Bebop, As Digested by a Classical Musician

[Music] recently I spent a lot of time studying bebop it's been a long ongoing journey full of ups and downs a lot of confusion and some breakthroughs but it's led to a lot of new insights about harmony rhythm form and also a new approach to composition for me later on in the video you'll hear some new music that I wrote out of this whole process but first I'd like to start off with a quick rundown of things I wish someone would have straightforwardly explained to me a classically trained pianist at the beginning of my journey bebop is a specific genre of jazz that began in the 40s defined by key players that came after the swing era unlike classical music where the score gives you exact instructions as to what notes to play the articulation dynamics and phrasing in bebop as well as other forms of jazz you have what is called a lead sheet which gives you a blueprint of the melody and harmony and sometimes rhythm over which you improvise a lot of these songs are popular tunes from the time or tunes written by jazz musicians themselves the letters and symbols you see tell you the harmonic progression of each tune and the labeling is not the same as Roman numeral analysis unless otherwise specified all chords are looked at as chords with four notes so instead of triads think 7th chords the notes that add color to each chord are the pitches that are extended beyond the first three notes of a triad so after the first third and fifth pitches consider also the 7th 9th 11th and 13th pitches above the root of the chord the written notation must not be taken literally a swing feel is implied for most Tunes and the closest description of it is a triplet feel but it's best not to think about that so literally as well refer to recordings of bebop players to understand this rhythm emphasis is given on the offbeat's so on the 2 & 4 of a foreign grouping and syncopation is a big part of the rhythmic language [Music] the main melody is referred to as the head and it's typically played once through at the beginning followed by multiple repetitions of the section which is when soloists improvise over the melody and harmony similar principles of melodic and harmonic framework exists in both classical music and jazz in terms of how notes are added to elaborate on a given harmony one of the most common chord progressions you'll come across is the 2 v 1 chord progression here it is in c-sharp minor and here's an excerpt from chopin's fantasie-impromptu what you just heard is also a 251 chord progression noticing this similarity is definitely interesting but there is way more beyond this together a better understanding of bebop I reached out to some of my friends who are experts in this genre here's Amy Nolte she's a fantastic jazz pianist vocalist and educator and I've learned a lot from her YouTube channel [Music] it's all good next I visited my friend Glen Zaleski who also has great videos on YouTube and is an internationally acclaimed jazz pianist and composer what if I were to sing it like I would sing that like like very legato very smooth right but I could take the exact same line and sing it in a bebop kind of way with just a little bit of Swing feel and a little bit of inflection same exact line you get a totally different thing da doo da doo doo dah all of a sudden right like just a syncopated way of saying my like everything changes if you listen to Charlie Parker play this you're trying to imitate his phrasing which wouldn't be this it would be more more gesture 11 and you could look at the line on a piece of paper I'd put accents sometimes that you definitely hear more than others right so rhythm underneath this which is like [Music] if we're trying to consider how to phrase on the piano we should listen to horn players yeah well where do they get their sense of thing where did they get it from and that's another good thing so another important thing about be walk is that it's essentially rhythmic music [Music] a lot of this language comes from the drums the jammer might play something like this too you know and that could be imitated on the piano like or it could even be imitated by a line you know you could imagine that on a drum set so imagine if they added a like a roll on one of the notes that would be like an ornament there's a bounce there's I adhered the base being emphasized but then the courts they're kind of punchy and they're on the alpha PS yeah good and and how do you have you know how do you know when to do that [Music] like that that's not a bad one oh so it's one and on the and of one it was like and of 1/3 and of four hold it out for the next bar that's pretty good way to start thinking about it's my time I'm filling up the bar and in the front if I want to hit anywhere I got the correct hit you know instead of relying on 1 2 3 4 1 mm thinking about one wanted to attend if you're like that loses a certain element of syncopation at some point we need to hear for example sometimes we need to hear up beats and downbeats at the same time otherwise it's not really it's not really syncopated register it's kind of like this murmur register but it's rhythmic like it and so it starts off with a specific bass line it's not all short and you know you can't use the pedal when you're doing it because then it becomes you can't business this frozen [Music] yeah another element that's used all the time to be about this called the enclosure and I think I did I do it there's one so that I know that the D flats my target on the b-flat minor chord but in order to get to it I go below it I go up of it I hit it does that it's it's in classical music all the time a lot of times the way that Bach would outline a line is such as is also the way that Charlie Parker would would outline his like just with a different inflection like you hear it all the time right yeah it's the same I mean movie buff is a very ornamental language it could be this this thing that could go on all day mm-hmm it could go on longer or kind of stop at any time it's it's um so you're just tapping into kind of a rhythmic flow you don't wonder like how are they coming up with that stuff you just you just think oh yeah they're their groove all right they're grooving [Music] it's like it's like at E flat seven kind of sound over the g7 you know the difference between in the mood and Cheryl these are both blues is right in the mood is a blues and octave of what I just play is a blues all right seven them