How Do You Build a Jazz Solo? Start With a Framework Line, Not a Scale
Build the skeleton first. A convincing jazz solo isn't a scale poured over chord changes — it's a framework line of guide tones that already outlines the harmony, with everything else layered on top. This is the voice leading guitar method Junewon Choi teaches at VoiceLid Jazz Guitar: his online jazz guitar lessons start every solo from a bare-bones line that a listener could follow as a tune in itself, then add color in defined stages. If you can play a framework solo through a progression, you already sound like you know the tune — because you do.
What exactly is a framework solo?
A framework solo (Junewon calls it the "skeleton line") is the simplest possible improvisation: mostly guide tones — the 3rds and 7ths that define each chord — connected by the smallest available motion. No speed, no decoration. Its job is navigation: when the chord changes, one note in your line shifts and announces it. It sounds humble, but this is the actual load-bearing structure inside the solos of Wes Montgomery and every bebop master since. Most players skip it, go straight to fast lines, and wonder why their solos feel like wandering. The skeleton is what makes everything you add later sound intentional.
How do the layers stack on top?
Each layer is a complete solo you can play through the whole tune before adding the next:
Framework line — guide tones, minimal motion, pure voice leading.
Upper structures — flesh out the skeleton with rootless upper-structure shapes that add 9ths and 13ths without new fingering systems.
Wes Line and Django Line — run the same ideas through diagonal positions so the line travels the neck instead of living in one box.
Approach notes and diminished — enclosures, chromatic approaches, and diminished resolutions that create tension and release.
How guide tones grow into upper structures is mapped step by step in the Bridge Series, which is the theory backbone behind this whole ladder.
Why write out solos instead of transcribing first?
Transcription matters — but at this stage, a written solo per layer teaches faster, because every note demonstrates one concept with nothing extraneous. In the Block Buster curriculum Junewon built, each tune comes with four composed solos, one per layer, each played slow and then at tempo, each explained note by note: which concept produced it, why that note, why there. You hear exactly what "framework plus upper structures" sounds like before you're asked to invent it. Master players' recorded solos mix every device at once; layered study isolates them first so you recognize the devices later inside the records.
How can one short tune teach both major and minor ii–V–I?
By design. Junewon wrote an eight-bar study tune whose changes move in a diatonic circle of fifths — with one deliberate exception: bar four becomes E7. That single substitution creates Bm7b5–E7, a minor ii–V, while bars six and seven give you Dm7–G7, the major ii–V. Same Wes Line vocabulary, two functions, one context — instead of the usual textbook approach of drilling every concept in C major and hoping it transfers. It's the same skeleton-first logic explored in Soloing Through I'll Be Seeing You With Guide Tones and the Wes Line, and it pairs naturally with How Voice Leading Turns the Melody Into Your Improvisation Guide.
Where should you start this week?
Take one tune you know — All the Things You Are is ideal — and play nothing but 3rds and 7ths through the form, slowly, until the changes feel narrated rather than counted. That's your skeleton. Add one layer per week, never abandoning the one beneath. If you want this build-up taught in order, with the voice leading logic connected to real tunes and real jazz language, the Fundamentals Program walks the entire ladder from first framework line to full vocabulary.
About the Author
Junewon Choi is a Berklee-trained jazz guitarist and the founder of VoiceLid Jazz Guitar, an online education platform teaching jazz harmony and improvisation through the Functional Diagonal Approach (FDA) — a chord-first method built on voice-leading rather than scale boxes.
Wes' Insight — Wes Montgomery's fretboard logic, in lesson form
Fundamental 1: Wes Diagonal System — the FDA from the ground up