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hey, welcome to 12tone!
the bebop era was perhaps one of the most important times in the history of jazz.
before bebop, jazz was mostly thought of as dance music, but the rise of artists like
Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker transformed it into something meant
more for just listening, focused on small groups instead of the Big Bands of the swing
era, and providing talented soloists a chance to truly shine.
jazz became more intricate, requiring more focus from the audience and rewarding that
focus with increasingly nuanced music.
that drive for complexity meant that performers needed new musical structures and ideas, and
perhaps one of the most iconic inventions of the era are the aptly-named bebop scales.
the bebop scales, defined by jazz composer David Baker, were generally used as chord
scales, which are scales you play over one specific chord in a progression.
probably the most common chord scales are what's called modes, which is where you take
the notes of a scale, usually the major scale, and play them as if a different note is the
root.
so if the song's in D major (bang) and the band is playing A7, you could take these notes
and build a scale off of A (bang) which gives us what's called mixolydian.
structurally, it's like major, but the seventh note is flat.
we'll come back to it in a bit.
anyway, chord scales are a really important part of jazz theory, because they allow the
soloist to change the shape of their solo in order to reflect the underlying harmony.
if you just played like you were in D major the whole time, it'd get repetitive, but even
just messing around with the ways you use and emphasize those notes allows you to create
a lot of depth.
but that wasn't enough for bebop.
they wanted more, so they turned to one of the best sources of complexity out there:
chromaticism.
in effect, chromaticism is when you use notes that aren't in the key you're playing in.
so in D major, a note like Eb would stand out because we're expecting to hear an E.
it adds color, hence the name, but it can be really hard to use effectively.
at first, bebop artists would use chromaticism at will, dropping in those spicy notes wherever
they wanted, but over time they started to develop a sort of structure for when and where
to use them, and the bebop scales were born in earnest.
probably the most important of these scales is bebop dominant, which was designed to fix
a problem with the mixolydian scale we saw earlier.
(bang) in order to understand the issue, let's imagine you're a soloist who wants to just
walk up the scale.
we'll turn them into eighth notes so they fit in one bar, and boom, we've got a solo.
see?
jazz is easy!
but now let's split the notes into two different groups: chord tones, or notes that are in
the A7 chord we're playing over, and non-chord tones, which you can probably figure out from
the name.
our chord tones are the root, 3rd, 5th, and flat 7th, and if we look at the rhythm of
the bar here we see those fall on beats 1, 2, 3, and 4, plus this bonus root at the end,
with the non-chord tones all falling in the cracks between.
this is perfect, allowing us to emphasize the harmony while also getting a little extra
flavor from those bonus notes.
but what if we want to walk down the scale instead?
here, check it out.
(bang) we still have our root on beat 1, but after that all the chord tones are on the
off-beats, with the emphasis falling instead on the non-chord tones.
and this is actually even worse in jazz, because they tended to play with a technique called
swing, where for each pair of eighth notes the first one is longer and the second is
shorter, kinda like this: (bang) this emphasizes the beats even more, almost completely burying
the actual harmony of the line.
and this is where chromaticism comes to saves the day: by adding an extra note to this scale
in exactly the right place, we can bump those chord tones over onto the actual beats.
(bang) this has the added benefit of moving the arrival of the root over to the start
of the next bar, so we can keep this cycle going for as long as we want.
it's kind of like if we played mixolydian and major at the same time, but with a clear
emphasis on that dominant tonality.
and we can see the same basic idea in the other primary scale Baker defined, bebop major.
if we walk down the major scale (bang) we see exactly the same problem: all our chord
tones are on the off-beats.
but we can't fix it quite so easily: in the dominant scale, we added a note between the
root and the 7th, but in major there is no note between those, at least not in standard
tuning.
that's ok, though, thanks to an important feature of jazz harmony: the major 6 chord.
this is, in effect, a major triad with an added note a 6th above the root, and it's
used to add some spice to major harmonies when a full major 7th chord would sound too
dissonant. in that case, then, our chord tones are the root, 3rd, 5th, and 6th, and since
the 6th is already on a beat, we just have to add a note here to bump the rest of them
over, giving us this, (bang) the bebop major scale.
don't worry, though: you can use it over a major 7 chord too.
the last scale I want to focus on is bebop minor, because it's a bit more complicated.
first of all, it's not really based on minor.
instead it's built from a mode called dorian (bang) but it's used over minor chords.
but the really exciting thing is that there's actually two different bebop minor scales:
the one Baker defined, and then another, more modern variation.
let's start with Baker's: it is, in effect, a mode of bebop dominant.
if we take all the notes of A bebop dominant (bang) but play them so that E is the root
(bang) we get Dorian, but with a bonus pitch between the third and the fourth notes.
effectively, we've got dorian and mixolydian going at the same time.
this is exciting because Emi7 is often used to set up A7, and that sneaky little G# in
there makes it feel almost like an E7 chord, which is what's called a secondary dominant.
if you don't know what that means, don't worry, the important point here is just that it makes
it feel even more like it wants to go to the A chord.
it doesn't actually do what the other bebop scales do, though: if we walk down this version
of bebop minor (bang) some of the chord tones are still on off-beats, so modern players
will often opt to borrow the technique from bebop dominant and add a note between the
root and seventh instead, (bang) which fixes our chord tone problem.
plus, it adds more colors: if we use these three scales over a classic II-V-I progression,
we get to add three different chromatic notes to the key: the #1 from bebop minor, the #4
from bebop dominant, and the b6 from bebop major.
we're exploring more of that chromatic space, but still doing it in a structured way.
of course, that emphasis on structure isn't meant to imply that bebop soloists were just
repeating formulas: there's lots you can do with these scales to make them your own, from
playing with rhythms to changing directions mid-line, or even beginning on different notes
in the scale.
they're just a starting point, but they're a starting point that some incredibly talented
musicians worked very hard to find.
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