(playing Bird blues changes)
- Hi, everybody, my name is Jens Larsen.
In this video, I'm going to show you
how you can play the chords of a Bird blues,
or a Parker blues,
and I'm also gonna talk about
how you understand and analyze those chord changes,
and compare it to a normal 12-bar blues,
because the Parker blues, or the Bird blues,
is really one of the most important progressions in bebop.
It's a really great example
of how they started to use reharmonization
to really develop the chord progressions
that they were playing on,
and it's also a really good example
of how they really loved progressions that moved forward
with a lot of cadences, and a lot of movement,
and it's kinda also pointing a little bit
toward what was to come, with some parallel moving harmony.
In this video,
I'm going to first give you a basic set of chord voicings,
so that you can play the progression
and hear what it sounds like.
Then I'm gonna talk about how you understand the chords,
how it's constructed,
how it compares to a normal 12-bar blues,
and finally, I'm gonna go over a set of drop 2 voicings
so that you can also just play through this progression
in a more normal comping setting.
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about improvising over chord changes,
checking out some interesting arpeggios or scales,
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The most famous song using the Bird changes
is probably Blues for Alice, that Parker wrote himself,
and that's really sort of
the first original version of these changes,
and then the other ones are using slight variations,
but are really based on that form.
Another famous example is Freight Train from Tommy Flanagan,
and also one
that a lot of people don't really realize is a blues
is Bluesette from Toots Thielemans,
which is also a variation of the Parker blues changes,
but I'm, of course, also curious
if you know another song that's using these changes,
then please leave a comment,
because it's nice to have some examples of this,
and the more examples you have of people playing on this,
the more stuff you have to check out,
and the more inspiration you can get
when you're checking it out.
(playing Bird blues changes)
With the tabs and the chord diagrams,
I don't think it makes too much sense
to really go over the chords that I just played in detail.
You can check out the video on how to play jazz chords
if you wanna have that vocabulary in there,
and of course you can also go to my website
and download the PDF.
What you should be aware of, and what is really practical,
is to realize that there are a lot of II-V's
in this progression,
and if you follow the exercises from the other video,
you'll see that I tend
to really think of the II-V progressions as one thing,
and that is a lot more efficient,
because I think probably more than half of the bars
in this progression, in the Parker blues,
are all II-V progressions,
so if you can sort of just turn them into one chord,
or one thing, instead of thinking of two separate chords,
then that's a lot more efficient when you have to play them.
The easiest way to analyze the Bird blues
is probably to compare it
to a straight-ahead 12-bar jazz blues,
because that's a progression you're already familiar with,
and that's really also kind of where it's coming from,
and what it is a reharmonization of.
In the first four bars,
I think what immediately stands out
is that the first chord is a major 7 chord,
and there are a few things
that could be the reason for this.
If we look at the blues before bebop,
so really more, maybe swing, and maybe even earlier,
then actually the chords in the blues
were more triads or 6 chords,
and they were not really dominants,
and that kinda came later,
that we've turned everything into dominants,
like we're used to now.
So you'll also see Parker, in his themes,
actually use the major scale on a blues like this.
Cool Blues is an example of it,
and another thing you'll also see
is that he won't really emphasize the dominant
until he gets to bar four.
So really, when we need a dominant
to take us to the fourth degree,
so in this case really we need an F7
to take us on to the B-flat 7,
then the E-flat won't really get emphasized
until we're sort of closer to the B-flat,
so in bar three or four, and especially in bar four,
he very often, if you listen to solos,
he'll really pull out that note.
The other thing that stands out
is the fact that we have a lot more chords,
and they're all cadences that are moving forward,
so instead of going to the fourth degree in bar two,
and then back to the tonic in bar three,
we have all these progressions that are all II-V's,
and eventually they're a II-V to the B-flat 7,
so this is really back-cycling.
That means that we're just looking at
what we have in bar four is a cadence to B-flat.
That makes a lot of sense,
and then we just start adding cadences before that,
to just create movement to that cadence,
and finally, to the fourth degree,
so that really gives us a set of three bars
that are just all cadences moving forward
and pulling us to the fourth degree,
and this is also something that's quite typical for bebop,
because bebop is not so much
about playing interesting sounds on the chords,
or focused on what the sound of one chord is,
it's really about playing the movement,
and really about playing songs, and adding energy
by lines that are moving forward all the time.
In that way,
it's quite similar to how you might think about Bach.
In bar five, on the fourth degree,
I've written out two options for chords,
and that's just because the common variations
of this progression
sometimes will use a dominant on the fourth degree,
and sometimes will use a major 7.
The original Parker version clearly uses a dominant chord,
but Freight Train and Bluesette both use a major 7.
It is not that important, really,
it's just to point out that that is there,
and it is just the fourth degree.
There's little else to say about it,
and what comes next is just that we have first,
let's play the dominant,
so the fourth degree, and it becomes IV minor,
and in this case it's not a IV minor,
sort of a typical IV minor like a minor 6 chord,
it's turned into a II-V, so it's B-flat minor 7 to E-flat 7.
Now this is a fairly common thing to do as well.
I think Parker has a few other blues themes that do this.
Chi Chi is one of them.
Coltrane does it in Some Other Blues as well,
so it's normal to have this IV-IV minor thing happening
in bar five and six.
