Scalar Patterns – Introduction (7:41)

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The Blues: Understanding and Performing an American Art Form

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University of Rochester

The Blues: Understanding and Performing an American Art Form

330 ratings

The blues is an American art form and the most important musical form in jazz. Although there are other formal paradigms of the blues, such as 8-bar or 16-bar, this course focuses on different incarnations of the 12-bar blues. There are considerable differences between Early Jazz blues, Swing blues, Bebop blues, Modal blues, and Post Bop blues. Each type has its unique harmonic syntax, melodic vocabulary and, associated with them, improvisational techniques. While other aspects of jazz performance practice have been constantly changing from one stylistic convention to another, the blues has never lost its identity and expressive power, and continues to exert a powerful influence on the harmonic and melodic syntax of jazz. This seven-week course explores important aspects of the blues, blues improvisation, basic keyboard textures, jazz harmonic and melodic syntax. Topics include: (1) Blues Progressions; (2) Blues and Other Scales; (3) Improvisational Tools, and others. This course will also cover valuable theoretical concepts enabling the student to master the art of jazz improvisation. Each topic will be introduced from a practical perspective with the clearly stated goal: to improve one’s improvisational skills. Jazz improvisation is rooted in spontaneity, creativity, self-expression and, at the same time, self-control and order. A unique pedagogical approach based on a one-to-one musical interaction conducted with different instrumentalists will help to reinforce many of the concepts introduced in this course and realize its stated objectives.

From the lesson

Improvising the Blues – Part 2

Lesson 7 explores modal categories and scalar patterns in improvisation, in addition to continued discussion on pentatonics. As in the previous lesson, live musicians demonstrate key concepts and principles presented in the lecture, with additional play-along tracks provided for the student to explore concepts on their own.

Introduction and Diatonic/Chromatic Modes (7:46)7:46

Modal Categories (10:06)10:07

Characteristic Triads and Practice Tips (13:13)13:13

Minor Blues - “Sea Blues” Improvisation (7:50)7:51

Play-Along Session - “Mr. PC” Progression (3:06)3:06

Pentatonics – Introduction (7:09)7:10

Sus7 Blues Improvisation with Pentatonics (7:36)7:36

Play-Along Session – “Sus Blues” Progression (2:52)2:53

Scalar Patterns – Introduction (7:41)7:42

Scalar Patterns - “Top Set” Improvisation (7:39)7:39

Play-Along Session – “Isotope” Progression (2:42)2:43

Conclusion (0:47)0:48

Meet the Instructors

Dariusz Terefenko
Associate Professor of Jazz Studies and Contemporary Media
Eastman School of Music

Our final demonstration involves the isotope progression and we will use

that progression to discuss improvisation with different scale or patterns.

With a faster harmonic rhythm coupled with unusual chord progression, the isotope

progression is more challenging to negotiate during improvisation.

But with various scalar patterns, such as one, two, three, four, and I'm going

to use these numbers to refer to specific members of the underlying harmony.

So one, two, three, four, the first two, note, second note, third, and

five or any kind of combinations of four notes.

One, three, four, five.

Famous John Coltrane solo on Giant Steps [NOISE],

entirely based on scalar improvisation, pattern improvisation.

And with these patterns, we can clearly delineate the underlying harmonies and

engage in your highly idiomatic playing, which is similar

to actually what John Caltrane did in the late 50s and early 60s.

On the screen, you can see the use of one, two, three, five scalar patterns

as the progression.

When I play that line even without the baseline,

you can clearly hear the underlying progression.

Again, we're dealing with much faster harmonic rhythm and

much more intricate chord progression.

Let me play that line without a baseline.

Let's play with the metronome, so

we can retain the same growth and listen to these patterns and

try to hear the underlying chord progression.

One, two, one, two, three, four.

[MUSIC]

Okay?

So now let play it with the chords and again,

I just played four quarter notes in the case of single harmony and

eight, eight notes in the case of two harmonies per bar.

[MUSIC]

In the case of suspended chords, [SOUND] I used one,

two, four, five, in order to avoid the third.

Now, on the next screen, you can see the use of the one, two,

three, five pattern along with different permutations.

What we're going to do, we're going to treat them in the same way

we treated our chord [INAUDIBLE] in earlier lecture.

We're going to utilize and exploit different permutations of that pattern.

Here is our original pattern one, two, three, five.

We can kind of reshuffle these notes and play them.

[MUSIC]

So we have as many as six different permutations.

The next thing what you can do, instead of starting on the root,

you can start on the second note, start on the third, and start on the fifth.

Again, we will need all these configurations

in order to make a much stronger connection between individual chords.

Now on this next screen, you can see the of the chord progression

with much better voice leading connectivity between chords.

I show it with different colors, the connection between individual chords and

if you can notice the motion between chords are utilized by stepwise motion.

So if you start on scale to B1.

[MUSIC]

We move to,

[MUSIC]

To the second note.

[MUSIC]

And then,

[MUSIC]

One.

[MUSIC]

You can see it sounds completely different but again, it doesn't sound

like a pattern or like a sequence, which is so obvious when you play it.

[MUSIC]

But now I'm very mindful of the way I connect chords, and

try to utilize these important voices and connections.

As you can notice, the action, the main actions across the bar lines or

in the case of two chords per measure, between beats end of two and three.

[MUSIC]

And you can add rhythmic octave displacements for a saxophone player,

that's something that saxophone players love to do and

create a more kind of jagged contour.

As was the case with five part chords and four part chords,

we can experiment with different positions.

Instead of starting,

[MUSIC]

One, two, three, five, we can start on,

[MUSIC]

On the five, with different directions or all together,

we can change to a different pattern.

[MUSIC]

One, three, four, five or be a little bit more daring.

[MUSIC]

Or something

[MUSIC]

So there are endless possibilities but again, the most important thing

is to be in control of what you're doing and connect with your ears.

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