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Originally Posted by christianm77
I can buy that. I think of them as bop tunes, but those really aren't bop heads.
but hey, if somebody is starting out and wants to learn an easy head for Rhythm Changes just so they can have one in their bag, Lester Leaps In is right there with the Flinstones Theme in the great pantheon of easy rhythm changes heads
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02-18-2016 05:21 PM
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You haven't answered my earlier question and I would be interested in your thoughts - when you learn a Parker solo, what are you hoping to learn from it? Originally Posted by sunnysideup
What does the verbatim recreation of the solo demonstrate to you? How important do you think it is it to learn a solo verbatim? Is it important that a jazz musician have a repertoire of classic solos they can play note-for-note?
I'm not saying I know the answers to these questions. Famous musicians have weighed in both sides.
We had a rather long debate on another thread regarding verbatim recreations of solos - Henry Robinett for example was against it on principle, while I was a bit more open to it. I posted an example of me playing a Charlie Christian solo (not a Parker one I'm afraid :-)):
In fact I 'learned' this solo some time ago, but never worked it up for 'performance' in this way - but I felt I had extracted a lot of nougatty goodness from it. In the same way I learned an awful lot by learning Parker's (rather short) solo on Cheryl, Bud Powell's solo on Celia and the first few choruses of Dexter's solo on Second Balcony Jump. I learned all these solos completely by ear, fairly slowly. It does get easier.
None of these solos were worked up for verbatim performance because that wasn't the aim. The aim was to develop my language as an improviser. But working the Charlie C solo up to tempo was an interesting exercise in itself.
I'm open to the idea of doing this with a Parker solo, when I have time. That said, practicing a solo for 'performance' is a completely different exercise to working it out to start off with.
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I absolutely agree. That's why I think players should start with swing and go to bop. Wish I'd done it that way around. Originally Posted by Nate Miller
Riff tunes are great - C Jam, Lester, Honeysuckle Rose, some of the Monk stuff even.
Now's the Time is a twisted riff tune, really...
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@Nate: I don't think bop heads include Cherokee. That's an easy head in the scheme of things, not very "notey". Even the bridge at 320 bpm. But some pre-bop heads are just as hard as many bop heads - such as Tickle Toe. Lester Leaps in I definitely would not call a bop head, but that's me.
Still unsure about all the "CP solo" foolishness. This was a thread about learning heads. I will readily admit that I'm a lousy sight reader, but I've had no problem learning Confirmation (OK, I play the bridge very slightly wrong at one bar), Blues for Alice, Yardbird Suite, Bouncin with Bud, Chi Chi, Sixteen, Freight Trane, Tickle Toe, Pent-Up House, Crazeology, Good Bait and others by ear. If I can do it (non musical upbringing, started jazz at 30, busy day job etc), anyone can.
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All the heads I play a bit wrong, I do so because I learned them from music. Badly. in part no doubt because of poor reading, but also reliable sources can be hard to find. Air mail special has a mistake in in the Real Book for example, and you won't find that one in the Omnibook.... Originally Posted by coolvinny
Tickle Toe is very difficult on guitar (for me) but I do love that tune. The shout chorus is cool. Really cool. I love shouts.
The difference for me between swing and bop lies in the organisation of the rhythm.... Swing tunes tend to have predictable rhythms.... Tickle Toe is pretty simple rhythmically, for example....
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I hear you, though it's a fine line. Crazeology and Tickle Toe feel similar to me, though TT is rhythmically more predictable in the first half. Originally Posted by christianm77
As for playing Tickle Toe, try playing it in 3rd position - well, sliding into the Bb there. You'll have to shift around a bit over the tune but if you stay in that general area, I think you will find it easier than higher up on the fretboard. Hope that helps.
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Just went through that one again recently. A lot of those 'twiddles' are notated with mordents in the Omnibook version of Confirmation but there are still a few errors. Have you seen Mark Voelpel's book on Parker? It's probably the best notated source for lots of Parker heads and is quite twiddle worthy. Originally Posted by christianm77
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I like Au Privave & Steeplechase as relatively easy heads from the CP Omnibook.
I also learned Dexterity on the advise of an instructor (which is not in the Omnibook).
this is a great thread, other than the grumpy dissonance
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A couple of things worth mentioning for anyone attempting to get Parker tunes down on the guitar. Don't expect to play everything in position. It's more difficult to do in the end as you'll often find yourself having to make awkward stretches and it's generally harder to get horn-like phrasing if that's what you're going for. Also, those tunes were conceived on the alto sax and its optimum playing range is higher than the guitar's. As a result, you may have to try out a few approaches to gauge where a tune sits best. If you take a tune like Dexterity for instance, you might play it at notated pitch up around the 10th position or down the octave around the 3rd position. If neither of these seem right in terms of fingering or register, there are other options. Jonathan Kreisberg's solution is to play the 'A' section in the lower octave and go up for the bridge whereas Peter Bernstein transposes the whole tune from Bb to F.
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Donna Lee is pretty easy to learn at slower speed. One thing I do when I practice is I'll load it into audacity, slow it down to half speed, and go through it several times at faster and faster tempi, although I lose it around 80%, I just don't have the chops like some of you guys.
