Upon an enthusiastic recommendation, I attended Barry Harris‘ weekly jazz workshop last night.  Barry is a legendary jazz pianist and fervent jazz educator who, at the age of 78, hosts a workshop every Tuesday night for musicians of all levels.  That is to say, beginners are welcome, but he goes through stuff fast and it’s kind of funny when he snaps, "What’s so hard about that?  Play it right!"

Barry took us through the scales to play over "Whispering", the basis for the bebop standard "Groovin’ High".  Measure by measure, he drilled us in eighth-note scales counted off at around 160 bpm:

"Everybody play D7 up and down, one, two, three, four…  [play]   Again!  [play]  Down and up!  [play]  Up and down!  [play]  Now flat the second and the sixth, one, two, three, four…"

Then he’d stop and point out that we’d just changed our D7 scale into a G harmonic minor scale, and then sing some lines for us to play to connect the changes together.

I kept up with about 90% of it.  There was one long line he sung leading into the second half turnaround that was just too many notes for me to process at once, and breaking it apart became a lost cause once the whole room started noodling trying to figure it out.

Working through the song led us on a few tangents, one of them being what David Baker refers to as "bebop scales", but Barry refers to as making the scale "right".  I happened to start working on these heavily within the last month or so, and it’s really improving the flow of my phrases.  I’m not crazy about all the "rules" that go into where to put half steps and when, but I realize that I’m learning bebop and these are merely conventions to get that idiomatic sound.  But what really got me excited was that Barry said they didn’t need to be half steps…they could be "any random note"!  And he had us play G7 descending from the root, first with a half step between the root and seventh, then jumping up to the third between the root and seventh.  Awesome!

To further illustrate this, he had us play C major scales, inserting a half step between every tone.  Where there wasn’t room for a half step, he had us approach the note from a whole step above.  He went around the room making us play ascending from different scale tones.  I got to play from the sixth:

Then he had three of us play from different steps simultaneously.  The harmony sounded pretty cool.  There’s some potential in jazz arranging here, I think…

I learned a lot in two hours.  Even the stuff that I already knew, like G harmonic minor over D7, was worth learning again.  I always approached this as playing the harmonic minor of the target key.  Barry showed us that flatting the second and the sixth yields the related harmonic minor.  I always tell people, the more ways you learn to think of the same concept, the better you will be able to incorporate it into your playing.  So that’s a concept that just sunk in a little deeper.

For $15 a workshop?  Yeah, this is a good deal!  I’ll be going back for more.

One of my main reasons for starting this blog was to share all sorts of jazz improvisation ideas. There’s not going to be any particular sequence to these studies. Some will be rather complex, others pretty mundane, probably nothing all that original. But these are all things I put through my horn, and if it inspires somebody else to do the same or build upon what I’ve learned, then super!

I’m going to start off with a fairly simple pattern I worked out today while warming up. Patterns to me are a way to open pathways through my instrument that unpracticed would pose a technical challenge. By playing systematic exercises that go through each and every possible interval and combination on the horn, I prepare for playing any passage during spur of the moment improvisation. Additionally, I familiarize my ear with new shapes and sounds.

The essence of this pattern is the 5-note spelling of the 4-tone minor 7th chord. This pattern repeats downward in minor thirds. To truly absorb any pattern, you must work it out in all other keys, as well as ascending and descending in other intervals. So try it descending in half steps, or ascending in perfect fourths.

I wouldn’t generally spell this pattern out verbatim during the course of an improvisation. That sort of playing ends up sounding robotic. (Though, a splash of robot music can be a nice touch! Always let your taste guide you, not ‘rules’.) I do like to use fragments of patterns as launching points for lines, or to mix them with other patterns non-repetitively. Thus, the exercises you practice can serve as seeds for your musical imagination.

It is worth noting that any time you create a line using minor seventh arpeggios minor thirds apart, the resultant note set is that of the diminished scale. So the pattern above could, for instance, be applied to a G7^alt tonality. However, when doing so, I advise you to not lose sight of the scale tone functions within the context of the harmony chord. For instance, C# is the root of the C#min7 pattern, but is still the #11th of the G7, so it is a tension in relation to the harmony chord.