Developing your fluency with bebop takes time and intention. That’s why today, we’re going to share a clear practice blueprint for mastering the bebop language. Mastering this style gives you the foundation for almost every style of jazz language. 

But consistency is key—and that’s why we have our 30 Day Bebop Chops Course with Cecil Alexander. This course is for players who love bebop, but when it comes time to sit down and organize their practice routine, they feel like they don't have a clear structure for improving consistently.

So let’s check some of these exercises out! But if you want to follow along with how Cecil plays it, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video as well.

Contents

Melodic minor exercise

Transposing a phrase

Motivic ideas

Rhythmic variation

Combining vocabulary

Melodic minor exercise

Let’s start with an exercise that's just going to be crisscrossing arpeggios through the C melodic minor scale. So we're going to start off with CmM7 ascending, Dm7 descending, Ebmaj7#5 ascending, F7 descending, G7 ascending, Am7b5 descending, Bm7b5 ascending, and then finally CmM7 descending. 

Of course, you can change the direction of those as well, and you can feel free to try it in different positions.

Try playing in a more vertical playing style (staying in one position rather than playing horizontally). And be sure to try this in different keys as well!

Transposing a phrase

For this one, we're going to start by taking a ii-V-I lick and moving it through a couple different keys. So the lick in C is going to look like this. 

So we’re going up the D Dorian scale, starting with a chromatic approach to the root. Once we get to that A, we do a chromatic enclosure to B, then we go up a Bm7b5 arpeggio, and down the scale to do a chromatic enclosure into E—the third of Cmaj7. 

So if we move this to fit a ii-V-I in F major (moving it through the cycle of fourths) would look like this.

Then moving it through another key to Bb major:

Followed by Eb major:

Then you can continue through the circle of fourths until you get through all 12 keys. But you'll start to notice that for guitar, some of the fingerings will start to repeat, and more importantly, you'll start to get the sound of the phrase in your ear, and it'll be a lot easier to transpose. 

Motivic ideas

For our next exercise, we're going to be soloing through the changes of “Ornithology” using motivic ideas.

So again, this is going to be motivic, both rhythmically and melodically.

So you want to think about things like call and response, parroting the same rhythmic structure from measure to measure, or even across two beats or across measures.

We also want to think about melodic motivic development, where you take the same melodic figure and try to transpose it to fit different chords.

Again, all these things just work together to give the listener more to latch on to.

Rhythmic variation

Now let’s check out some rhythmic variation with a bebop lick. Something really key to being a better bebop player is being able to take a phrase and vary it rhythmically. This will allow you to make it fit a lot of different contexts and make sure that you're really hearing it properly in your ear.

Our lick looks like this.

There are a couple of different things that we can do with this to vary it rhythmically.

We could syncopate the first two notes rather than stating it so rhythmically straight.

We can vary the chromatic enclosure in the phrase rhythmically.

And now, if I put those two together, we have this.

And if we take it one step further, that pivot arpeggio that's in the phrase starting from Fmaj7, we’ll add in a chromatic approach before the second note and then an eighth note triplet.

No this is a lot more interesting rhythmically. Plus there are other variations that you can add as well.

Try experimenting with it and follow what you're hearing in your head. 

Combining vocabulary

For our final exercise, we’re going to be checking out combining bebop licks to create longer lines. We’ll take a Grant Green lick, and the other is going to be a Sonny Stitt lick. We’ll put them together to create this phrase.

We take a piece of the Sonny Stitt phrase, this little eighth note triplet approach into the root of G7, and we can use this over a ii-V into C. We go down chromatically to the b7, and then we do the fragment of that Grant Green phrase, and chromatically go from the 6 to the 5, then back up to the b7. 

From there, we vary the Grant Green lick rhythmically by incorporating an eighth note triplet to his use of the pivot arpeggio. And then we again have that altered scale phrase moving from the V chord into the tonic chord. 

Like we mentioned before, when you're learning licks, it's great to be able to improvise around the moving pieces of the phrase—isolating four and five note structures, arpeggios, chromatic approaches, and enclosures, then just gluing these things together in unique ways to create your own phrases. 

And that’s what we talk about in the 30 Day Bebop Chops course. If you want to put all these pieces together and build a real bebop foundation, make sure to check that out. Plus, make sure to check out the accompanying YouTube video to see how Cecil played through today’s exercises.

See you next time!