Learning to navigate Blues for Alice is like taking the training wheels off the blues. www.flickr.com/photos/23596957@N02/2348934926 This isn’t just I, IV, and V chords. It’s called “backdoor” blues changes because instead of going from F to Bb7, up, it goes through the backdoor, down to Em7b5 (into a ii-7b5-V7-i in the relative minor, D minor). I can tell whether or not people have done their homework on this tune when I hear them improvise in bar 4, bar 6, and bar 8. These measures contain trick nuances, and you really can’t navigate them with straight major and minor pentatonics. Here [...]