3 Ways to Upgrade Your Bebop Solos | Feat. Vincent Herring
- Jazz Lesson Videos
- Apr 7
- 4 min read
Playing bebop has a learning curve of its own—there are a lot of things happening, and it is probably all happening pretty fast. That’s why having a strong bebop vocabulary is important—so you don’t need to think as hard over the changes.
We’re going to look at 3 ways you can upgrad your bebop solos, and we’ll have Vincent Herring helping us along the way! So if you want to see how Vincent plays these etudes, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video, 3 Ways to Upgrade Your Bebop Solos, as well as our resource 25 Bebop Etudes on Jazz Standards.
Contents
How to build language
One of the first things that we’ll go over is how to build language. Now, one of the things that helps Vincent out a lot is having digested and mastered through what people are referring to as bebop scales.
Here is an F major scale from the fifth, which is pretty much what everyone uses.
But we can have it with a bunch of approach notes going to that. We have approach notes from the 1 which gets you to the 5.
From the 3, and that also gets you to the 5.
And then we also have from the 7.
Now that gives us approaches from 1, 3, 5, and 7. It can be confusing when you have a song with a bunch of approaches. But Vincent will look at that more as a phrase over a tonal center, not worrying as much about which scale goes over a chord. Like looking at Charlie Parker’s playing, it’s not over the chord, it’s over the phrase or the tonal center.
With this, you’re going to want to have all of your approach notes and bebop scales mastered.
We have major…
Minor…
From the five…
Also from the five…
We have from the minor tonic…
From the major tonic…
From the minor third…
From the major third…
From the seven minor…
And then from the seven major.
So you have to digest those. It's not just learning the scale, but you have to have them so that you can manipulate them, too.
We're going to go over an etude that's in the book—this is on “Stella by Starlight.”
So the first measure, most of this stuff is disguised and you don't hear it, because you're not going to hear the full scale. Then on measure 10, we have this.
The best way to get used to this line is to take it through all the keys. Shouldn't be a situation where you're rushing through it. You have to really get it and make you feel good. And it's not about playing that specific line. That specific line will lead you to your own vocabulary. But it's about understanding and hearing how it's placed and how it connects with the chords. It’s simple enough, we have a 1, 3, 5, 7 on a half diminished chord, and then down, and that’s the minor ii-V.
Voice leading
In addition to digesting these scale combinations, it's also important to hear chord changes, and one of the best things that you can do is work on voice leading. Now we’ll look at another etude from our resource, and this will be B-flat rhythm changes.
Playing through the etude that we have here on rhythm changes, you’ll notice a couple things. One is good voice leading and kind of blues phrases—it starts out:
Voice leading is something that is very important to Vincent when playing his solos, it's just automatically hearing the center of the harmonic phrase that's going by. And so it's just natural for him to play with good voice leading. The sooner you concentrate on voice leading and make that part of everything that you do, the better it'll be when you start creating better solos.
Having a good time
The final advice for today is about having a good time and really locking into what's going on. And it's the same as if you're speaking to someone—you’ve probably heard someone speaking with great diction and timing, and it’s really impactful. Then if you have someone say something similar but without the timing and diction, it’s just not as impactful.
So what you say is important, but how you say it is also important. And all of these concepts that we talked about, you have to digest those so that your mind can be free to create. You don’t want to have to be thinking about time, you don't want to be thinking about scales and placements and notes, and you shouldn’t have to be consciously thinking about good voice leading. You don't want to think about anything. You need to spend a lot of time with it in the shed, you need to spend a lot of time thinking about these things and developing your own personal concept for using them. We’re going to look at one more Etude from our latest offering—this is Airegin.
Reading through this Etude, you’ll see all the things that we talked about—very good voice leading, Bebop combinations, and it's played with good time, good feeling, rhythmic placements of the notes. You want to develop a constant time feeling—you want it to be a theme of your playing anytime you play. When Vincent played with Freddie Hubbard, it was an amazing time, and every time he played with him, he was in such awe of how his time felt. It was so exceptional, you almost didn’t notice it!
Well that’s all for today, but if you want to dive deeper on these topics, make sure to check out our resource 25 Bebop Etudes on Jazz Standards, and if you want to see how Vincent plays these etudes, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video, 3 Ways to Upgrade Your Bebop Solos. We’ll see you next time!