When you’re developing as an improviser, it’s helpful to start branching out to some new styles, scales, and techniques.
Something that many jazz players work on is bebop soloing—which evokes some of the style and technique of the bebop era and some of jazz’s greatest players like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell.
Bebop is often characterized by complex melodies played at a fairly fast tempo—often floating around 300bpm.
Today we’re going to check out three steps you can take in bebop soloing to get you more comfortable with the concept.
If you’d like to dive into this more, check out more of Cecil’s PDF packages, including 20 bebop etudes!
Contents
The bebop scale
The easiest place to start with bebop playing is the bebop scale.
If we look at the G dominant bebop scale from the perspective of the mixolydian scale, we’re going to have not only the mixolydian flat 7, but we’ll also have the natural major seventh as well. This creates a smooth b7-7-1 line that you can move through quickly. This scale is basically a cross between the major and mixolydian scales. Essentially what we’re doing is adding a passing tone so that all chord tones fall on strong beats in an eighth note line.
You’ll notice that in the G dominant bebop scale against a G7, we have the root, b7, 5, and 3 all falling on strong beats, which are all chord tones in G7. And this all just ensures that there is harmonic clarity in the line, and even if we add in more chromaticism outside the scale or play decorative figures in the eighth note lines, we still have the sound of G7 underpinning it.
If you want to start integrating this scale into your playing, a good way to do so is to descend the scale from every chord tone. This means descending from the root, then the flat 7, the fifth, and finally the third—and you want to do this descending instead of ascending, which is how it’s mostly used in idiomatic bebop phrases.
If you want to see how Cecil does it, be sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video, 3 Steps for Bebop Soloing.
Integrating arpeggios into bebop lines
So within the dominant bebop scale, we have four arpeggios that are built off the chord tones of G7—that’s from G, B, D, and G.
So off of G, we have of course G7. Off of B, we have Bm7b5 (B, D, F, A). And you’ll notice that A is giving a tension nine over the G7 chord. Then we have Dm7, which gives us the 5, b7, 9 and 11 from G (D, F, A, C). Then we come to Fmaj7, which gives us the b7, 9, 11, and 13 from G (F, A, C, E).
Now what you can create simple bebop lines by connecting the arpeggios to the scales, by doing the arpeggio ascending and the scale descending.
Check out our accompanying YouTube video 3 Steps for Bebop Soloing if you want to see how Cecil does these lines.
But you’ll notice that when Cecil plays the G7 arpeggio, he lands on an E natural, which is a non-chord tone on a strong beat. That’s why he uses an extra chromatic approach to get to the next lowest note in the scale, Eb to D, then continue down the scale from there.
Incorporating chromatic approaches and enclosures
Our third and final tip is to start incorporating chromatic enclosures and approaches that are outside of the scale.
A great one you can use is this one: an eighth note triplet covering a minor third within the scale.
In this case, we have a minor third from E to G, and we can fill that with chromaticism.
There are a few other places you can incorporate this in the scale—like from the second (ninth) to the fourth, from the third to the fifth, and from the fifth to the flat seventh.
Now to start using it, we’ll just connect it to the dominant bebop scale. We’ll use that approach from the sixth to the root and then just descend the dominant bebop scale.
Using the concepts on a ii-V-I
We’ll close out today by checking out how you can look at these concepts in the context of a major ii-V-I.
Starting on our ii chord, we’re going to make use of the dominant bebop scale and we’ll use the same scale over the V chord—that’s going to be G dominant bebop.
On that ii chord, we’re going to start with that chromatic approach over the minor third in the scale and we’ll descend the scale down to the b7, where we’ll do an Fmaj7 arpeggio. So anytime you land on a chord tone on a strong beat, feel free to use one of the arpeggios we just talked about. Then from the Fmaj7, we land on D on beat one, which is the 9 of Cmaj7.
Check out how Cecil plays these lines slow and fast in our accompanying YouTube video 3 Steps for Bebop Soloing, and if you want to dive into this more, check out more of Cecil’s PDF packages, including 20 bebop etudes.
We’ll see you next time!
コメント