Looking to add some more modern jazz feel to your solos, but not sure where to start? Well today we’re going to look at some modern techniques that came from artists like the Brecker brothers, Steve Grossman, John Coltrane, and more.
All of the techniques we cover today are covered in Ryan’s video course “Modern Saxophone Techniques.” In that course, Ryan gives a look at his practice techniques on how to get these modern post-bop techniques into your playing. This includes things like false fingerings, pentatonic shifting, chromatic cells, Coltrane changes, and more. Plus if you want to see how Ryan plays these concepts, check out our accompanying YouTube video, 4 Techniques for Modern Jazz Improvisation.
Now let’s get playing!
Contents
Pentatonic shifting
There are a few ways we can think about pentatonic shifting. What we’re going to do today is think about one pentatonic scale as our home scale. This is something that Coltrane does a lot when playing over modal vamps. He has one tonality or one scale that he always comes back to, which we’ll call the “home pentatonic.” Then he shifts to different tonalities from there. So in this case, we’re going to think of G minor pentatonic as our home pentatonic, and those notes are G, Bb, C, D, F, and back to G.
We can think of other pentatonics as varying degrees of “out” from our home. So playing a half step would be the furthest away from the home pentatonic. Meaning that Ab pentatonic and F# minor pentatonic are equally far out of the home pentatonic.
But if we go up a flat six or tritone interval, we can have a different sort of outside sound. So from our G minor, we could play our Db minor or Eb minor pentatonic. We can think of outside as our tension and inside as our resolution. So a good way to do this is keeping one pattern the same but switching tonalities. Here’s a pentatonic pattern in the “out” Db minor pentatonic.
And what you’ll see Coltrane do a lot is shift between tonalities in even numbers of bars — so that’s every 2, 4, 8, 12, 16 bars in a modal setting. There’s some great recordings we can talk about for this as well — one specifically is from the Love Supreme Suite, in the third movement called “Pursuance.”
In “Pursuance,” Coltrane has his home pentatonic, then he starts shifting in even numbers of bars. This is something great to incorporate in your practicing by learning and memorizing patterns that shift through tonalities. So try using scales that are a tritone, flat six, and half step apart, and experiment with that in bars of two — two bars inside and two bars outside.
Groups of three
The next concept we’ll talk about is “groups of three.” In this section of the course, Ryan covers examples of how he practices improvisation with just three notes per bar and how it really stretches the imagination.
One way we can think about groups of three is with a word like “strawberry.” Since it has three syllables, think of all the different ways you can stress the word strawberry using different lengths and inflections.
Let’s take a chorus in a blues and try using these groups of three throughout the whole tune. Don’t even think about the notes, just think about saying the word “strawberry” a bunch of times in your head in different ways.
Wide interval phrases
Our next concepts is one from studying the works of Michael Brecker, and that is wide-interval phrases.
Check out how Ryan applies these in our video, 4 Techniques for Modern Jazz Improvisation.
Chromatic approaches
Our last concept that we’re going to talk about today is chromatic approaches. We’ll look at some approaches to practice over rhythm changes, with different ways of going inside and outside of the chord, just thinking about approach tones.
This version of chromatic approach is literally approaching our chord tones chromatically from inside and outside. But chord tones that are outside of the key are just superimposed changes and we’ll talk about that in a second.
So let’s try chromatically approaching our chord tones in rhythm changes. We’ll play what we can think of as a bass line — so one chromatic note per chord, and rhythm changes move quickly. We have two chords per bar always throughout the entire tune, except the bridge. But we’re just going to focus on the A sections for this part.
So let’s play one chromatic approach note to each of the chords here. The first part of the concept is just to play a chromatic approach to the root of every chord.
We can then repeat the concept by doing all the chord tones for our chords — so we would do the same thing with the third, the fifth, and the seventh. You’ll want to do this both ascending and descending as well.
Being able to play any chromatic approach to any one of those chord tones and keeping the form of rhythm changes is something fun to do when learning songs. You can interrupt the bass line with chromatic approaches on solos, sort of in a bebop way.
That would be like — play a little bit of the bass line…a little bit of solo…interrupting yourself. This helps your time and helps you remember where you are in the changes and in the form.
The second part of this is to use chromatic approaches in chord tones outside of the key. A cool trick to do on rhythm changes is to find the hidden chromatic melody that goes through the tune
In our video, Ryan plays C, C#, D, Eb, E, F, G and then an enclosure on F# and enclosure on G.
There are also some other fun little chromatic things you can do, starting on the root and going up chromatically with that hidden melody line using some chord tones and chromatic tones going through the first four bars of rhythm changes.
The other concept we discussed at the beginning was playing chord tones outside and chromatic approaches outside. We can try this by starting a b6 away from our first chord of rhythm changes and if we’re playing in concert Bb, you would start on concert Gb and play the cycle of fourths until you get to concert Bb again, which would be on the downbeat of our fifth bar.
It’s a cool concept to play outside of the key and think about chromatic approaches to those new chords that you’re superimposing as well as playing chromatic approaches to your inside chords from the rhythm changes itself.
That's all for today, but if you want to dive deeper on these topics, make sure to check out Ryan’s video course “Modern Saxophone Techniques,” as well as our accompanying YouTube video, 4 Techniques for Modern Jazz Improvisation.
See you next time!
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