It’s time for your chorus on a B-flat blues. You know the chords, you’ve got some licks, and the only thing your hands want to do over the form is walk.
Quick answer: how do you start improvising on bass?
Start with a bass line you already play and subtract from it until you can feel the form without quarter notes. Then trade the root for the third and seventh, play them in swung eighth notes with space, and add the fifth and ninth. Build vocabulary by adding half steps around the notes of melodies you know.
This is a free primer for bass players, upright or electric, who are learning to improvise in jazz. It starts where my soloing courses start, with the bass line you already play. It’s bass-first and practical, so it doesn’t cover jazz history or try to catalog every scale. There’s no signup.
In this primer:
- What is improvising on bass?
- How do you keep your place in the form?
- Which notes do you play over a chord?
- How do you solo over a ii-V-I?
- Do you need scales and modes?
- How do you make your rhythm sound like a solo?
- How do you build jazz vocabulary?
- How do you learn from records?
- What changes when you play with a band?
1. What is improvising on bass?
For a bass player, improvising means switching jobs. When we walk, we’re the accompaniment: clear, consistent quarter notes, mostly roots, no rests. When we solo, we abandon that role and play with the time instead.
That switch is the number one reason bass players have trouble soloing. A lot of bass players struggle with soloing not because they lack harmonic information, but because they’re so used to quarter notes that they don’t know how to feel the form any other way. We’re also uncomfortable with silence. Even the drummer lays out some of the time, but if the bass player lays out on a gig, it’s a disaster.
So I don’t start with a blank canvas. I start with a bass line and chisel it down until I get a solo. The bass line is the marble from which the sculpture is carved, and the sculpture is the solo. And you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are 12 notes, and you’re recycling them in your own personal way.
2. How do you keep your place in the form?
When you walk, you keep track of the form with the notes you’re playing. When you solo, you keep track of the notes and the rests at the same time. I can walk a B-flat blues and have a whole conversation, but I couldn’t solo and talk. Soloing takes another gear of focus.
The exercise for this is the subtracted bass line. Play a simple walking line on a B-flat blues, then play it again with beats left out while you keep the form going. Try beats two and four, then one and three. Then start some phrases on beat four and play over the bar line, so you’re not always landing on beat one.
Practice the whole form, not four bars. Working on four bars gives you licks for those four bars, but that’s part of a solo, not a solo. I really believe half of our struggles with a tune like “All the Things You Are” are struggles with form. We know what an F minor 7 chord is. But do we know exactly when it’s going to appear? There’s more in how to solo on upright bass.
3. Which notes do you play over a chord?
When a bass player sees F7, we think root and fifth. That’s right for a bass line. A horn player, a pianist or a guitarist thinks third and seventh, A and E-flat, because the bass player’s got the root and fifth. If you play the note the bass player’s already playing, that’s unison, not harmony.
So in a solo, the third and seventh become your defaults, because they’re the two most important notes that tell you what the chord is. Play a chorus of a B-flat blues with just thirds and sevenths in half notes, then one that starts on the seventh. That’s tougher than it sounds. When we hear B-flat 7, we hear B-flat first. An alto player hears D and A-flat.
Next, think 3-5-7-9 instead of 1-3-5-7. On B-flat 7 that’s D, F, A-flat and C. The ninth isn’t a scary note. It’s the second note of the major scale you practice whenever you pick up your instrument. The root can sneak in, but it’s very rarely a good note to start with. More on getting off the root and off beat one in how to solo on electric bass.
4. How do you solo over a ii-V-I?
In C, a ii-V-I is D minor 7 to G7 to C major 7. “Autumn Leaves” is full of them, and the last four bars of a B-flat blues, C minor 7 to F7 to B-flat 7, are one too.
Start with 3-5-7-9. On D minor 7 that’s F, A, C and E. On G7 it’s B, D, F and A, or A-flat for the flat 9. On C major 7 it’s E, G, B and D.
The dominant chord is where it starts to sound like jazz. Major and minor chords each have one set of extensions, the 9, 11 and 13 (with a sharp 11 on major). Dominant chords can take many more, like the flat 9, sharp 9, sharp 11 and flat 13. We use those extensions to create tension, and dominant chords are the only chords that naturally carry tension. They’re a call to action: move me, take me somewhere else. The one note I avoid on a dominant chord is the major seventh.
