HOW TO START A BEBOP PHRASE

 

Here we are: the theme has been exposed, the sax and trumpet have done their solo and now it's our turn...and what do we do? How do we start? 

At the very beginning, we could feel lost, confused; we start a bit haphazardly, throwing our hands on the instrument, pulling out a few notes just to break the ice...then, with experience and with the craft, we learn to always have a riff at hand, a pattern that "goes well" to start each song of our setlist, and then, may God send us good luck. 

The most cunning and talented learn to listen to the end of the previous solo and get ideas from it to start their solo without interrupting the flow...but in any case it changes little, our "beginning of the phrase" will always be a bit labored, mechanical, repetitive and confusing. 

So what is the solution? Very simple: the solution to learning to improvise in a structured way, step by step, with practical and concrete exercises that enable us to apply the principles and theoretical concepts to our first attempts at improvisation, is the ability to study each phrase in a tripartite way, that is, a section that we will call attack, another that we will call development and a final one that we will call conclusion, studying each phase to master every nuance and detail related to the section we are studying. So we will first study how to start a phrase, then how to develop it, then how to conclude it and finally how to "put it all together" so as to find ourselves with a fluid, square and musical phrase. 

So let's start without delay to understand how to begin a phrase. 

The target note 

The solution to the problem of this question is so simple and elementary that at first, after having hypothesized and evaluated it, I had a hard time believing it too: to start a phrase well, all you have to do is play a note of the chord on one of the beats of the 4/4 measure. 

What?! You will tell me…impossible! Too easy! Instead, not only is it possible but, if we analyze the solos of the greats, 90% of them begin like this (putting the cart before the horse for a moment, we can say that they very often begin with a note of the chord on the strong beat preceded by an embellishment). 

Here we are, we have met our first, faithful friend: the target note. The target note is nothing other than a note of the chord of the underlying harmony; if we take for example the Cmaj7 chord, the possible target notes will certainly be the I, the III major, the V perfect, often the VI major and the VII major: 

 

For the dominant seventh chord, the target notes will be the I, III major and V perfect as for the major chord, and also the VII minor: 

 

For the minor seventh chord, we will have I, III minor, V perfect and VII minor: 

 

For the minor seventh chord with the diminished fifth (which is the typical second degree in minor keys and is often called “semi-diminished”), we will have I, III minor, V diminished and VII minor:

And finally, for the diminished chord we will have I, III minor, V diminished and VII diminished (that is, a semitone below the minor seventh; if it is the major seventh of C, Bb is its minor seventh and Bbb is its diminished seventh. Therefore, we are not talking, as some unfortunately do, of A, or worse still of VI^, otherwise the music police will arrive and we will all end up in jail). 

 

NB: later we will also consider the so-called “extensions” (ninth, eleventh and thirteenth) as target notes, but for now let’s limit ourselves to the simplest options that are more than enough to start improvising with sufficient variety and fluidity. 

Why do I call them target notes, you ask? Because, as we will see immediately afterwards, in addition to “putting them down” directly I can precede them with a preparation (simple and multiple appoggiatura, various diatonic and chromatic bypasses and more) that “aims” at the note in question, which becomes a bit of a “target” for the embellishment. 

Let's think of a ball thrown into a bowl: before stopping at the bottom of the hole, the ball spins a bit here and there... But let's go back to what we were saying: the first exercise will be to know how to put one of the target notes on the first chord on each of the four quarters of the measure: for example, considering for example the famous "round of C", these notes: 

 Or even better, to avoid jumping here and there like goats drunk on LSD, when the chord changes we must be able to immediately find the target note (or notes) closest to the one we have just played. 

  

For now there is no need to do anything else, just become relentless in knowing how to “drop” the right note at the right time, all for every key and initially at least for every chord maj7, min7 and 7, chaining simple progressions in all possible ways Let's sit at our piano (if we are pianists), with the left hand we hit a simple Bud Powell shell on every quarter and practice “dropping” each target note on every strong beat of the bar, relentlessly, without hesitation, in a solid and relaxed way. If we are not pianists, let's put on a nice Aebersold and work in the exact same way. 

NB: the phrase can start on any beat of the bar, not just the first!