4 Great Essential Bebop Elements You Can Implement Now

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Stuff you can practice when it comes to Bebop. The first thing is to [Think Like a Drummer]. Let’s take a simple phrase like:

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You’re targeting that third in a bunch of ways, right? Exactly. So that’s already cool. You can take just the third of that triad and aim into it with this device:

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Right? That’s really cool. And it’s all on F. If you play an F, you can just play it, but connecting to the drummer point is key because you’re like:

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Yeah, that’s the thing. It’s not much less convincing. It’s also about hearing the subdivisions, the dynamics, and the articulation. Just like when a drummer applies it, exactly. Or, yeah, right? Like you have the three. If you take the trail out, it’s super funky, right? Like:

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Swing Funk is all in the same family. Alright, give me another one:

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Because you’ll have like:

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Right? That’s the classic, very well-known phrase. So you’re kind of spelling out the arpeggio of the first chord, aiming into the third of that C, and then right also emphasizing the flat nine there. But you’re landing on the five of F. Exactly. So that’s the key. What you said, what I did, like from the theater:

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Right? Then I take it like another variation of the vibe and put the emphasis on the flat nine. Oh, nice. That’s really cool. When you’re practicing stuff, instead of just playing it like, “Oh, I learned the phrase, let’s move on to the next one,” maybe we can squeeze that lemon and get more of the articulation and different emphasis. And it also leads to the next point that is very important: voice leading. You know, behind the Bebop phrasing. Right? Like a narrative, right? Of a story. And you have the house and the sunshine and the stuff, but there’s like the backbones of the story. Exactly. It makes sense. It’s like if you need to go from A to B, there are a lot of ways to do it. Endless, I would say. In this particular one, five flat nine, you have a very developed language on the instrument. I’m curious if your approach, looking back, was it more of, “Voice leading is a very important device. I should tackle this in my practice today. I’m going to work on voice leading,” or was it, “Well, I’m just transcribing a bunch of stuff because that’s how I learned best?”

To me, it came after a while. It started off from transcribing, transcribing a lot of solos, like really a lot, you know:

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Right? Like it’s a voice session, Parker, 15 or 20 solos. Yeah, you’re not wrong. Right? The melody itself is already so much:

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Just the written value of this, without the notes, sounds like a drum solo. Yeah, this is why it’s so nice to hear it. It’s so rhythmic, it makes you move. I teach a bunch. I have many students, each one of them talented in their own unique ways. And I think that rhythm is something that some people have very intuitively, and some people learn it and then become masters at it. For me, rhythm was the first thing that was natural to me on this instrument. I started off as a drummer, and that’s the only thing I thought about: rhythm.

Alright, I didn’t know that you started off as a drummer. I’ve been listening to you and playing with you for like 20 years. You know, I knew you back then. You had a very strong sense of rhythm. So how would you help someone who hasn’t experienced that? How can we teach people to become better rhythmic improvisers?

For a long while, the more my ideas grew, I wanted to do more and more complex stuff. Then, on a recording session, it would sound like it’s rushing; the rhythm is not there. I worked a lot with the metronome, and it helped, but it wasn’t still the essence. What I learned is that the essence is subdivisions. I think subdivisions are the key because if we take, for example, this head again:

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I’ll do it without subdivisions, and you’ll see how it feels:

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It doesn’t sound bad, right? Think about it like the drum:

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Now you’ve got my attention, right? It’s kind of like, what did I do? It’s like if I do:

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Attack, attack, attack. That’s like for it. But if I divide it into three:

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Attack, attack, attack. Nice. There’s contrast in the rhythm. When you go and you feel that and you play with it, that’s time. Then your time is on spot in one point because you tell some kind of a story that is in the place of the song.

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