Last edited by Dirk; 03-21-2019 at 06:55 AM.
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Whatever you say, but you're good, that's what's counts. Listening to this clip of yours I realised, as someone already said before in this thread, it would be much easier to get it by ear from guitar version, then from sax/ trumpet. Not that I'd be able to do it at all, but somehow from guitar it sounds familliar, while from horns it's just "beee - wooouum - bop - eee - pinu - ninu -tra -la - lala - leee ..." Originally Posted by pkirk
Last edited by Vladan; 02-19-2016 at 02:44 AM.
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it's true that transcribing guitar is easier for a guitarist, just because of the physical nature of the instrument. Sometimes I think that no guitarist should ever transcribe Pat Martino because his pet phrases are so strong that they are hard to *remove* from your back of licks. Originally Posted by Vladan
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I don't know if anyone has mentioned this before but there is a
collection of mp3's of the original Bird recordings of all the tracks
that are transcribed in the Omnibook.
Try here:
Charlie Parker OMNIBOOK
Last edited by Moonray; 02-19-2016 at 09:56 PM.
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hi everyone,
i was recently asking myself what it takes to learn and master bebop heads in a reasonable amount of time.
i've played with a bunch of people, piano players as well as saxophone players, who were able to perfectly sight read and play bebop themes after 2 or 3 choruses. at the maximum they needed an additional practice time of 3 minutes if it was a really tough one.
i'm curious: can you guys do it? do you know people who can do it? is that something one can expect from a guitar player or will the nature of the instrument make this an almost impossible task? (e.g. if you're trying to play all the trills and ornamentation, then there's usually not a lot of ways on the fretboard that are going to work out in the end. not sure how likely you're going to pick the best solutions right away..)
what do you think is required to be able to do it?
outstanding technique? outstanding sight reading skills? great fretboard organization? what else?
i'm curious about your answers!
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If that's what you want to accomplish simply work on it. I believe Jaco Pastorious said it took him 6 years to get Donna Lee down. Yes, work on sight reading, and best positions and shifts needed. You might get good at at but it takes lots of practice time.
No, I can't sight read at that pace myself. I've been playing by ear for a long time and just got back into reading music a couple of years ago. It took me a while to get comfortable with Au Privave, and I needed help by listening to a few versions rather then completely relying on reading the notation. I'm not ready for Donna Lee yet, because it will require a lot of time and effort.
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Well, "learn and master" isn't really synonymous with "learn for the first time at tempo on the bandstand by sight-reading", so you have two different ideas confounded here. I certainly cannot sight-read bebop heads at tempo, but I can sight-read them slowly and figure out where I want to play them on the neck, and then commit them to memory, and then play them at a reasonably brisk tempo by memory (but I still can't play Donna Lee at 225...)
Why would it have taken Jaco 6 years to learn the head? There must be more to that story...Last edited by jasaco; 04-15-2017 at 01:00 AM.
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Good question!
For me a big step was when I started working them out by ear. I still read heads, but playing bop by ear helped me finger the lines more idiomatically for the guitar.
Furthermore the better your ears get, the more nuances you can pick up with turns and so on that sometimes get left out of charts.
Technically, employing legato in an idiomatic way is an important part of bop playing - whether it's little slides, hammers or arpeggio sweeps. Stone alternate picking simply doesn't work for this language in my experience, but of course you may well find a different solution works for you than works for me. That is - use your ears and let your technique follow.
These days it takes it still takes me a while to get a head up to tempo but the actual learning bit of it is mostly taken up with singing the line accurately. Once this is done fingerings often suggest themselves, although it may take a few weeks to get a tune up to speed.
That said, the more you do the easier it gets.
You may also want to have a go at playing them in different keys, a good way to see if you can really hear every note of the head and aren't just resorting to muscle memory.
I like what mike moreno said about bop heads - treat them like they are Chopin! Keep polishing them and exploring fingerings and phrasing options.
Play them along with the recordings too. You can slow these down with transcribe. Also with the click and without. Record and critique your performances.
Finally, one thing that is often overlooked as a learning tool is composing your own heads, using what you learn from the heads you learn from recordings and notation. This will help you internalise lines and phrases and use them in your improvisations too.Last edited by christianm77; 04-15-2017 at 01:33 AM.
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+1 on what Christian said.
If you don't know these heads (able to scat them, phrase by phrase)...reading well is not going to be the answer.
So much of what needs to be played just defies musical notation, IMO. For e.g, "Oleo" is almost not even a tune---more like a riff, but if you don't get the accents right, it sounds phony (maybe that's "butter").
Also, working out the best fingerings is not intuitively obvious. I play "Billie's Bounce" in open position...there is a little up-sweep where the top 2 strings come in handy, then a shift.
(But Christian's earlier pt. re: transposing these is a good one. "Fingers memory" allows us to turn the brain off, and if you do this before you understand WHY the line works...you can't play it elsewhere, or use the concept in another context. Jack Z. has said if you can't play something in all positions, you don't really know it....he's right. But....it's work. So my "open string" solution, is really only a half-way house approach.)
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thanks to all of you!
