Your bass solos don’t sound like jazz, and you play over the same standards without really feeling confident in your ability to solo. I know that feeling. I used to feel very inadequate when it came to soloing. I felt like I wasn’t playing the right stuff, or I wasn’t playing the language correctly, or I was outlining the changes too obviously, and I didn’t really know how to use chromaticism or dissonance.
Quick answer
Bebop language grows out of melodies you already know. Charlie Parker’s Ornithology takes How High the Moon and stretches its phrases with half steps, passing tones and enclosures. On bass, Paul Chambers adds wrong notes after the basic ones and gives every phrase a direction. Start with one melody phrase and surround its notes with half steps.
That changed when I started studying one genius bass player, the great Paul Chambers. We’ll get to his licks. First, here’s where bebop language comes from in the first place: the melodies you already know.
How does bebop language grow out of the melody?
Take “How High the Moon.” It’s a simple tune in the key of G major, written for a Broadway show. Charlie Parker wrote a melody on it called “Ornithology.” Hear the two side by side and you might think they have nothing to do with each other. That’s where you’re wrong. It’s not about imitating the melody. It’s about taking the information in the melody and using chromaticism, half steps, passing tones and enclosures to address it and make up your own language. That’s exactly what Charlie Parker did.
Go phrase by phrase. On one phrase, he takes the first four notes, adds to them and expounds on them, but he ends up at the same place. On another, he takes the note a phrase ends on, an A-flat, starts on that note and just adds some half steps. On its own, you’d never think it had anything to do with an F minor 7. The way he ends it makes it clear. Another phrase is literally 3, 5, 7, flat 9 on a D7, which shows you how important those 3-5-7-9 and 3-5-7-flat 9 shapes are to soloing over these tunes.
In the ’40s, that sounded like it came from outer space, because nobody had heard anything like it. Now we have the resources to understand how he came up with this language, and most of it is taking simple phrases from songbook melodies, stretching them, and adding a heavy dose of chromaticism. If you know the melody to “Ornithology,” you don’t have to stop at the melody. You can improvise on it. I touch on this idea in my jazz improvisation primer for bass.
What makes a Paul Chambers lick sound like jazz?
Paul Chambers, to me, is the foundation of really learning to solo on the upright bass. And wrong notes are something I talk about all the time with my students. Without wrong notes, you have a kind of boring, dry consonance. Wrong notes are what make the right notes sound good.
Take a lick from one of my favorite Chambers solos, over C minor 7 to F7 to B-flat major. What makes that lick great is its use of wrong notes. He starts on the four, the 11 of the minor chord. If you only play the right notes, it starts to sound like something you’d hear in the blues scale, or in some kind of folk music. That’s great, but it’s not really jazz. What makes it special is the note Paul Chambers plays at the end of the bar. That note makes the whole phrase. It changes the color, and he uses it to resolve to the next chord.
Then, in the next bar, he plays a note that’s both a wrong note and a right note: the B-flat, the natural four on the F7, and he resolves it to the third. As Jacob Collier describes it, the natural four works because you’re already home. The lick resolves to B-flat major, so the B-flat on the F7 already lands.
Basic is fine, just don’t stay there
Playing the same chord for two bars is always a big challenge for bass players, and the way we deal with it is wrong notes. On his recording of “You and the Night and the Music” with Bill Evans, Chambers has two bars of C minor 7 going to F minor 7.
In the second bar he plays what I call an imaginary five. The tune doesn’t have a C7 in that spot, but he’s implying it, and he creates tension two ways: by implying the dominant, and by playing a dissonant note, the major third, E, over the C minor 7. If I play the minor third there instead, I’m just arpeggiating the C minor chord. It gives you the essence of C minor, but nothing interesting. The second I change those E-flats to Es, it’s so much more interesting and so much more melodic, even though it’s dissonant. He plays an imaginary five in his walking on “So What,” too, creating a five even when there is no five. I break that down in the So What bass line.
In the first bar, he does something really interesting. He starts with the first four notes of the C minor scale. You can’t get a more basic start to a C minor 7 lick than that. Then he follows it with wrong notes, the major seventh, B, over the C minor 7, and he leans into it and resolves it beautifully to the root.
