You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Bebop Scale? Not a Thing.

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

Peter and Adam are here to make some serious claims about the Bebop Scale. What do you think about this scale?Check out Chris Park's latest YT on this topic here!Have a question for us? Leave us a SpeakPipeCheckout courses from Adam, Peter and more at Open StudioLet us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Twitter | Instagram

Hey, Peter. Hey, what do leprechauns, unicorns, the lockness monster, and the bebop scale have in common? None of them exist. Exactly. I'm Adamannis. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear podcast. Real talk from two players.

Real talk from two players. I had to look at my notes. It's the day two. It sounds like, is this a sports podcast? Real talk from two players. You know what? I'm still workshopping it, man. Come on.

This is what keeps people coming back. They want to know what the latest. That's what keeps people coming back. Okay, we're going to do a new segment, because I know you love segments. I do love the second. I'm not a fan of... New segments. Okay, go ahead.

After I do our current catchphrase, our, you know, little thing there. Which is, again. Real talk from two players. That's what it currently is. Love it or leave it, buddy, all right? Well, I'm going to give you a little quiz about past ones and see how many you can remember. First of all, what was our very first... Daily Jazz advice.

coming at you. Coming at you. Daily Jazz advice. Probably our best one, actually. Well, we stopped being daily. So that was, you know. We stopped being jazz. We stopped being jazz.

Really, it's not good advice. All of it can go. Let us know in the YouTube comments, please. And look, we had some questions about this. Some folks are like, I'm listening to your podcast in the car. How am I going to let you know in the YouTube comments? Pull out your phone while you put it in cruise control. Pull out your phone.

Just kidding. Do not do that. Once you get to a computer. Yeah. Or to your Roku or to your mobile device, be it to Android, Microsoft phone or iPhone, go to YouTube, find this episode. Because this is on the YouTube, right? I see video cameras. There is.

Yes, it is on the YouTube. I feel a little weird in this thing. Oh, you're on, are you leaving a comment right now? I am. I'm on YouTube right now. I'm leaving a comment. You can leave a comment, even if you don't watch it on the YouTube. But you might want to check out our YouTube.

You'll hear a channel because it's kind of fun, too. Yeah, and go ahead and hit, if you're watching this on YouTube, go ahead and hit the like or subscribe. button. It really helps the channel, and we want to spread the word for podcast. And if you're listening on the podcast, rating and review. Peter, we've got to get back to that. Do we have any new reviews? I feel like we do.

This is a free podcast. We only ask for, it's like a gentleman's agreement we're asking from folks. Is that what you call that? You don't have to be a gentleman even. You don't have to be gentle or a man. That we will continue to give you this, hey, there's some runners going by. No, Peter's, he might leave us here in a minute to go run. That we will provide you with this high quality podcast or whatever we come

with our choice. For free. Dealers choice. For free. All we ask for in return is a rating review. It doesn't even have to be set. No, it does have to be seven stars. We demand it.

We demand seven stars. So when you get a chance to do that. What do we got today? What are we talking about today? So today we're talking about 12 notes. Yes. But in jazz, you know, we play all the notes. All 12 notes.

We're talking about a chromatic scale in the Western Greco-Roman scale. Nope, not Greco-Roman. What we're talking about really, though, is Barry Harris's chromatic scale, which is this beautiful concept. And it also dispels this myth of a bebop scale. I was looking through, there's a really great music theory reference website

that I found last night. But it had a jazz section, which was perilous. I'm being honest. And a main chunk of the jazz section was the B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-scale. And these are concepts that I was taught as a young musician and then had to be

untaught and unlearned because if you go to the direct sources, the bebop musicians didn't play bebop scales. They didn't play Bop major scales or whatever you want to call it. Is the Bbop scale like something

you can't unsee? Like you can't unlearn it once you've learned? Well, you can. Because the concept is, so for those of you don't know, typically a Bbop scale is taught like if you have a C-7, the B-Bobbb scale would you put a half-step

between the, root and the seventh, right? And you do that so that everything I was told lines up on the note, right? The non-core tones. Question. Yeah. Is it always... I feel like I've somebody said or I read somewhere.

Yeah, so it's eight notes, so it's lining up. But is it also... Well, that's the major bebops. So this is the bebops. And this is all wrong, by the way. None of this is real. None of the bebop musicians didn't use this. This is good. This is what we like to teach on the You'll Hear a podcast. No, we're setting it up so that we can teach sort of the real way.

So this is all, by the way, inspired by this music theory website, which is a good classical music theory website, but the jazz section was perilous. Also, we have a new video coming out on Open Studios' YouTube channel from Chris Parks, a friend of the show, Chris Parks, who has his own YouTube channel called Things I Learned from Barry Harris. He made a YouTube video for us here at Open Studio all about this chromatic scale concept. We're going to link to that video here so that you can see. It should be just coming out as this podcast is coming out.

But so we were just setting up what the bebop scale is usually taught as. Yep. And we're going to then explain how Barry Harris didn't teach it that way at all, but taught a sort of what you might consider a similar concept, but actually is way deeper. Like all things, Barry Harris. It's way deeper and has way more applications than you might think. Very onion-esque with many layers. So it does involve putting chromatic scales between notes of the scale, like putting chord tones and non-cord tones on the beat. But it's not just the one.