@jasaco you're totally right, that's two different things - even more impressive they were able to sight read stuff on the first chorus missing a hand full of notes, missing no notes on the second chorus and master it after playing it for the third time. and, you know, they played it better than i did after practicing it for a week. (to be fair i have to say: that was 2 years ago and back then i hadn't disclosed the secrets of practicing music.. much to catch up!) btw. i could tell they mastered the songs 'cause i wrote them.
@bobby d i think thats what i'm doing already. i'm working on all possible combinations of trills and target notes that use half and whole tone steps - on any string set, tempos 25-200bpm - at the same time developing serious classical technique, speed and dexterity. also i'm focusing on sight reading but that's definitely my weakest area. besides that i'm working on hearing how the notes relate to the given chord as well as the tonic. i'm also organizing the fretboard in a way that i can "hear", "feel" and "see" these relations as well.
i can see why it takes someone 6 years to master a certain head. i believe if you pay that much attention to detail with a single tune you take a lot more from it opposed to learning 12 heads half-assed (like i've been doing for years). also jaco probably didn't spend every day on learning donna lee and he probably developed his whole technique along. like.. no one knows what stage he was in, when he started learning it.
@christianm77 thanks for your advice! my ears are pretty decent, i think, to give you an idea, i learned "marmaduke" a week ago and it would take me 5 minutes to "transcribe" (didn't write it down though) and memorize it. it would take me another 5 mins to find my favorite position to play it on the fretboard. (all of that would have taken much longer with a tune like "donna lee" or so of course)
the tricky part is when it comes to playing it accurately and in tempo. also, despite the technical aspect, i wouldn't rely on memorizing it well enough to be able to play it under stress in front of a crowd after this fairly short amount of time.
i totally agree with everything you say. i do practice in different keys, different areas areas on the neck and i write (freebopish) tunes as well.
also let me say i'd rather learn a tune by ear and also spend time on it. but when it comes to learning someones original tune, meeting for a 30 minute rehearsal right before the gig, trying to get 5 new tunes down, this requires special skills.. i was blessed to mostly work with people who were able to do that, but i myself could never compete in that way. up to now i haven't seen a guitar player do it, but lots of piano, saxophone and bass-players. i'm definitely willing to spend a lot of work on this, but at the same time i'm trying not to frustrate myself by expecting too much..
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More yes... 8 years! Of course he did a lot more during that practice time than just learning the head.Why would it have taken Jaco 6 years to learn the head? There must be more to that story...
Jaco: "I practiced 'Donna Lee' [his version of Charlie Parker's chop-busting bebop standard is on his eponymous first lp] and the 'Chromatic Fantasy' for eight years before I would play them in front of anybody.
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To me bebop heads are the classical music of jazz. You need to think about phrasing, tempo, fingerings, dynamics etc... Mike Moreno plays "milestones" a lot. So I think it'd be a good idea as a guitar player to start out learning 5 heads really, really well. And work out how it sounds the best. Recently I found out playing on the treble strings give the most clear sound. Here I'm playing Relaxing at Camarillo as I used to and then in a lower position.
Last edited by yaclaus; 04-15-2017 at 04:11 PM.
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Nice! Enjoyed that. Barney Kessel played on, didn't he? Originally Posted by yaclaus
I agree that learning a few bebop heads (5 is a fine number) is a good idea. It's a challenge to get the rhythms / articulations / dynamics right, but all the progress one makes in that area is valuable.
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Nice, that swings. I'll have to learn that one. Originally Posted by yaclaus
Btw - have you been watching that Moreno workshop vid by any chance? :-)
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guilty as charged
TBH I thought he was being kind of obsessive with his points. Thing just is... He's right 
(and Kessel plays a solo on one of Parkers versions - take 4)
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Sight reading is a valuable skill, but I don't think it's the most useful skill when it comes to learning bebop heads.
I think one needs to go to the original recordings and work it out. There are multiple ways to finger a melody on guitar, and you have to find the way that lays best for the tune and your hand. That takes time. You also have to know how the masters have treated the song and what the range of possibilities is. More time.
I also think that the most valuable thing about learning these tunes is learning the whole tune, and learning it deeply. Melody, changes, lyrics, classic interpretations -- the whole bit. That REALLY takes time. Learning a tune so that you can play it up tempo, at medium tempo, as a ballad, maybe a latin version, in a rhythm section, as a solo guitarist, as a soloist and as an accompanist requires really learning the tune. Memorize it and internalize it so you never have to read it again. Nobody does that in three minutes. You can maybe get a start on it with one tune in a couple weeks if you practice a lot, and it's a long-term process from there to polish it up and make it your own. But when you've gone through that process you can do anything with the tune. You really know it.
That's much more valuable than sight reading the head. If you work through a series of bebop tunes in that way over a couple years, you will have built up a repertoire of tunes that you can use in many different ways and in many different situations. I admit to not having done as much of that as I would have liked to myself, but I think that's how you build real, substantive musicianship. Going through tunes in that way has been the most valuable thing I've ever done musically. And that's very different than just getting through a tune.Last edited by Jonathan0996; 04-15-2017 at 04:58 PM.
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