If you play something basic and obvious, you got to follow that up with some wrong notes immediately.
Cole Davis
Paul Chambers probably played the first four notes of whatever minor scale he was playing over many, many times. So it’s not necessarily that you’re playing too basic or too obvious. It’s that you stay there too long.
Give every phrase a direction
On “Whims of Chambers,” he plays a longer phrase through bars two to five of a blues. It’s a great way into the four chord, which we often struggle with because there are so many bars of F7 before it. Once again, it’s the perfect combination of right notes and wrong notes. There are so many wrong notes in his first bar that the third bar is all right notes, to give you some consonance to balance out the dissonance. Part of the phrase is one of the most fundamental bebop licks there is, and it’s all about creating movement.
Paul Chambers was great at pretty much everything, and one of those things was playing lines with natural motion. The chromaticism in this line gives it natural motion. It’s almost impossible to play it without swinging. Even if I play it with straight classical phrasing, it still sounds good, because the wrong notes make it swing, and so does the direction.
He does the same thing in his walking. Up, down, up, down isn’t a direction. Going up, then down, then up, then plateauing a little, then up again: that’s a direction, and it’s why you follow it so much more closely. That’s also what makes the “You and the Night and the Music” lick melodic: it starts somewhere, it goes somewhere, and then it ends somewhere. Start, end, direction.
Try this today: turn one phrase into bebop
- Learn the melody. Play the opening phrase of “How High the Moon” in G.
- Surround the last note. That phrase ends on a B. You have a C above it and a B-flat below it. Connect half steps to it.
- Draw from the 3-5-7-9. Add notes from the 3-5-7-9 of the chord as your base.
- Follow basic with wrong. If you start with something basic and obvious, follow it with some wrong notes right away.
- Check the direction. Make sure the phrase starts somewhere, goes somewhere and ends somewhere. Fewer notes is fine.
Soloing is really just an amalgamation of chromatic language with the 3-5-7-9 as your base to work off of. But to play a good solo, you have to understand the form first. You get there by taking a bass line, playing it over the form, and chiseling away at it until you get something that resembles a solo. I walk through that in how to solo on upright bass.
The Chambers licks here come from Bebop for Bass: The Paul Chambers Approach, where I break down 12 of his licks note by note. Start with one phrase of a melody you love tonight, and give it a wrong note and a direction.
Go deeper
Bebop for Bass: The Paul Chambers Approach
Twelve Paul Chambers licks broken down note by note, so you can bring his bebop language into your own solos on upright.
FAQ
Where does bebop language come from?
From the melodies of songs. Bebop vocabulary is really an expansion of melodies you already know. Charlie Parker’s Ornithology takes How High the Moon, a simple tune written for a Broadway show, and stretches its phrases, adding a heavy dose of chromaticism. In the ’40s that sounded like it came from outer space.
What’s Ornithology based on?
How High the Moon. Charlie Parker wrote his melody on it, and going phrase by phrase, the two are more related than you might think. He takes the information in the melody and uses chromaticism, half steps, passing tones and enclosures to make up his own language. One phrase is literally 3, 5, 7, flat 9 on a D7.
What makes a bass solo sound like jazz instead of the blues scale?
Wrong notes. Without them you have a kind of boring, dry consonance, and the line can sound like the blues scale or folk music. In a Paul Chambers lick over C minor 7 to F7, one note at the end of the bar changes the color of the whole phrase and resolves to the next chord.
How does the natural four work on a dominant chord?
As Jacob Collier describes it, the natural four works because you’re already home. In Paul Chambers’s lick over C minor 7, F7, B-flat major, the B-flat on the F7 is both a wrong note and a right note. It’s the note you’re resolving to, so it already lands, and he resolves it to the third.
Is it bad to start a solo phrase with something basic?
No. Paul Chambers starts a C minor 7 lick with the first four notes of the C minor scale, which is as basic as it gets. It’s not necessarily that you’re playing too basic or too obvious. It’s that you stay there too long. Follow something basic with wrong notes immediately.
