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Originally Posted by Drew  Interesting discussion. 
It's worth noting that I was jamming over "Summertime" with some people not too long ago, and my ability to play a cohesive, musical-sounding solo increased, like, seventy-five fold when I stopped trying to play through each change, and just treated it as an Am blues with a few substitutions that I just needed to drop in a few chord tones to make fit.
It's when you try to overcomplicate things that you paralyze yourself. |
I just remembered, I once read an interview with Larry Carlton where he said that when he was playing with Steely Dan, and having to navigate some insane changes, he'd (quote, unquote) 'think of everything as a blues and shrink to fit'.
Similarly, Emily Remler apparently had a method where she'd think of everything as being based on the Lydian or Melodic Minor scales. I already mentioned Pat Martino's 'converting to minor' system; apparently Greg Howe did a similar thing when he was getting into fusion after his first album, although according to a recent interview he doesn't anymore.