The other option is what we would know from Take the...
No, not Take the A Train: Straight, No Chaser,
where you have B-flat,
and then you get the sharp IV, so B diminished.
That's also a very common progression to have,
to take us back to the tonic,
but that's really what's happening here
is just IV to IV minor.
What follows next is probably easiest to understand
just as a row of chromatic II-V's,
and that's also because that's how we have to play it,
so it's just really going
from B-flat minor, E-flat 7
to A minor, D7,
A-flat minor to D-flat 7,
and then down to the II chord in the last cadence.
Of course, you could think of this, also,
as a reharmonization of a sharp IV diminished chord,
because that exists as well.
There are blues songs
that will have that type of progression
that could be reharmonized like this,
and of course the A-flat diminished
that you're then reharmonizing to A-flat and a D-flat,
is reharmonized like that in other songs as well.
I think Just Friends is a good example of it,
and in that case then you would have something like,
if I turn it back to a sort of more-traditional progression,
B-flat 7, B-flat minor 6, and then some sort of F
that would probably be like an F with A in the bass,
and then to the A-flat diminished, and then down to G minor.
That would be this type of progression
that's then turned into, instead of F with A in the bass,
we get A minor, D7,
and then the A-flat diminished
is turned into A-flat minor, D-flat 7,
down to G minor.
The final four bars of the form are not that interesting,
and also not really that different
from what you'll see in a straight-ahead 12-bar blues,
because it's just the II-V,
so the long cadence, and then a turnaround.
(plays turnaround progression)
So there's not really anything happening here.
Sometimes you'll see that in a Parker blues,
the V chord is substituted with a tritone substitution,
so you get G minor, and then D-flat minor,
G-flat 7, to F,
and then it can be F7, F major 7,
maybe even a III-VI-II-V,
so it'd be A minor, D7, G minor, C7,
or just I-VI-II-V,
and of course these variations are all possible,
and you will find different versions of them
in the different songs.
That's how the chords work
if you relate them to a straight-ahead 12-bar blues,
which of course they are a reharmonization of,
so that makes a lot of sense.
Now that we have an idea about
how this whole thing is constructed,
maybe it's useful also
just to check out some more useful comping voicings,
so that you can play it in a band setting,
and that would be something like this.
(playing Bird blues changes)
All the voicings that I'm using in this example
are drop 2 voicings,
and if you wanna dig a little bit deeper into that,
then I have a playlist
with all my lessons on drop 2 voicings
that I'll link to in the description of this video.
So the first voicing I'm using is
this A minor 7 voicing
that I'm using for an F major 7
because that gives us an F major 7 with a 9,
and from here I move up to this E half-diminished.
For the A7,
I'm using the C-sharp diminished voicing, of course,
because that's an A7 with a flat 9.
Moving it up here, where that's still the same set of notes.
D minor 7,
G7 with a 9,
and then a C minor 7,
and then this F7 where I'm also adding a 13,
down to a B-flat 7 with a 13,
and then we get a long row of II-V's, so the first one is
B-flat minor 7 with a 9, E-flat 7,
then pretty straight-ahead A minor 7, D7,
A-flat minor 7 with a 9, G-flat 7,
and then I can easily move that to a G minor 7
like this, with a 9,
and here I'm moving up
because I have longer time on the G minor 7.
I'm sort of walking up to the C7, first using this voicing,
and then with another melody note, C7 altered,
which in this case is a C7 with a flat 9 and a flat 13,
and then sharp 9, and then down to
the A minor 7 on the F major 7,
an F-sharp diminished for the D7, and then
G minor 9,
C7 altered, and then back to this voicing for the F major 7.
Drop 2 voicings are really a huge part
of the sort of bebop sound
when it comes to playing chord voicings,
so that's definitely something you wanna dig into
if you wanna check out some more bebop-oriented material.
What you also wanna take away from this
is that you need to focus mostly on the melody
when you're comping,
and what I mean by that is that you need to focus
on the melody that you're playing with the chords,
so really the top note melody,
so if I'm playing the last four bars of this,
then that's, of course,
(plays turnaround progression)
and what you really have to get across there
is actually what the melody sounds like, so
(plays top-line melody of turnaround progression)
and that's a lot easier to work with,
because if you can make a logical melody,
that's something you can hear,
it's difficult to hear four moving voices at the same time,
but you can hear a top-note melody,
and having a strong melody is gonna make your comping
sound a lot stronger, and a lot more natural,
so that's also what you wanna focus on
when you're trying to come up with
your own version of these chords.
Now, of course I'm working on just the chords
and understanding the harmony in this video,
so I'm curious if you would also be interested in a video
on soloing on this form,
because it is, of course,
an important form to check out
if you wanna check out some bebop.
For the rest, I already asked about one thing,
and that was about the other songs
that are using this chord progression,
because I don't actually know that many of them,
and then a theory of mine,
and I'm curious what you think about that,
that's just my theory,
but in a way I see Solar as sort of being
a minor version of a Parker blues.
Do you think that makes sense,
or is that just a silly notion on my part?
Let me know in the comments.
If you wanna learn more about jazz guitar,
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That's about it for this week.
Thank you for watching, and on to next week.
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