You’re Using Approach Tones Wrong… Do This Instead (feat. Cecil Alexander)

For most jazz players, the term approach tones is familiar, but maybe you’re unsure how exactly they can fit into your playing. Most people focus too much on the harmonic component and not exactly on where the notes are landing. 

You can pretty much land the notes wherever you want, and it can sound cool. But to get to that point, you'll want to first practice being able to play approach notes leading into a downbeat with a chord tone. Then as you expand from that, you can experiment with landing on other diatonic notes and displacing the rhythm of the approach notes. But you'll want to learn to walk before you can run, so that you can sound truly fluent in this concept. 

Today, we’ll look at how you can practice approach notes and apply them to your improvising. Everything we're going to cover is tied directly to our resource 27 Approach Tone Etudes. These etudes are designed to teach you to use approach tones in a way that creates real phrasing, rather than just patterns. Inside, you'll find diatonic and chromatic approaches and enclosures, approach tones in major keys, approach tones in minor keys, and all applied to 27 well-known jazz standards. Each etude shows you how to apply these concepts in real musical lines, not just in isolated musical exercises. 

And if you want to see how Cecil plays through any of the examples we talk about today, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video, You’re Using Approach Tones Wrong… Do This Instead (feat. Cecil Alexander).

Now let’s get playing!

Contents

Adding momentum with approach tones

Adding in enclosures

Adding momentum with approach tones

First up, let's talk about how approach tones can add momentum to our lines. 

Playing chord tones on strong beats is like the meat and potatoes of improvisation. In order to make things a little bit more interesting, you can add approach tones, which is in turn going to make your line sound a little bit more bebop-influenced. 

Here's an example of taking a diatonic ii-V-I phrase in C. We’ll look at it just with all the diatonic notes, and then we’ll add a little bit of chromaticism to it to make it more interesting. So over Dm7, G7, Cmaj7…

You could play this diatonic phrase.

And here’s how you can decorate it with approach tones.

An exercise that is helpful is just adding approach tones before each chord tone of the chord in the chord progression. So if you have Dm7, you could do this before all of the notes in the Dm7 arpeggio, so approaching D, F, A, and C.

And then on G7, Cmaj7, etc.

This at least helps you visualize where you can place those extra chromatics, and then you can get more adventurous from there as you get comfortable with that concept. 

Let's take a look at a line from this etude on “Days of Wine and Roses,” and check out what concepts we have going on. So this phrase is going to come from the second A of our etude. 

We'll start off on the root of Fmaj7, then go up to the ninth. We’ll use this approach note that's kind of outside of the key. We have Ab back down to G, which is the 9 of that Fmaj7. 

So you can use approach tones to decorate chord tones, but also scale tones. And if you want to get a little bit more adventurous, you can do it with notes outside of the scale to just add a little bit more momentum to your lines. 

So we have that approach note up from G, Ab, back down to G, and then we're going down the scale to the seventh.

We get into the root of Eb7, which is our bVII7 in this tune. Then we have this other approach note going from the root down to the b7. You could think of this as being derived from the Eb dominant bebop scale.

That's playing the scale down from the root to the fifth. That approach tone within the scale is really helpful for connecting chord tones on strong beats. So we have our root to the b7, then we get into the 6 of the Eb7. Then we get into Am7, our iii7 in this tune. 

Here we have an example of an approach tone that leads us to a note that's a scale tone, but it's a little bit dissonant on the Am7, but then we resolve it immediately in the next beat. Then we'll have an arpeggio—Am7, but we’ll decorate it with an approach tone before the b3. 

Then we’ll use the remaining three notes of that arpeggio as part of an eighth note triplet. From there, we get into G# on this D7, which is going to be the #11.

We have this decoration, kind of inside/outside of the scale, eventually just getting into the 5 of D7 and then we go up chromatically from the 6 to D natural. So that in that D7, we’ll have 5, 6, b7, 7. And you can again think of that as being like a bebop scale decoration, because we have that natural 7 in there, moving up to D, which is going to become the 5 of Gm7. 

So if we play through this phrase one more time slowly, we have a lot of chromaticism, which serves to decorate the sound of the chords a little bit, adding some forward motion and momentum to our lines. 

Adding in enclosures

The second concept that we're going to get into today is the concept of enclosures. With approach tones, we just had to chromatically approach a note from one direction. With enclosures, we're going to approach a note from both above and below. 

A simple example would be if we have the note C on Cmaj7. Rather than just approaching it from below or above, we're going to approach it from both directions. That's B to Db, down to C.

You can also have more decorated enclosures, like one note from below and two notes from above, or two notes from below and two notes from above.

You can kind of get as creative with it as you want. The idea is just that you're decorating your target—coming up with more elaborate ways of getting from point A to point B.

In our next example, we're going to look at the etude from the resource on “All the Things You Are” and get into the use of enclosures in context.

Taking a look at our line on the first couple of measures…

We're going to start on C7, as part of a pickup into Fm7. We’re starting on the #9 of that chord, and we just go diatonically down to the root. We have a chromatic approach there from the root into what's going to become the 4 of Fm7. 

Now we have this long enclosure on Fm7 that can be broken up a couple different ways. You might see it as kind of two small phrases being put together. This is going to be an enclosure to that 9 of Fm7, and then we also have this enclosure into the b3.

That's starting on the b9 relation to that Fm7, up to the 9, 4, back down to the 9, and then into the b3. So in this instance, we have kind of a mixed enclosure, right? It's going to be two chromatic notes below, and then a whole step above our target, half step below, and finally into our target of Ab. 

Continuing the phrase, we move down into Bbm7. We have this chromatic decoration into the b3 there, and then another enclosure. This one's going into the 9 of Bbm7. So this one's a little bit more straightforward. 

You just have above our target, below our target, and then finally into our target on a strong beat. And like we said, you can use enclosures to highlight the sound of chord tones, scale tones, or even notes outside of the scale, if you want to get a little bit more interesting. 

Here we have an example of a tension or scale tone that's being highlighted.

Then we have another mini enclosure, diatonically going into the b3. So that's from the 9, 4, up to b3. So we have half step below, whole step above, and then into our target of Db, then we move down to F on that Bbm7. Then we approach Ab on the first beat of Eb7 and we have this enclosure that's going to lead us into the #5 tension against our Eb7. Then another enclosure that's going to highlight the sound of the b9 on Eb7.

This is an example of changing the chord quality a little bit to be more of an altered dominant sound, and highlighting the #5 or (or b13) and the b9, just that E natural. Then we have this  diatonic enclosure.

So starting on that E natural, you could even back up to the note before it to see it a little bit more clearly. So from F#, we have those whole steps that are enclosing Eb one more time, and then into the Eb there. Then we get into Abmaj7 from there.

So you can see that we have a wide variety of enclosures happening here—diatonic enclosures, chromatic enclosures, and even enclosures that combine different groupings of notes. Sometimes we have one note below our target, sometimes two notes below our target, sometimes two notes above, two notes below, etc.

But what’s important is to experiment and get the sound in your ear so that when it comes time to improvise, you already know how to access that vocabulary.

That’s all for today, but if you want to see more about this concept, make sure to check out our resource 27 Approach Tone Etudes, as well as our accompanying YouTube video You’re Using Approach Tones Wrong… Do This Instead (feat. Cecil Alexander).

We’ll see you next time!