Before worrying about language or advanced concepts, the first step with What Is This Thing Called Love is getting the chord changes out of the chart and into your ear. This tune moves quickly through harmonic territory, and if you’re still reading changes while you solo, everything downstream becomes harder than it needs to be.

This step shows you how to learn the changes by giving them context and meaning instead of trying to brute-force memorize chord symbols. By understanding how the progression is organized and how each section connects, the harmony becomes memorable rather than fragile.

Once the changes live in your head, you free up mental space to actually improvise. This foundation is essential for everything that follows in this tune.

What Is This Thing Called Love spends a significant amount of time in minor, making it an ideal vehicle for developing real minor-key language. Rather than relying on abstract scales, Roy Hargrove’s approach shows how small, melodic ideas can generate endless variations over minor harmony.

In this step, you’ll study focused exercises drawn directly from Roy’s language on this tune. By breaking phrases into manageable pieces and practicing them systematically, you begin to build a working vocabulary that’s immediately usable.

Applying this language directly to the tune transforms the changes from something you “get through” into something you can actually say something over.

Once you have a foothold in minor language, the next step is expansion. Clifford Brown’s playing is a masterclass in clarity, melodic logic, and forward motion over minor chords — qualities that are essential for navigating What Is This Thing Called Love at tempo.

This step focuses on extracting specific techniques from Clifford’s solos that apply directly to minor chords and minor ii–V progressions. Instead of collecting random licks, you’ll learn how to recognize repeatable ideas that can be adapted across the tune.

The result is longer, more connected lines that sound intentional rather than reactive, even as the harmony moves quickly beneath you.

Half-diminished chords are one of the biggest stumbling blocks in this tune. When players default to scale thinking, these moments often sound stiff, hesitant, or disconnected from the rest of the line.

In this step, you’ll learn how John Coltrane approached half-diminished chords in a way that’s musical, flexible, and grounded in sound rather than theory labels. By focusing on chord tones, shapes, and direction, these chords stop feeling like obstacles.

Mastering these ideas and exercises will allow you to move through the half diminished moments of What Is This Thing Called Love with confidence and continuity.

One of the most powerful ways to deepen your understanding of a tune is to study a contrafact built on its changes. Hot House, written by Tadd Dameron, uses the harmony of What Is This Thing Called Love as the foundation for a bebop melody packed with chromaticism and advanced harmonic thinking.

In this step, you’ll see how a composer transformed the original changes into a complex bebop head, revealing new ways to hear dominant motion, altered harmony, and melodic contour. This perspective gives you fresh ideas for improvising over the same progression.

By understanding how Hot House is constructed, you gain a new lens on the original tune — one that sharpens your ear, deepens your harmonic awareness, and expands your improvisational options.