3 Secrets of Bebop Lines

Hello everyone my name is jeremy siskin I am the author of this book and I play jazz solo piano and today I want to talk to you about

bebop

um

bebop

is really the language we talk about when we improvise in a jazz style it's nice. It's like our modern language, so bebop was invented primarily by Charlie Parker, but you know, with the help of people like Bud Powell, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Mom, bebop involves a lot of eighth notes, it's usually a kind of virtuoso style. . being really unpredictable in bebop um so I'm going to show you three things that you may not have noticed before if you've been studying and playing in the bebop style and mainly I'm going to use the iconic Charlie Parker piece. donna lee as an example, if you've never heard donnelly, that's the first half, that's the general sense of how everything goes and the three things we're going to talk about are building connections with strong needs, creating interesting shapes and then, thirdly, forming compound melons and these things will take you from sounding like you're a lame imitator of the bebop style to someone who actually knows what they're doing and is playing bebop very authentically, so let's dive in. in connections with strong number ones, so by strong rhythms, I first mean beats one and three of four four bars.

I said in a strange way I beat one and I beat three out of four four meters and then what are we? What we're going to look for as we look at Donna Lee is how we're going into beat one and beat three, so when we go from end of four to b1, what is the interval and then we go from end of two to beat three? ? the interval there so give me a second so here's donna lee and I'm going to put it on the big board and now I'm going to highlight those points that I told you about so first of all, here's b4 coming in on time one . a half tone b and two that go on time three um, you can see that the key signature has four flats, so it's a B flat that goes on a, so the next one is a half tone and a four that goes on b1 , it's from F to G flat, that's a half tone. the end of two goes to b3, which is from e flat to d, it is a half step now our next connection is different from c to g it is a fourth, not a half step, but if we continue we will see that almost always something like i I don't know, let's say that 75 of the time we are moving into a strong rhythm, Charlie Parker will connect in a half step or sometimes a full step, so if we continue naturally to the end of the line. in this E flat which is a semitone um this is not a semitone he's doing an arpeggio there from D flat to F flat going to D flat that's a full step from C to yes that's a half tone D flat to C that's a half step B flat to a full step from F to G flat that's half a step from F to E that's half okay, we could go on for the whole melody, the formula will be almost the same almost every time we move to a strong rhythm we're doing it in a half step or a full step and if you think about it this makes sense, this is where we focus our harmony and therefore we want to generally be guided towards strong chord tones in these rhythms etc.

One thing you want to do when you practice bebop is practice playing, for example, your third on every downbeat and what I'm doing is practicing going in half a step because I'm doing a neighbor tone lower. so there's the third of the a flat chord and I'm playing b to c here. I'll give you a better view of the keyboard by going into the third of the f7 chord again with the half step, so I'm playing the third of each chord and then you can practice getting to them and if you can play them, you'll really sound like you know what. what you're doing because the harmony is going to be very clear, you're going to have the third right in the rhythm, so you're going to have this beautiful harmony between the third and the root and you're going to go into it very nice and smoothly because what most amateur musicians do is reset every chord and you Hear that sounds very segmented, it doesn't sound very fluid and when we play bebop

lines

we want to create this kind of long, winding line, now beyond a lower neighboring tone.

One thing that is common in bebop is called chromatic enclosure and it is where you go half a step above and then half a step below the note, I think it is possible to reverse that, but the most normal thing is that first it is half a step up and then half a step below and you can practice that with the third one too, okay? is practicing again a half step from the bottom and then putting it into context, it's just an exercise, but it gets you used to playing those initial half steps for chord tones in strong rhythms.

Well, back to our list, the second thing is interesting shapes and this one is a little more ambiguous, I can't give you an exact formula on this, but shape is very important in d-box and the reason is that shape creates rhythm in jazz, which is a little strange to think about. You know the way a line moves, you don't necessarily know that it has to do with the melody that it doesn't have to do with the rhythm, but there are at least two ways, probably more in which the shape influences the rhythm. The first is that we generally accentuate. jumps, so if I'm playing right, it's a seventh jump, it's a big jump, so normally I'm going to accentuate that note that I'm bowing to and that's true whether we're bowing up or bowing down. and there are a couple.

One of the reasons, firstly, is that it is musically amazing and the second is physically, especially if you are a pianist. It's a great place to use rotation. Rotation is the turning motion of the door knob because you will typically use your pinky or finger. your thumb on that leaf is a great place to add an accent. The second way we create shape is by spinning and I hear this a lot with mediocre jazz musicians who will play the right scales and the right arpeggios, but I feel like they're really stuck in the groove because they're always spinning right in the groove.

If I turn on the beat instead of the beat, it's going to sound square, so we usually have these two things first of all. I don't want them to be predictable. Bebop has to be unpredictable, but more often than not they will be unconventional rather than pessimistic, so let's take a look at Donnelly. I'm going to clarify these highlights and so on. The first interesting thing we see in the form is that it starts with what I call a turn, so the top note doesn't actually occur right on time, but a little off time, and that's much more interesting than if You'll start one, two, good. that feels very square compared to well, then we have this nice jump down.

