This is Walking Line of the Week: one walking idea from my lessons, every Thursday. This week it’s Percy Heath on Miles Davis’s “Blue Haze,” and a blues drill that’s tougher than it sounds.
What Percy Heath plays on Blue Haze
What I find really interesting about this record is that Percy Heath himself isn’t necessarily swinging. He facilitates the swing. He’s not aggressively swinging. He’s just playing straight down the middle, solid time, and once the drums come in, it’s the most swinging thing you’ve ever heard.
This is something I talk about with a lot of my students. You’re not responsible for creating the swing. You’re responsible for allowing the swing to revolve around you.
He doesn’t do it just with his beat. He does it with his bass lines. He chooses the simplest bass lines, and by simple, that doesn’t necessarily mean elementary.
Simple means organized. Simple means clear. Simple means subtly intelligent.
Cole Davis
He starts off with the simplest of simple bass lines: one, five, three, five. He played so simply that Horace Silver took on the responsibility of playing complex, and he played so straight down the middle that it enabled the whole band around him to take risks.
This is ironic, actually. You’d think the simpler the bass line, the more roots there’d be on beat one. It’s actually the opposite. He plays a variety of notes on beat one, the three, the five and the seven, and by doing that, he’s evoking that blues feeling. It comes from suggesting the harmony to a subtle but beautiful extent. He gets away from the beat one root in his two-feel on “Bags’ Groove” too, and I go deeper on that in Percy Heath’s two-feel on Bags’ Groove.
The drill: a B-flat blues on triads only
Ron Carter has all his students play a B-flat blues with only triads. Not 1-3-5-7, just 1-3-5. You really hear the blues when you do that. Try it and you’ll realize how tough it is, because you’ll be tempted to play something that just feels like you’re sight-reading a beginner’s guide to walking bass. That doesn’t sound like the blues. One way around it is to not start beat one on the root every time.
- Triads only. Walk a chorus of B-flat blues using only the 1, 3 and 5 of each chord.
- Move beat one. Don’t start every bar on the root. Start some on the third or the fifth.
- Straight down the middle. Keep every note consistent and let the swing happen around you.
- Listen back. If it sounds like a beginner’s guide instead of the blues, start fewer bars on the root.
To hear the beat one idea first, pick the B-flat blues in the free walking bass line builder, open More options, and switch Beat one from Roots to Roots and thirds. Paul Chambers has his own beat one habit on a B-flat blues, and I break it down in what Paul Chambers plays on Freddie Freeloader.
My full breakdown of this line is in Percy Heath: Blue Haze.
A new Walking Line of the Week goes up every Thursday.
Go deeper
Percy Heath: Blue Haze
Percy Heath’s line on Blue Haze, and how playing it simple gave Miles and Horace Silver room to take risks.
