5 4 3 2...GO!

 

 

The great pianist and teacher Barry Harris, famous for having played with all the greats of bebop and for having been a great friend of Bud Powell, has developed his own teaching method since the seventies (perhaps the most famous of his concepts is that of the “sixth diminished scale”) where he has tried to systematize in a “no nonsense” way the various “tricks” to learn to build a bebop vocabulary.

One of these tricks is the systematization of the enclosures according to the degree of the scale on which they begin – hence the nomenclature 5 4 3 2, we note that the concepts of target notes on the downbeat and displacement are respected.

Example: the four enclosures, first separately and then one after the other

Example: short phrases

Example: rhythm changes

To avoid the "lego" approach that we have criticized so much when talking about the pattern approach, let's see how from the basic principle we can derive infinite variations that everyone can explore and develop as they like.

Example: motivic variations

Example: seventh chords

NB: on each m7 chord you can also play what you would play on a seventh chord placed a perfect fourth above – that is, on Dm7 you can play what you would play on G7, and vice versa.