I'm going to zoom in and I'm going to go to my iPad view because I'm good at this, so we have this nice jump to the end. of three here, this is three and therefore we jump to an unconventional beat, it makes sense that we connect to the downbeats with beats one and d3 and then we jump to the unconventional and then again the turning point is in the end because of this term, so, um, right. and in turn, I'm talking about this little flourish, so the highest note now of that phrase is in the and in the middle triplet, this change point is just pessimistic, but then this change point is out of time, like this which, you know, I always think bebop should sound good if you played it as a snare solo. um, looking here again, we have this nice jump that will accentuate the end of one and then the turning point is at the end of four, a nice jump to the end. of one again, a turning point at the end of two and I hope I'm clear when I say turning point I mean the highest point before it starts to go down or the lowest point before the melody starts to go up, so here goes the melody. from f to a to c and then it starts going down to b and that's why it's c, that's the highest note, that's the turning point and then again we have to turn around at b1, turn around at the end of two, so these shapes They are really interesting and it is a great exercise to try to play the Donnelly shapes without playing the notes.

I could do it in the sand melody, so I'm picking different notes of the chords, or I could do it in a different melody. I know if I wanted to play Donna Lee in the Autumn Leaves, I could take the same shape and I could apply it, so stick it in your ear and I'm going to play it real good, so that's Donna Lee in the Autumn Leaves just using the the shapes aren't trying to use any of the chord notes or tones or anything like that, so the intersecting shapes are key and I'll tell you just a quick story about that, which is that keith jarrett apparently at one point took solo a handful of students and reports from keith's area students were that all keith wanted to do was look at bud powell's souls, but powell is one of the great bebop musicians and he only talked about soul forms, that was all he was obsessed with, was where he goes up where he goes down where he turns where he jumps versus where he plays step by step so even Keith Jared is a little obsessed with these shapes so the last concept is maybe the hardest to understand, but I think which is really important and this is the concept of composite melodies and a composite melody is when you have a melody that can be played by a single line instrument but involves multiple different melodies, so anything from boccello sweets, is a great example of a composed melody because the cello by its nature, unless you're playing double stops, is a single line instrument, so if you're playing I don't know the candy box, but something like this and here, of course, it's beautiful like its own melody, but it also implies something like that, right, and this middle line also creates a melody, so within these melodies there are other hidden melodies and before we see them in Donna Lee, where such Maybe it's a little more complex, I want to show you Charlie Parker's police. blues for alice where I think it's a little simpler so I'm going to change the reviews for you like the semi-pro that I am like the YouTube star I was born to be so if you've never heard this tune cool said blues um . to me this has these very clear composed patterns, especially at the beginning, right, we're right, it's especially clear here because each one of them lands right on the strong rhythms again, the composed melodies also create rhythm, our ears are drawn to these compound melons and if you start If you look for these, you can start to see them in many other places, like, for example, if we look at this second line here where I put the star that we have d d flat and that really wants to take to c and then where does it want to go ? b flat a flat right um, so once you start looking for them you realize that there are melodies composed everywhere, you know, they make sense too, they don't have to be like that, you know, it's a complicated thing to think about , they also make correct decisions. this D flat here this is a tense note that wants to resolve to c, so it makes sense that that c comes next, but um, just like snare composed melodies make your music much richer.

Charlie Parker's composed melodies make his music richer so I want to show you a couple of places and one of the things that's interesting is that sometimes you'll also see him jumping octaves with his composed melodies and I think that is really noteworthy, so let's start with this second line, here I am. I'm going to put a star next to it again, so first of all notice that we have this E flat that was left far away and then picked up here again. I told them that the octave jumps from low E-flat to high E-flat and then look what happens and that. it resolves to the downbeat, you even hear that G flat wants to go down there and then we have this E flat, so this is a long composed melody that actually spans a whole octave from E flat to E flat, let me play it to see if can.

Keep your ear on that composed melody. Do you mean it's okay? You're picking random notes, that doesn't mean he is. You meet some kind of genius making a composed melody. um, but I think there are many more examples of this. I know, um, and some are very subtle and some are very clear, so you know, I'm not saying I'm a genius, but that B flat, a flat definitely connects with that G, same thing again here and look again that are connecting by octaves. e flat a d flat c a b flat a a g and if you really wanted to make an argument, you could argue that it then continues with that f sharp.

I don't know if I'm buying that connection with the F sharp. but there are all these ways that connections occur even in this opening sentence that I didn't show you because I wanted to show you a clear example first. There are all these ways that these kinds of important connections happen and just like in the blues. For Alice, right, he's using the heavy beats as a way to make a connection. This is the craziest part of the melody that I didn't play at first, but it sounds like a chromatic mess if you're not paying attention. just a bunch of similar side steps, but if you look at the notes on the downbeats, it's actually very clear, just these stepped notes of the stepped line, sorry guys, um and then again, if you buy my octave theory , we have this scale down to the right. but what happens is that we go from D flat to C and B flat an octave higher and then,finally, to a flat, so it really brings back the melody completely.

Anyway, those are three sight

secrets

that I hope you find useful. You're forming your own bebop, I think they can do it.um, you know, it makes your bebop playing a little bit bland again and a lot more interesting. I really appreciate anyone who reads my book. It's called playing solo jazz piano and I especially appreciate the people who buy from my website. I can keep more money than If you buy on Amazon and I will sign it for you, that website is jeremysiskin.com. Have a great day, see you soon.