THE CROSSROADS Where blues meets jazz

Welcome to the first in a new series of articles aimed at bridging the gap between blues and jazz. While the romanticised mythical image of the itinerant blues player selling their soul at the crossroads at midnight might just be a thing of folkloric legend, many of us face a far more realistic crossroads in our playing when we consider which direction we’d like to take our music, stylistically. So many of today’s blues players, such as Josh Smith and Robben Ford, colour their sound with the inclusion of jazz-like vocabulary. Similarly, jazz guitarists like George Benson or Kenny Burrell are equally comfortable playing the blues. Where do players like Oz Noy, Scott Henderson and Mike Landau sit? I’d say squarely in the middle of the crossroads and they relish in taking any idiomatic junction they