Motifs and forward motion

[CliffR]

(In case I'm using the term incorrectly, my intending meaning of 'forward motion' here is the way in which a melody through a bar moves towards and eventually lands on a target note of the chord on the following bar.)

As beginning improvisers, we spend a lot of time playing arpeggios and scales with the above definition of forward motion, 'playing the changes'. But then there's the idea of motifs and motivic development. Play a short phrase over one chord; modify it to fit the next chord and play it again. As I understand it, the two main ways of modifying it (excluding actual variations) is to transpose it directly from one chord to the next, or to make as small a set of modifications to the notes so that the modified one fits the up-coming harmony. So this is another way of playing the changes, and we do have voice-leading with these modifications. But I'm wondering if anyone has tips about combining this sort of motivic playing with forward motion - the motives not only morph to fit each chord in turn, but also create a sense of movement towards each following chord?

[Jimmy blue note]

Great point and question. If I understand your question fully, I think you've got the right idea and really, how you get from the motific content to your target note (or chord, or implied harmony) is the freedom that is the content of a solo. By that, I mean there are lists of things that get you from one place to another, but once your hearing and your imagination become prominent in your thinking, you'll hear contours that bring a line to life; and nobody can quantify that.
For instance, a motif can be changed in content, impact, intent or effect simply by where it sits in the rhythm of the phrase. If you shift the start over even an eighth note, you can effect syncopation, which makes you think and hear the phrase differently, and so the notes that follow, guided by your ear and where it takes you can make that motif very personal. Practice playing by ear and your vocabulary of possibilities and options opens up enormously, and your ability to catalog and call back the devices you use becomes personal.

One thing that I like to do is to create a phrase cell, something with an intentional phrase beginning and play to one of the 12 available chromatic notes for my phrase ending. This challenges me to hear the effect of intervals with unexpected and non chord tonal notes challenging me to create and even imply embedded harmony. It's your solo, and what you do is a combination of practiced experimentation and what you learn sounds good. If you hear it convincingly, you can play persuasively. That's a good reason to practice outside of your comfort box.

And in addition to the two modes of motific treatment you mentioned, you can also keep the motif strong within the key area even with harmony pulling you somewhere. You can hear this kind of static/dynamic interplay in the tune Embraceable You, where the motific theme takes on a very different feeling even though the melody stays the same. Motifs can form their own interplay with harmony if you can use your ears and develop a lyric sense.
I hope this is somewhat of an answer to your question.
Good luck!

[CliffR]

Many thanks Jimmy! Lots to chew on here . Great point about keeping the motif constant over the moving harmony, too.

In the meantime, I realised one method would be to use some sort of pick-up into the following chord/motif. I recored a quick example over the first three chords of Have You Met Miss Jones (my new challenge):

[Jimmy blue note]

Many thanks Jimmy! Lots to chew on here . Great point about keeping the motif constant over the moving harmony, too.

In the meantime, I realised one method would be to use some sort of pick-up into the following chord/motif. I recored a quick example over the first three chords of Have You Met Miss Jones (my new challenge):

Love it. That piece especially, has such a strong sense of movement that what you move and how to get there gives you SO much to work with. You'll also find that how you build depends on the strength and length of your motif. Play with that too! Shorter your seed melody, the more flexibility you have in bringing out and even changing the harmony you're conveying.
Sometimes the simplest of motifs, developed in a strong way, embeds that melodic piece in the listeners mind. You can then go on to develop your thematic material, introduce new melodies, but when your return to that idea, wow!, it ties things together and everyone thinks you're a genius. If you take your motif from the closing melody of a tune, and the solo ends with you quoting the melody, then it's like shaking the hand of the composer with his own ideas.
Listen to Jim Hall's Angel Eyes solo on the Live! album, or heh, just about anything Sonny Rollins plays.

[CliffR]

Will do! Many thanks for the advice.

[James W]

(In case I'm using the term incorrectly, my intending meaning of 'forward motion' here is the way in which a melody through a bar moves towards and eventually lands on a target note of the chord on the following bar.)

As beginning improvisers, we spend a lot of time playing arpeggios and scales with the above definition of forward motion, 'playing the changes'. But then there's the idea of motifs and motivic development. Play a short phrase over one chord; modify it to fit the next chord and play it again. As I understand it, the two main ways of modifying it (excluding actual variations) is to transpose it directly from one chord to the next, or to make as small a set of modifications to the notes so that the modified one fits the up-coming harmony. So this is another way of playing the changes, and we do have voice-leading with these modifications. But I'm wondering if anyone has tips about combining this sort of motivic playing with forward motion - the motives not only morph to fit each chord in turn, but also create a sense of movement towards each following chord?

You could think rhythmically - take a rhythmic motif but of course change its pitch content to fit over the changes. Or you could think in terms of contour - so, like, two up three down followed by an upwards leap, but vary the exact details of it...
Really this topic is huge and wide open. To create a sense of movement to each chord? Well that makes me think of things like guide or tendency tones resolving from a dissonance such as a dominant seventh chord onto a tonic chord - so I'd suggest writing some lines which do that. I feel like you've kind of answered your own question when you mention targeting a note of the chord in the following bar. But to get away from vanilla or clichéd lines, you could target the ninth or thirteenth chromatically - things like that (though these things have also been around a long time!).
Bert Ligon's book Comprehensive Technique For Jazz Musicians is a good book for this. Also, obviously Hal Galper's Forward Motion - of which I have a copy but to my chagrin, I've hardly read much of it. You might want to think about acquiring a copy of Schoenberg's Fundamentals of Musical Composition, whose first part is the most relevant for thinking about motives and the like.

[CliffR]

Thanks James. While I realise it's important to explore how to make variations of motifs, here I was particularly concerned with how to include some element of voice leading so I can move elegantly from one to the next, but without adding notes that are going to decrease the impact of the motifs themselves, if that makes sense.

At the moment, this is just a thought that occurred to me while watching a couple of YouTube videos on motifs, but definitely something I want to get more into my playing.

[pamosmusic]

For that motivic development stuff, I take a small idea and then run it through a diatonic scale. So if it's C-E-G-F-E ... I might say, cool that's a C major triad and then a descending scale fragment back to the middle note. Once I say that I can push it through a whole scale –– D F A G F, E G B A G, etc.

But I can also start changing it. I can make the triad descending. G E C D E, A F D E F. Or maybe I can make the scale fragment ascend from the last note of the triad. C E G A B, D F A B C. I can reorder the triad ... C G E D C. or E G C D E, or start fiddling with the length of the scale fragment. I could invert the triad and repeat anything I did with the root position. Invert it again.

I like doing practice like this because I feel like I'm practicing a lot of ideas I wouldn't have come to naturally, but also I feel like I'm practicing the act of developing a motive. Maybe I'm more prepared when I hear something cool to pick it up and run with it.