"Tickle Toe," comping pt.1, with a digression into Miles Davis' "So What."

Let’s start with the first eight bars, four bars of Bbm, and four of Ebm. Believe it or not, these kinds of passages can be harder to play over than when you have a bunch of chords. When I first started playing jazz professionally (as a bass player) having to walk over one chord for long stretches was what made me the most nervous.

Now the last thing you want to do is just play “Bbm” over Bbm. Check this out:

We’re connecting the different Bbm chords with a passing C-half-diminished. The Ebm7’s are connected by means of passing Fm7’s. And by doing this we’re creating a simple backing melody. What's in this example might be more than you actually need to be doing when you're in the trenches, I just wanted to show you the various possibilities in that position.

You’ll notice all the motives whose last notes are on the “and” of the beat. The tendency is to even those eighth notes out, which is wrong wrong wrong! A great model for doing it right is Miles Davis’ famous “So What.” 

https://youtu.be/DEC8nqT6Rrk  

Listen to the backing horns at 7:05 behind the piano solo. The riff consists of two eighth notes on beat four of every alternate measure, swung, with a little accent on the “and” note. Thus, ooo-Bop-*-2-3-4-1-2-3-ooo-Bop….  That last eighth note will be short, and the listener will perceive an accent due to its inherent syncopation .

And here’s the first 8 of the head, which you want to know anyway. COPY AND INTERNALIZE THESE RHYTHMS AND ARTICULATIONS.

Seeya

Tickle Toe (Count Basie, 1940)

Here are the head and changes to Tickle Toe, which you could think of as a very early bop tune. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooUUhsBsv

It pops along, around quarter note = 200, and at that tempo, "swing eighths" aren't really "swing eighths" in the normal sense. Find the swing in the placement of accents. Think generally of giving emphasis to the melodic peaks, such as the "and" of beat two (aka "the and of two")  in measures 1 and 2. Same with measure 5, but - what about measure 6? Downbeats of 1 and 3 there. 

This is a fun tune to play, and play over. 

Moody's Mood For Love

You’ve got to know Moody’s Mood For Love, one of the most iconic solos in all of jazz (https://youtu.be/u0KN4_99qEM). It was originally recorded in the 40’s as an alto sax solo over the changes to I’m In the Mood for Love, (https://youtu.be/yuOsB4psC9E). Eddie Jefferson set lyrics to Moody’s solo, and the new version, first recorded by King Pleasure (https://youtu.be/ICNhZMimZjk), became a hit and has been in many many jazz singers’ books ever since. Here below is a tab of the first chorus of the original solo, which is an excellent example of how to play over ballads.

Yes banjo-pickers, we CAN play over ballads! Listen to Moody’s phrasing - the musical sentences, and the moments of silence separating them - and notice the importance Moody places on how the phrases end. Frequently with the beboppers, you’ll hear the “modern” stuff happen on the last one or two notes of a phrase. Phrasing is yuuuuge! Pretend you’re a horn player or singer and give yourself places to take a breath, and don’t be afraid of a little silence. The use of silence is a great way of claiming this particular musical space as yours.

Breath-awareness is a great thing to incorporate into your improvisation practice: Try only playing on your exhales. Sometimes I need to do this on the gig if I find myself getting a little too busy, or valuing notes over music, my ego over my audience.

So some brief notes about playing ballads would include:

Play in phrases.

Breathe.

“Play” silence. 

Place the last note of a phrase with the same intent as you placed the first.

Learn the lyrics if possible, at least have some idea what the tune is about.

Use the melody. That melody is the reason you’re even bothering to try to play a solo over it.