Then connect the chords. Voice leading just means getting from one chord to the next in the most fluid way, so it sounds like one consistent line. When a tune stays in one key, the shapes you choose for each chord are usually only a note or two apart. On electric, I teach this with box scales: five- or six-note pentatonic shapes that hold all or most of a chord’s extensions.
5. Do you need scales and modes?
Not to get started. If you can play a bass line, you don’t even need scales or modes to be a good soloist. I’m no expert in scales or modes. They don’t even teach them at Juilliard, where I went to college. They teach you how to feel the form.
Modes are still really good to learn. A mode is just another way of starting on different notes within the chord. Some people think in terms of modes, Phrygian, Locrian. I think in terms of the actual degrees.
Modal tunes are their own case. On “So What,” you have many bars of one chord, and you’re playing in a mode more than a set of changes. It’s called modal jazz, not chordal jazz. See how Paul Chambers keeps those long stretches moving in the So What bass line.
6. How do you make your rhythm sound like a solo?
Quarter notes are the language of bass playing. Eighth notes are the language of soloing. Start with thirds and sevenths in straight eighth notes, two bars at a time, slowly, with no metronome yet.
Then subtract. Nonstop eighth notes sound more like a fast walking line than a solo. Leave one or two beats out of each bar, and pick a different beat each time. Leaving out beat three in every bar is a bad habit, and a good solo is improvised.
Then swing them. Straight eighth notes over a B-flat blues sound like a bass line. Swing the same notes and it sounds like a solo. The irony is that a swinging walking line is straight quarter notes, so swinging eighth notes takes an extra step for us. Don’t play straight out of a fear of sounding corny, but skip the giddy-up sound too. Swing is a balance right in the middle, like umami in cooking.
For space, listen to the Bill Evans Trio on Sunday at the Village Vanguard. That’s broken time: they acknowledge the quarter note, but none of them plays it. For phrasing, listen to Chet Baker’s solo on “But Not for Me.” His phrases are about the same length as the melody’s phrases, and each one has a cadence, a breath, before he picks up again. Play your solo with a similar phrase length to the melody and it automatically sounds melodic.
7. How do you build jazz vocabulary?
Once you can play 3-5-7-9 over the form, add vocabulary. Jazz vocabulary is really chromatic language over chord changes, and every note has two chromatic notes next to it: the half step above and the half step below.
“Blue Monk” is a great place to start. Thelonious Monk wrote it on the form of a B-flat blues, and its first phrase starts on the third, D, and moves up by half steps to F. Pick a target note like that F, play the half step below it and the half step above it, then land on it. Some people call that an enclosure. It’s really just half steps. Then mutate the phrase: invert it, add notes, go a minor third above the target and come down. When you play something you like, remember it and practice it.
I would much rather have 20 licks that I can interpret in a million different ways than have 200 licks that I just play from memory.
Cole Davis
Bebop grows out of melodies. Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology” is built on “How High the Moon,” and phrase by phrase you can hear him stretch the song’s melody with half steps and passing tones. On “Confirmation,” try using the first melody note on each chord as a target note. When I did that, it was a good solo already, and I wasn’t even thinking about jazz vocabulary.
It works the other way, too. Paul Chambers’s bass lines are often bebop licks in slow motion. Play his line on the bridge of Miles Davis’s “Bye Bye Blackbird” twice as fast and you get a bebop lick.
8. How do you learn from records?
Listen a lot first. Before I transcribed Jaco Pastorius’s solo on “Havona,” I hadn’t spent any time playing it, but I’d probably listened to that album, Heavy Weather, something like 8,000 times.
Listen for the feel, too. On the bebop records, the melodies sound relaxed and flowing, not aggressive, and they’re not playing every single note.
Transcribing is how that language gets into your playing:
- Sing it first. Get it in your ear until you can sing it, even if you’re only approximating. If it isn’t in your ear, it’s just muscle memory, and it won’t show up in your playing.
- Find it one phrase at a time. Check whether what you’re singing lines up with the phrase.
- Check the rhythm. You can have the notes right and the rhythm wrong.
- Play it without the track. Make sure you can play it as if it’s your own solo.
- Improvise on it. Take the licks over the same chords and make them part of your own language.
