— Begin quote from "Jerry M"
…I still play some chord melody now and then and remember all the jazz harmony studies and so on but I gotta tell you all, when I started on the BG thing about 4yrs ago i was amazed how difficult it can be to play in four keys…just playing G for a whole measure instead of multiple inversions 2 to 4 a measure is considerably easier obviously but the single note lines with all the pulloffs, bends, hammer ons, etc. I find a real challenge. Add to that the naturally more difficult, IMO, acoustic guitar and it’s a handful…
— End quote
I played jazz (swing, bebop, fusion, modal) for 30 years before even thinking about trying to play bluegrass. And I agree, to me bluegrass seems much tougher to learn than did jazz. I have analyzed this in my own learning from the last few years and this is what I have surmised. Bluegrass, with all it’s improvisation involved, is much more strict about how it should sound and how to get those sounds. For example, in jazz it is common (and even considered preferable) to improvise a completely new melody over the harmony or chords of a tune. In bluegrass, that concept is heresy and the audience should be able to hear the original melody woven into your new improvisation when you “take a break”. Also, in jazz it is common place to start and end licks or phrases on non-chord tones (ie. start a phrase on the 9th of the chord and end on the 4th). In bluegrass, you would sound like a jazz guy if you did this and in fact, you should be starting and ending phrases/licks on chord tones (more specifically the note of the melody that happens at that moment). To make matters more confusing, bluegrassers routinely use blue notes in ways that differ from jazzers. It is common to move from the b3 to the 2 to the 1 in bluegrass while the b3 in jazz is more often followed by the natural 3. These small but significant differences (and many, many more) are what has thrown me for a loop in my learning to play bluegrass. Even the comping in bluegrass is much more complex than the simple “boom-chuck” sound that most folks describe. Folks like David Grier amaze me. What I have found is that some of the great bluegrass guitarists can also play jazz very well whereas you will not find many jazz guitarists that can play bluegrass well (or at all for that matter).
The relatively small numbers of chords in a bluegrass tune belie it’s difficulty to perform well. We often laugh when someone says "What key is this bluegrass tune? and everyone responds “the same as all of them, G major!”. God help me if bluegrass tunes were in as many keys as jazz tunes because I would never, ever, get a handle on this style… 