Just Friends pt.2, getting a solo together

Just Friends is in G; clumps of its chord changes fit into various (mostly major) keys; you need to know the scales; you need to know the chords; if you had to pick one, I'd say learn the chords. The other notes will find their way in there. So let's just break the tune down to a collection of chord arpeggios as a place to start. I picked one place on the neck, 8th/9th position. Here are the arpeggios over all the changes in the tune:

One bit of "jazz folklore" has this or that musician playing some difficult tune in every key, every possible way. So a lot of us come up feeling guilty that we can't play, say, Just Friends all up and down the neck in every key. First of all, unless there's a singer involved, you will play it in this key - nobody else got around to doing it in all twelve keys either. Secondly, you can only solo over it in one place or key at a time. You play a hot solo in 8th/9th position, and nobody will know or care that you can't do it in the key of 6-sharps standing on your head.

That's a roundabout way of saying just do this. And when think you've got it pretty well in hand, try improvising over Just Friends, limiting yourself those same arpeggios. You might be surprised to discover that it doesn't sound half bad! So, something like this:

The iReal app is great for working on stuff ad infinitum; you can program the changes in and let it play as long as you want, at whatever tempo you like. Do change the tempo up from time to time, you don't want to get "tempo muscle-memory" (it does happen!) Gradually let some non-chord tones creep into your soloing, maybe a little chromaticism as well. If it's going well, you're playing chords in a scale-y way, and scales in a chord-y way, and not being quite aware of which is which. Or caring!

see ya.


 

Just Friends

Just the other night I was on a gig playing bass, "Just Friends" was called, and as my solo approached I thought OK, stand back y'all... I mean, I've been blowing over this thing for years, and it's a great tune to play over. And I STUNK UP the joint. So the next day I went back to "Just Friends" and started all over again, which is a great thing to do every so often.

It's a jazz warhorse, so you gotta know it. Here's the head, and in subsequent posts I'll go over some ways to attack your solo. Preferably not with the blunt instrument with which I attacked mine.

"Seven Steps to Heaven" - the head and Miles' first solo chorus, in G (the original is in F).

The flat-V m7b5 thing, a swing tune and a solo.

There’s a common chord substitution that jazz players like to make, especially when the melody sits on the tonic note for a bit (say, a C note in the key of C), over the I-chord. There are a couple of variants, but they all start with a m7b5 chord on the flat-V of the scale, F#m7b5 in the key of C. From there, the chord roots move down chromatically to the tonic.

For example, here are two versions the final four bars of the jazz standard “My Romance,” in C. The first example has the “stock” changes, and the second replaces the final C chord with a chromatic sequence starting on F#m7b5. Notice that every chord has C in the melody.  

Stevie Wonder’s “You Are The Sunshine of My Life” sometimes gets this treatment in the first chord. Compare these two versions of the first phrase in the key of C.

In one band I played with for years, we’d call it “the flat five thing,” which eventually got shortened to “fluhfluh.” You’d be coming to the end of a tune and someone would shout out “Fluhfluh!!” and we’d know what to do, unless one of us vetoed it on grounds of it being “Gratuitous Fluhfluh.” Yes, we were a very silly crew.

This progression sometimes is part of the tune. Here’s one from a series of "counterfeit Gypsy jazz" tunes I wrote once. The recording can be found on my website, www.theotherjocko.com, click on the "Sounds Like..." tab and you'll find it there.  Here's the head.

You could play the chord changes of the "fluhfluhs" in the first part using these voicings.

or:

It's best to break them up though, to add a little textural, rhythmic, and melodic interest:

Here’s a solo I played over it. On the first four chords I never left the tonal center of Ab. Don’t forget, this sequence is a substitution for the tonic chord, so it’s a good idea to think of it aas a thing that happens in the tonic key. That being the case, Dm7b5 in this position is, to me, “Ab-something-with-D-natural-in-it.” I also tend to play the written Dbm7’s as m6 or m(M7), i.e., the I-chord of Db melodic minor, which is also the key of Ab with a b6 and 7 (see "Getting into major scales, pt 3: the Honorary Notes" on this blog, posted 2/16/16).  I guess I should’ve just written the chord as Dbm6, but either one works..

Again, just know the key of Ab well enough that you can alter scale tones at will, and you don’t have to waste a lot of time learning “chord scales,” the “jazz red herring.”