An Essential Bebop Chord Progression to Master

Mastering approaches to chord progressions is a great way to feel confident when you see a specific progression pop up in a tune. When we practice progressions like the ii-V-I or the I-IV-V, we’re able to feel our way through them in a much more efficient way when it comes our way.

But there are a lot of chord progressions that you don’t see everyday, especially progressions that include chords that fall outside of the key.

Today, we’re going to look at the Tadd Dameron turnaround (named for jazz pianist and composer Tadd Dameron). There are a couple of variations on this, but we’ll deal with it in its most basic form.

The Tadd Dameron turnaround featured at the end of Lady Bird

This progression pops up in the tune “Lady Bird” by Dameron, and it often takes the place of a iii-vi-ii-V at the end of a tune or at the end of a section. 

Breaking down the Tadd Dameron turnaround

If we look at the progression in C major, we’ll have Cmaj7, Ebmaj7, Abmaj7, and Dbmaj7. As you see, the only chord that’s actually inside here is Cmaj7! The Ebmaj7 is the bIII, the Abmaj7 is the bVI, and the Dbmaj7 is the bII.

The progression uses modal mixture.

While these chords don’t come naturally from C major, they can come from parallel C keys with the use of modal mixture. Thinking in this way, the Eb major could come from the parallel minor of C minor — and the Ab chord could as well! If we’re looking at the Dbmaj7, what’s coming from C Phrygian, which you can also think of as the Ab major scale. So that gives us our Ionian (major) mode, Aeolian (parallel minor) mode, and Phrygian mode. 

But when it comes to soloing, you may want to have a clear way to move through these keys. One of the best ways for you to do that is with melodic cells. Melodic cells are a fragment of a melody, one which you can twist and reuse in different ways.

A common cell that we can use is the 1, 2, 3, 5 cell. So off each of these chords, we would have:

Cmaj7 — C, D, E, G

Ebmaj7 — Eb, F, G, Bb

Abmaj7 — Ab, Bb, C, Eb

Dbmaj7 — Db, Eb, F, Ab

Melodic cells starting on each degree

You can start by simply playing up those melodic cells over the chords, but then you’ll also want to mix it up and invert some of the cells for maximum interest. 

Phrases built on melodic cells

That’s all we have for today, but if you’re interested in learning more tips like this, make sure to check out Cecil’s course with Jazz Lesson Videos, Bebop Essentials. And if you want to hear how Cecil played through what we talked about today, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video, Essential Bebop Chord Progression to Master.

We’ll see you next time!