It's not just that. It's available to us in pretty much anywhere that there's a scale tone or a chord tone. A chord tone and a non-cord tone, it's available to it. So let's just take a major scale, C major scale. Let's do it. So the way that Barry Harris would teach to put chromaticism between chord tones and non-court tones is you can go chromatic up to the third, right? Because there's a note, chromatic note between C and D, right?

the C major scale. There's a chromatic note between D and E. And then once you get to hear, this is where things kind of go awry. Because there's no chromatic note between E and F, which is the diatonic, right? So what Barry does is have you go up to the scale note just above F.

So you jump up to G and then back down to F. Now there's a chromatic tone between F and G. a chromatic tone between G and A There's no chromatic tone No, there is a chromatic tone between A and B Because you're doing the major But there's no chromatic tone between B and C So you do the same thing

And you still need another beat, right? Or half a beat. So you go up to the tone above the C Let me see if I can play what you just I might not have caught it. Exactly. So, right, so it's like, right, it happens in the same. Ah.

So anytime. anytime there's a natural chromatic tone between scale tones, you can put it in. If there's not, if it's a semitone, then you jump up to the scale tone above your target. And it's the same thing going down. Uh-huh. Play here?

Yeah. And this is where you get things like, right? So what's brilliant about this is now it doesn't matter what scale you're playing. So let's do a dominant scale. C-7, right? So the same rules apply. It's exactly the same. But when you get to that half step between the A and the B flat, you jump up to the scale tone above the B flat, C, and then hit the B flat, and then there's a half step now between B flat and C.

That becomes the passing. And that becomes the path. Yeah. So that's, if you were to go down, that's jumping up a little bit more. But the same concept applies. So you can use this on any scale, like you'd use it on a Dorian scale, right? Can you talk a little bit at this juncture, before you even go on the Doreen, just about your phrasing? I notice you have an affectation with your phrasing that really fits, especially when you're, yeah, and when you come down.

It just makes sense, right? I'm exaggerating there, but there is something. Right when you're jumping up before you're coming back down. But it's important because I think a lot of, like, we get this, it's such a big part of the bebop feel. Yeah. Actually. Like we talk about bebop vocabulary, folks sometimes get so caught up in the notes, which are obviously important. But the missing link with it, the missing piece is often the phrasing.

So I think accentuating that is going to be so helpful for a lot of folks. Because once you have it, you kind of take it for granted. Right. Right. Because it just automatically comes out. Just like if you learn how to say a sentence, a sentence and you're emphasizing certain parts to make your point, you don't have to think about it. But as you're learning that, you do have to kind of pay attention when you're learning a foreign language. language, which B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-Beghs for everybody.

Totally. The magic of this isn't playing it, like all scales. The magic of this is not playing it from C to C, right? The magic of this is playing it in ways that make it musical. Like, you know, Barry might talk about going up the chord, you know, when you get to a chord tone, right? Or doing a pivot, what Barry Harris might call a pivot, right? Something like that. That is where this really comes in handy.

It's a way to sort of timeout. The great thing is, too, is diatonic. So if you have like a 251 in the key of F, right, which is where we're doing C7 here, right? The two is just the five, and this is also just the F major scale, the C dominant scale. I'm just looking at your sweatshirt there. The two is just the five.

Gotcha. Works on F, right? It's just the F major scale is the C dominant scale. It's the same thing. It's the same concept. So it's not just about putting a half step between the fifth and six tones on the major. It's not about putting a half step

between the root and the dominant seven on a dominant scale. It's like these half steps can go anywhere and where they don't fit naturally you can put that scale tone above, both ascending and descending. It's a beautiful concept. We're going to link to Chris Park's video. By the way, Chris Parks is doing a lot of teaching over at Open

Studio Pro, I know if you know that, Peter. Open Studio Pro books love Chris. Well, he's just like, I mean, he studied with Barry Harris for decades. He really has all of Barry Harris's concepts right at his fingertips. And he's so clear and concise with how he explains it. I just love this idea because, you know, seeing that sort of classical theorists talk about the B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-Musings

weren't thinking about that, like that at all. You know what I mean? It's so great. So great. And I mean, just the fact that... Can you help me with this more time? To be able to play a line, and this, you haven't even taken into, like, you know, any kind of like breaks or skips or anything like that.

But just to play the line straight when it makes so much more musical sense than some of these other scales. Every scale tone is on the beat. Yeah. It's a system. It's a little system. It's a little system. It's a little joyful system. Is that great? It's just a really beautiful little... And now I finally know it.

And now you got it. So, and now, based on our episode last time, you're going to take it through all 12 keys. Okay. Exactly. Can you do it descending as well? Oh. I don't know if I could do it descending back in C. Is that right? Yeah. I know you're going to use this because you're such a fan of the chromatic bailout, but it's going to come in handy.

Of course, the chromatic. But in jazz, you know, we play all the notes, 12 notes of the scale. Good. Great stuff, man. Thank you, Adam. You laid this out beautifully. Looking forward to the future Chris. The bebop scales. Not a real thing. It's not. That's why it sounds like. All right.

Until next time. You'll hear it. I'm in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, really. Indianapolis. Hey, how's it going guys? Andrew, hi. Because I feel inspired to play something else from your playing. Okay, okay, that's right. I think using the metronome is a great tool, but it's not the only tool. All of the answers are really in the music. What does it mean to live in a groove, be in a group? Until next time, happy practicing.