Bebop “heads,” what jazz players sometimes call the melody of a tune, tend to be some of the trickiest and most technically demanding strings of notes you’re likely to encounter. Much busier than classic jazz standards, these intricate melodies are generally more difficult to learn, understand, and commit to memory.
So what do you do when you inevitably come across one of these bebop tunes?
Sure you can play it over and over until you’re blue in the face, and that will certainly help, but beyond any brute force approaches, the key is to break down all of the concepts & techniques within these bebop gems…
By understanding what the composer is doing, you’ll be able to add these tunes to your repertoire more easily and you’ll acquire powerful improvisational concepts that you can utilize in your solos.
You see, one aspect of this type of tune that makes them so valuable is that they’re often built upon the chord progressions of popular jazz standards, giving you a new pathway and perspective over a familiar harmonic vehicle.
In jazz we call these new melodies, contrafacts.
So if you’ve been struggling over a particular tune or just want a fresh take on the changes, what better way than to see and hear what a great composer made of them?
This is an invaluable process and it’s exactly what we’re going to show you how to do…
Today we’ll look at Tadd Dameron’s creation Hot House, which is written over the chord changes to Cole Porter’s What Is This Thing Called Love.
Here are just a few of the things you’re going to learn:
- How to use chromaticism in a more advanced way
- How to hear variations of altered V7 sounds that are likely new to you
- How to conceptualize pieces of a bebop melody from different angles
- How a bebop melody can give you a new way to think about chord changes
- How composers use certain dominant shapes within their melodies
And a whole lot more…
But before we go any further, take a listen below to masterful trumpeter Wynton Marsalis play over What Is This Called Love.
With an AABA form, these straight forward chord changes are ripe for a new melody…
So in 1945, the legendary composer Tadd Dameron did just that…he took these changes and created a new approach to how you might move through them.
He called this new creation Hot House and the bebop greats Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie quickly adopted this new melody as one of their favorites. Have a listen…
Throughout their careers, they recorded the song numerous times, with slight variations and embellishments from take to take. (Note that we’ll use the recording above as our primary study because it’s the most clear)
We’ll go into a little of this variation later, but don’t get too hung up on the variations and embellishments in various recordings or charts.
Instead, try to grasp the larger picture of what the melody of Hot House teaches you about how to weave through the chord changes to What Is This Thing Called Love.
We’ll take it a section at a time, starting with the first A, which is packed full of useful bebop techniques.
Okay, let’s get started…
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