It takes a lot of focus, which is why nobody wants to do it, and it might take you two or three days. When I was at Juilliard, I spent two months on one Paul Chambers solo. My whole process is in how to transcribe bass by ear.
Train your ear as you go. For a while I’d play licks I knew would work, and then I realized I wasn’t even hearing them. So I’d play the root and sing the licks over it, in different keys. You don’t have to be a great singer. If I can sing it, it’s in my brain, and I’ve got a much better chance of playing it.
Records from my lessons to start with:
- Weather Report, Heavy Weather. Jaco’s solo on “Havona.”
- Bill Evans Trio, You Must Believe in Spring. Eddie Gomez’s solo on the title track, which I consider the greatest upright bass solo of all time. It starts with the melody and keeps coming back to it.
- Miles Davis, “Bye Bye Blackbird.” Paul Chambers’s bass line on the bridge.
- Chet Baker, “But Not for Me.” A solo that phrases like a written melody.
- Charlie Parker, “Confirmation.” Relaxed, flowing bebop.
9. What changes when you play with a band?
Bass lines are still the most important thing. When I played rhythm changes in all 12 keys at 400 beats per minute, one thing I learned is that the soloist doesn’t care whether you repeat your own bass lines. They care that you give enough of the roots, keep the time and keep the quarter notes steady. Consistent, clear quarter notes are what let a drummer or a singer swing on top of your line. Your bread and butter as a bass player is making everything feel good, and you work on that feel by playing along to records, way more than with a metronome. More in Ray Brown on Have You Met Miss Jones and my guide to walking bass lines.
How to practice this week
- Walk, then subtract. Walk a simple B-flat blues, then play it again with beats left out. Go all the way around the form every time.
- Thirds and sevenths. One chorus in half notes, then one that starts on the seventh.
- Eighth notes with space. Thirds and sevenths in straight eighth notes, two bars at a time, then leave different beats out of each bar.
- Swing them. Same exercise, swung more than you think.
- Add the fifth and ninth. Play 3-5-7-9 on every chord, then mix up the order and the register.
- Take one melody apart. Learn “Blue Monk” and add half steps around its notes.
- Sing one phrase off a record. Pick a solo you’ve heard many times, sing a phrase, and find it on the bass.
Only move on when the step before it feels solid. Do the whole form, as slowly as you want, but don’t stop. To drill it, add a metronome on all four beats, on one and three, or on just beat four, which is what I do.
If you want this path step by step, with the exercises written out, it’s the core of Jazz Soloing on Upright Bass: From the Beginning and Jazz Soloing on Electric Bass: From the Beginning.
Walk one chorus of a B-flat blues tonight, then play it again with half the notes gone. Every solo in this primer starts there.
FAQ
Do I need to know scales and modes before I improvise on bass?
No. If you can play a bass line, you can start without them. First learn to feel the form without quarter notes, then learn the third and seventh of each chord. I’m no expert in scales or modes, and they don’t even teach them at Juilliard, where I went to college. Modes are still really good to learn.
What’s the first exercise for learning to improvise on bass?
The subtracted bass line. Walk a simple line on a B-flat blues, then play it again with beats left out while you keep the form going. Try two and four, then one and three, then cross the bar line. If the only way you can play over a form is to walk, the vocabulary you learn has nowhere to go.
Do I need a band to practice improvising?
No. When you’re learning to solo, chances are you don’t have an on-demand rhythm section every time you practice. Learning to solo unaccompanied actually makes you a better soloist, because it’s easier to play with a band than to play alone. Play along to records to work on your feel.
Is this primer for upright or electric bass?
Both. My upright and electric soloing courses follow the same path: a bass line, a subtracted bass line, thirds and sevenths, eighth notes, swing, then 3-5-7-9. Lines that go across all four strings are much easier on electric, because it’s horizontal, not vertical, so gravity’s on your side.
How do I know if a lick I made up is any good?
You know when it’s good because you play it and you like it. If you think it’s pretty good, chances are it’s a jazz phrase. Remember it, practice it, and keep mutating it with half steps around your target notes. Keep the things you like and throw away the things you don’t. That’s really where jazz vocabulary comes from.
Go deeper
Jazz Soloing on Upright Bass: From the Beginning
The step-by-step version of this primer: 5 lessons that turn your bass line into a solo.