and this is operable so on one hand in the most basic sense the difference is harmonic intricacy its way anyways for piano players I think the harmony stuffs not that complicated anyways right pianists are good at harmony they understand this stuff pretty quickly so really do you know the pianist Barry Harris so he does a workshop every Tuesday in New York City do you know about this of course I went to the workshop Barry Harris is one of the most iconic pianists and educators in bebop so he talks a lot about the six diminished scale and at first I was really confused as to what it was and what he's talking about I also heard that it varies from week to week depending on who's there when I was there I was too shy to really get close to the piano and there were just too many people crowded around so I couldn't reisel my way in so long story short I ended up just being confused and later on Glenn helped me understand this concept a little more and I spent some time thinking about it and trying to understand it on my own and in the next three minutes I'll try to explain it the best I can in the way that I currently understand it [Applause] [Music] so if you have a cord or a key Center for example c-major relative to this cord you'll have a dominant chord so in this context it'll be C major g7 or G dominant seven back to see now in jazz and bebop you add extensions especially to the dominant chord so the first four notes you'll add a flat nine so this chord here can be simplified as it B diminished 7th chord because these notes are the top four notes of a g7 flat nine chord so to a C major scale which has seven notes you'll add that added note and now you have an eight note scale one two three four five six seven eight so based on this you can organize these eight notes into two categories one is home base so C major and the other is diminished or the tension and since a diminished chord is built on minor thirds once you have the four notes that make up a particular diminished chord you can really start it from nr so that might look like this [Music] and the way he likes to voice it seems is with the c6 for example in this Mozart Sonata it's going from C to G dominant seven or g7 back to C so tonic dominant tonic if you were to apply this sort of concept with diminished chords it might sound something like this maybe it's kind of like finding ways to embellish main chords either by harmonizing them or adding notes between them let's take 251 in C major and if we had a line like this applying these principles might turn it into something like this [Music] so diminished non diminished diminished non diminished g7 with extensions diminished resolving back to a non damaged I think if you're familiar with my channel you've seen me immerse myself in different genres and for me these genres studies are like a form of travelling it's almost like taking a trip somewhere to learn about and experience something new and coming back home with a few souvenirs and most importantly something that adds to and changes my perspective of things back at home of course the whole point of this is to find new influences for my own writing now this particular study led me in a few directions at first I was going down a path where I began to familiarize myself with one of the most played bebop tunes all the things you are first by arranging it in the style of Chopin something I'm already familiar with [Music] after a while though I lost steam with it while trying to translate these ideas into a bebop style I think I was missing the point of it all and was driven more by a certain concept I had around this idea then after a bit of a break from it all I decided I would put more of a focus on different aspects of influence I gathered from bebop such as spontaneity and imagination of harmony and phrasing rather than trying to Zone in on all of the detailed characteristics of the genre I could walk into this room you can say something about before yeah talking about the same thing exactly is an amazing technology that's such a great analogy you could do the same thing with a chord change we could all be talking about a flat minor seventh someone else could put it like this someone else to play this and there's actually an infinite number of things that you could say oh yeah I did it's literally infinite and district has improvisers and automatically make it better than something that's written and in fact doesn't even make it automatically more spontaneous you're very like Chick Corea said that in an interview he said that you shouldn't be you you shouldn't keep you spontaneity and different this just because it's different it's more spontaneous they're different after a while I started to get to know the tune better and was experimenting with it and got to a place where naturally I felt like elaborating on it and this is also around the time when I started to look more into reharmonization techniques at this point I found great information on Rick viedos channel Jeff Schneider's channel these two notes in here that's the for resolving five the flat six fifth mode of the harmonic minor scale Jen's Larson's channel so that's the group of so dominant course and many other videos on YouTube the music of the day owes all of this eventually led me to take on a completely different approach which now brings me to my final arrangement of the tune [Music] [Music] I think one of the biggest takeaways for me was to take on a different approach when it comes to creating music and having more of a sense of freedom and like I said before spontaneity surrounding this and really using mmm intuition and imagination like I said in the beginning of the video this is an ongoing process for me so look forward to follow-up videos on this genre and this subject and if you made it this far in the video thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Nahre Sol

Views: 604,998

Rating: 4.9646878 out of 5

Keywords: bebop, classical music, bebop jazz, piano lesson, music harmony, music theory, music composition, bebop lesson, bebop as digested, all the things you are, 6th diminished scale, bebop analysis, barry harris, jazz lesson

Id: oZ16m7MyXJ8

Length: 21min 7sec (1267 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/omegajams]

Her channel is awesome.

[u/Ephisus]

Bebop with sustain is late Stravinsky?

[u/Digital_Failure]

This video is recommended to me no matter what I watch. YouTube recommendations are totally useless at this point.