If you’re looking to make your lines sound more like the bebop masters, there are a few tricks you can use. And these tricks are ultimately what gives bebop its distinct sound as a jazz sub-genre.
We’re going to run through a few of these must-know techniques today, along with a few etudes that will help you work these concepts into your playing.
If you want to dive even deeper into this, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video for 3 Must-Know Techniques for Bebop Vocabulary, along with Cecil’s PDF resource with jazzlessonvideos.com—20 Bebop Etudes.
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Contents
Chord tones on strong beats
We’ll start with one of the big hallmarks of bebop, which is having chord tones on strong beats. We’re going to check out a simple V-I, from Bb7 to Ebmaj7.
You’ll notice we start on the third of our Bb7, moving to the second to the root. Then we have a passing tone to lead into our flat 7—that’s A to Ab. Then we have G, F, Eb, and we’ll land on the seventh of our tonic chord on beat one.
If you look at the notes, they are falling on strong beats—that’s beats 1, 2, 3, and 4, and on each of those beats we have our third, root, and we use a passing tone to make sure that we have the flat 7 on a strong beat, followed by our fifth and seventh on the one chord. This makes it very clear harmonically—you can even strip away the accompaniment and hear what the chords would sound like under that line.
Triplets
Our next bebop technique is using eighth note triplets to create some forward motion and rhythmic variation in your lines.
For our phrase, we’ll start again on the Bb7 to Ebmaj7, which is going to look like this.
This time, we’ll start on the third of our V chord on beat 1, with an approach note into the fifth of the chord—so E to Ef, then we go up on an Fm triad using eighth note triplets. When we land on Bb, our root, we’ll again put that passing tone between the root and flat seven, back up to the root and then we’ll land on the third of our I chord on beat one.
Syncopation
Our last technique that we’ll cover today is syncopation. This means that we’re going to add some unexpected rhythmic movement to lines to give it even more forward motion and give the upbeats and phrases some more natural swing.
Taking again our Bb7 to Ebmaj7, we’ll start on our third again right on beat one. We’re going to have those two eighth notes on the 1 and &. Then this time, we’re going to leave space, instead of going right into the triplet, we jump up to that C—the 9 of our V on the & of 2. And then we have our roots with the passing tone to the flat seven and back up to the root. Then finally, we’re going to land on the third of our tonic chord.
That’s a really easy tool to apply to any eighth note lines—it’s just kind of editing them by removing the occasional eighth note to add more upbeats.
Now that we have a strong foundation with these tools, let’s check out some etude examples for how you can use these concepts.
All the Things You Are Etude
Looking at these first four bars, we see that this is a vi-ii-V-I progression in the key of Ab major.
Starting right out, we have a long chromatic approach to the 1 of the vi chord. We’re starting in with that sense of syncopation already, we’re targeting that F, starting here on the second degree on the & of one. We use that G to kind of do an internal target to that b3, leaping down to the seventh.
Then we’re going to have a sixteenth note triplet chromatic enclosure to F natural, the root of the chord. We’ll leap down to C, then the root of our Bbm7 chord and go up a kind of scalar passage—just just the scale from the root to the fifth. Then we’ll have a long chromatic approach into the b7 of our next chord, the V chord. For this, we’ll start on F, going down chromatically until we get to Db. So notice that a lot of chord tones are falling on the strong beats. We have that b7 right on beat one.
After that, we’ll leap down to E, which is going to be a chromatic approach to F, the second degree of our Eb7, and we have this kind of Fm triad over the Eb, giving us the second degree (or ninth), the fourth (or 11th), and 6th (or 13th), which are all natural tensions on that Eb7 chord.
So we have that eighth note triplet with that Fm triad. Again creating some forward motion in our line. Then we go down a half step to B, which is going to be our b13 against Eb7. And this is a kind of common thing in bebop—where you use language over the first half of a V chord that focuses on the natural tensions, then switching to chromatic tensions later in the bar.
In the first half we had 9, 11, and 13. In the second half of the measure, it’s now b13, 3, #9, b9, to Eb, the 5 of our I chord.
You’ll want to check out our accompanying YouTube video 3 Must-Know Techniques for Bebop Vocabulary to see how Cecil does this line—both slowly and up to speed.
Rhythm changes etude
For this last etude, we’re going to take a look at a four-bar excerpt from the etude on rhythm changes. Rhythm changes are one of the most common progressions in jazz, and you can find them on countless standards like “Moose the Mooche,” “Anthropology,” and “Oleo.” It’s characterized by its fast harmonic motion—so you have in this tune two chords per measure, so it can be kind of a challenge to outline these chords confidently and coherently.
Let’s take a look at how you can apply some of these bebop characteristics to a set of faster moving changes.
Starting out in our first measure of Bbmaj7 to G7 (or the I - V/ii or VI7), we have our phrase starting on the & of one. On this Bb octave, we jump up to the third of our next chord, which is going to be the 5 of our G7—going up a kind of scalar passage up from the fifth to the root.
Then we’ll go to Cm7, with an A natural right on beat one. This could be seen as the sixth of our ii chord, or it could also just be seen as harmonic generalization, which is really common in bebop. With harmonic generalization, we’re just going to play language from the V over the ii chord. That said, we can look at this as the third of F7, and we’ll do a chromatic approach from the third to the fifth, which is using an eighth note triplet to get there. Then we hop chromatically down to Bb, C, B, Bb, which is going to be the fourth of our F7. We’ll use this little excerpt of an Eb triad and leap down to G, so it could be considered kind of an octave displacement idea. But this interval, Eb to G—the sixth—is going to pop up a lot in different bebop lines. The sixth is a good way to jump down in a new register and create some interplay between those registers.
So we jump from that Eb to G, then follow with this chromatic approach back up to G, followed by D and F against Dm7. Then we’ll have C falling on beat 3, which is right where the G7 occurs. Now normally the fourth would be considered an avoid note on a dominant chord. But when you have a line that doesn’t put chord tones on strong beats, we want to make these small adjustments so that we’re able to have our chord tones on the strong beats.
You’ll notice right on the next beat that we have the 3 of our V/ii, jump of to D, then C. This could be kind of a chromatic approach that B, D, to C, and we have kind of another scalar approach in C minor.
Once we get to F, we land on the 13, then the b13, and down the third, landing on C, which is going to be the fifth of the next chord.
On that F7, we have a very idiomatic phrase, and we have another example of what we saw in the last etude where we were changing the color of the dominant with those natural tensions followed by chromatic ones. This just helps give us a little extra forward motion and puts some more color in your lines.
Like with the last etude, you should check out Cecil playing this etude in our accompanying YouTube video 3 Must-Know Techniques for Bebop Vocabulary—both slowly and up to speed.
We hope you enjoyed learning some of the hip bebop techniques. If you want to dig a little deeper into this, be sure to check out Cecil’s PDF package with jazzlessonvideos.com, 20 Bebop Etudes.
We’ll see you again next time!