the intervening notes for flavour - because they're not held long enough to grab the attention, they're only really sensed in passing by the listener, adding "grease" to the core D minor pentatonic notes.

This third example is taken from the ballad "Angel Eyes" in C and Jeff is milking the C major / A minor pentatonic scale in position 4 around the 12th fret. This ideas really hangs on bending the 2nd (D, 15th fret B string) into the major 3rd (E) before resolving down to the 5th (G, 12th fret G string) with some singing vibrato, before making his way down through position 3 of the scale  in the second half of the lick and finally coming to rest on the root C (10th fret D string). This creates the effect of a question and answer/ call and response phrase, the 5th  leaving the listener hanging (similar to how Albert King would use it) before finally coming to rest on the root. This is an interesting concept and on the demonstration video I'll show you a couple of ways you can bring this into your playing.

The fourth example is really two separate call and response ideas taken from Jeff's cover of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" played around the vocal line in the second chorus (where the song modulates from A minor to A major). In the first lick, we're focusing on a D-shaped A arpeggio with the addition of the 4th for a sus4-major resolution and an unusual bend from 5th (E, 9th fret G) up to 6th (F#)  before ending on the 3rd (C#, 11th fret D). The second lick revolves around position 2 of F#m/ A major pentatonic, focusing on the repetition with variation of the F#-G# C# E idea, varying articulation and timing (I'll be able to demonstrate this better n the video), before concluding with a dramatic slide up to the A note (root) on the 10th fret B. 

Although I've focused on Jeff's blues based playing, he also was an exceptional jazz player, and I think we'll be returning to take a look at that facet of his playing before long... meanwhile, dust off the catsuit and the Les Paul Custom, warm up that falsetto... as we shine a light on The Darkness!