How to Play Soulful Bop Lines in Jazz feat. Kellin Hanas
- Jazz Lesson Videos
- Oct 8
- 7 min read
Finding your own playing style isn’t easy — it takes time to figure out what is right for you, But if you’re looking to add some more soul to your bop lines, there are a few quick techniques you can use to bring more personality into your playing, outside of just the notes you’re playing.
We’ll run through a few today, but if you want to see how Kellin plays these examples, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video How to Play Soulful Bop Lines in Jazz feat. Kellin Hanas as well as Kellin’s resource with Jazz Lesson Videos, 84 Soulful Bop Phrases. This resource includes Kellin soloing over various common chords, ii-V-I progressions, all while using soulful elements. Everything is written in all 12 keys, and it also comes with recordings and backing tracks.
Now let’s get playing!
Contents
Laying back with time-feel
So the first concept that we’ll look at today is time-feel. When we think about bebop, we think about these fast, virtuosic lines. And while that's sometimes the case, it's also good to have a variety of rhythms in your solo. One way that we can work with time-feel is the concept of “laying back”. If you've ever watched the movie Whiplash, you remember the scene where JK Simmons is talking to the drummer. He's asking him, “are you rushing or are you dragging?” Well, that's because there's a back end, a front end, and a center to every beat. Laying back means we choose to be on the back end of the beat. A good way to practice laying back is to put a metronome on and choose a single note to play and see how far you can take that note without getting out of time—just trying to play on the very back end of the beat, right before you're out of time. Laying back in your solos or in your lines gives it a little bit more of a relaxed feel and kind of contrasts against the typical fast bebop language. Here’s a line from the resource where Kellin slightly lays back on the beat, but still stays in time.
Laying back is a feeling that requires practice and listening. I highly suggest that if you want some things to listen to that might help with this, The Basie Band is a great place to start, and specifically one of Kellin’s favorite tunes of all time, “Li’l Darlin”. That recording has some great examples of laying back.
Now when you’re actually onstage, it’s easy to just black out and go on autopilot, which can mean playing a solo that's entirely eighth notes. A really good exercise that Kellin likes to do to slow down a little bit is going through an entire chorus of a tune and just play it with only quarter notes, or only half notes, or maybe even forcing herself to play in phrases of two bars—or phrases of four bars and then taking four or two bars off.
Blues phrases and triplets
The second concept we’ll look at today are blues-inspired phrases and triplets. Very often, when people are introduced to jazz in middle school or elementary school, one of the first things that they're taught is the blues scale. If you don't know it, it goes something like this.
This scale has three key notes, the b3, b5 and b7. When playing bebop lines, you don’t necessarily need to be thinking about playing the blues scale, but sometimes those key tones come out in the lines you play. Here’s an example from the resource, using those key tones.
So we can see throughout this line, there's these little sprinkles of those three key tones. In the first bar, you can see that we use the b7 as well as the b5 in bar two You can see that we’re using the b3 twice, and we go back to using b7 in bar three. So throughout this line, we’re not thinking about using the blues scale, but those key tones are in there to give it a more bluesy sound.
Something else you can utilize that also goes along with our last concept of time feel, is utilizing triplets. Using triplets in your solos gives it kind of a heavier swing feel, which is more associated with the blues. And also in that first bar of the line that we showed you, you can see that we’re using triplets pretty heavily in that first bar.
Something that really helped Kellin with triplets when she was first starting out was transcribing. When she went to the Manhattan School of Music and studied with Ingrid Jensen, one of the first assignments that she gave was to start working on my triplets because Kellin was less confident in them. And so Kellin had to transcribe Freddie Hubbard on “Up Jumped Spring,” which is an amazing solo, and he utilizes so many triplets and so many amazing lines. This is a great solo to transcribe, if you haven’t already.
Articulation
The third concept that we’ll talk about today is articulation. Something that's commonly seen in developing players is a lack of swing in their playing, and sometimes that might come from putting the emphasis on the wrong beats. Ultimately, we want to place the emphasis on the upbeats rather than the downbeats, and we can do that just by articulating a little bit stronger and putting some more air into our horn.
There's also a wide array of articulations that you can use to emphasize different energies in your solos. And if you want to hear more about that, you can also look at our previous blog, How to Build Better Jazz Solos. But for a quick review, you can play a line in many different ways. For example, you can play it legato, or you can find places within the line to add in some staccato or more marcato notes.
Articulation is a tool that you can use to convey many different energies in your solos. So it doesn't mean that the entire line has to be one way. You can incorporate various little articulations here and there as you go.
One more thing that you can use to convey more of that relaxed feel, is ghost notes.
Depending on the instrument that you use, ghosting a note means either playing it slightly dampened compared to other notes, or it may just be a non-specific pitch. It's a rhythmic placeholder for a note that otherwise would have been there. Something that developing players tend to do is tongue every single note. And so by adding in ghost notes, it gives more of that relaxed feel, especially when you're playing faster. This is another way that we can develop our fast playing—you don't have to use your tongue on every single note. And ghosting can make it a lot easier to play fast.
Phrasing and shaping
Concept number four is phrasing and shaping. Think about your jazz lines and phrases as though they were words and sentences that you were speaking out loud. When you make a statement, your voice goes down, and when you ask a question, your voice goes up. The kind of phrasing you use depends on where you are in your solo, what you want to convey, if there's more to come after, or if it's the end of the solo. We can do this in a couple ways, one of which is by shaping the line. And what this means is sometimes you'll look at a line and you'll see that it travels upwards and then returns back to its baseline at the end of it, to show that it's come to completion.
We can also do this through dynamics. If you want to convey that it's the end of your idea, you might want to decrease your volume. And if there's more ideas to come, you might want to increase your volume. Taking a look at another line from the resource, this one travels upwards, maybe dips down a bit, goes back up, and then by the end of the line, we’re back down to the bottom of our range to signify that we’ve completed the idea, and that it's a complete sentence. We can also use dynamics to signify that the idea is done.
The phrasing is so important because it stops your solos from being one big run-on sentence. It gives your solo separate ideas that have a clear and concise beginning and end.
Imitation of the voice
The fifth and final concept of the day, and honestly, one of Kellin’s favorite concepts of all time, is the imitation of the voice. Depending on which instrument you play, there are a lot of different extended techniques that you can use to cause your instrument to make unique sounds. And these unique sounds can help us mimic the human voice, which is very important. After all, our ears and brains are specially tuned to hear and react to the human voice, and your instrument is an extension of yourself. Plus, as musicians, some of our greatest inspirations are amazing vocalists. These inflections are really important to know how to use, because it helps bring your own personality into your playing.
As a trumpet player, there are many things that we can utilize—one of which being a growl. You can either do that with your throat, or you can flutter-tongue and roll your r's in the back of your throat. Another thing to bring more expression into my playing is something called a half-valve sound, which is exactly what it sounds like. You basically play a note half-valved.
And there's one more technique that we can use, which we’ll call the diving board effect. This is basically where you start from a note higher than your target note and then fall to it at the end.
Using these sounds and inflections are trial and error. It's really just sitting down and figuring out what works on your instrument, what sounds good, what feels like you, and then going with it, something that really helped Kellin with this was transcribing some of her heroes, seeing where they use their inflections, what kind of inflections they use, and what kind of phrasing they use as well. This all comes with time, and the more you hear it, the more you'll feel it.
Well that’s all we have for today, but if you’re interested in learning more about how you can make your playing a bit more soulful, be sure to check out our resource 84 Soulful Bop Phrases, as well as our accompanying video How to Play Soulful Bop Lines in Jazz feat. Kellin Hanas.
We’ll see you next time!
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