BEBOP SUBSTITUTION
This month Tim Pettingale of Fundamental Changes brings us another lesson demonstrating the delights of substituting scales in a jazz-blues.
Last month we explored the idea of creating bebop licks over a jazz-blues using chord substitution. The idea is to ‘Minorise’ the Dominant chords by superimposing Minor tonalities over them. These Minor tonalities become the source of our melodic lines.
The first idea is to substitute a Dominant 7th chord with a Minor 7th whose root is a 5th above it. We’re working with a G Major blues, and chord I in our example is G13, so the Minor chord a perfect 5th above is D Minor.
Last time we used Dm7, Dm9 and Dm6 arpeggios as the basis for our melodic lines. This month we’re going to explore the sounds that can be created with the Melodic Minor scale. So let’s look at some D Jazz Minor licks.
In classical music, the Melodic Minor scale is played differently ascending to descending. Historically, jazz musicians have ignored this and played it the same up and down – hence the term the ‘Jazz Minor’. The scale has the formula 1-2- b3- 4-5-6-7 and works well when superimposed over our I chord (D Jazz Minor scale is illustrated below in fifth position). The root note is indicated, but I’ve added the adjacent scale tones to give you a shape to work with across all strings (see Diagram 1).
The beauty of playing D Jazz Minor scale over a G Dominant chord is that the scale contains all the essential chord tones, plus
“Last time we used Dm7, Dm9 and Dm6 as the basis for our lines. This month we’re going to explore the Melodic Minor scale”
extended or altered notes that create a pleasing tension. The following table shows the notes of the D Jazz Minor scale and, below each note, the tension it highlights when played over a G7 chord: D E F G A B C# 5th 13th b7 Root 9th 3rd #11
I hope you are enjoying this fresh way of looking at developing jazz lines using scale substitutions. See you next month.
NEXT MONTH Tim brings us another fascinating jazz lesson from Fundamental Changes