Improvisation II – Bebop Language
The bebop vocabulary on guitar; bebop scales, ii–V–I and minor ii–V lines, altered and diminished dominants, rhythm changes, a complete transcription method and a system for turning cells into lines of your own.
- Play the four bebop scales in position and explain why the added chromatic note puts chord tones on the downbeats
- Play, analyse note by note and transpose original bebop lines over major and minor ii–V–I progressions in C, F, Bb and Eb
- Improvise over altered dominants and 7b9 chords with altered-scale, diminished and tritone-substitution lines that resolve to minor
- Navigate rhythm changes in Bb from memory, with vocabulary for the A section, the bridge and the turnaround
- Transcribe a phrase by ear, write it down, analyse it by chord degree, transpose it to other keys and absorb it into solos
- Generate new lines from one cell by permutation, rhythmic displacement, sequence and combination, and review your own playing critically
Bebop is the grammar of modern jazz. Whatever style you end up playing, the lines of the late 1940s and 1950s are where the shared vocabulary comes from: chord tones on the downbeats, chromatic notes that connect them, dominants that resolve by half step, and eighth-note phrases that breathe like a horn player's. This module teaches that language on the guitar. It assumes you can already play seventh-chord arpeggios in position, target guide tones and use approach notes, the material of Improvisation I, and that you know the altered and diminished scales from the scales and modes module. Every line in these six lessons is original, written over the progressions bebop players used, and every chromatic note is accounted for in the text. Learn the lines, but above all learn the reasons behind them: the point is to end up speaking the language, not quoting it.