Month: February 2015

Jazz can take on many forms. Here is jazz whistler Ron McRoby. You must hear to believe! He really understands and speaks the language of bebop in the same manner as a vocalist or horn player.

I like Herbie’s chromatic movements around 4:10. He starts off his solo with simple ideas. He moves pentatonic arpeggiations around chromatically, which is something I’m trying to get more fluent at. His comping was pretty quiet during most of the solos, which is different from Oscar Peterson. Roy Hargrove has a great ear for melody – he seems to emulate a lot of Miles Davis in that he focuses on melodic impact over dexterity.

Not a hugely creative cover, but around 1:00, he starts improving over the second verse basically just using any and every scale. A lot of the scales are pentatonic and moved around chromatically like we did in class. As I said, nothing really that original, but I like to listen to this just to keep the sounds of these different scales in my head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EaqD4N9S9s

This is just an audio recording, but I thought it would be useful to listen to the ideas from the masters. Oscar Peterson brings in a lot of blues licks. I heard some variation of 1-2-3 at least four times (I probably missed a lot of them) through both solos. Also, Peterson has some trills that he uses all the time. I think I can learn them.

http://youtu.be/xncznvkB7S8

Written by Dizzy Gillespie in 1942, “A Night in Tunesia” is a signature jazz standard.  Characteristically of bebop, the solos do not disappoint, demonstrating incredible speed and technical skill. “A Night in Tunisia” has also made its way into popular culture. It was covered by Chaka Khan, and sampled by the hip hop group GangStarr in “Words I Manifest”.

I’m still developing my taste for bebop, initially I found it so fast that I just felt that there wasn’t much melody and the speed was just compensating for that. Speed for speed’s sake doesn’t really impress me. In my musical brain class, we talked about the limit of our processing ability, when someone does a piano rake its sounds nice when we hear it as a distinct whole descending sound. Trying to hear every note isn’t always beneficial, and to some extent that is true to all music, and especially with bebop.