Major chords are the easiest type of chord, right? We learn our major scales on Day #1 and from then on, soloing over a major chord is a piece of cake…or so we thought. One day, after practicing for some days, or even some years, we stop and think, “Playing over major chords is so boring and uninteresting,” and we try different “modern” and “complex” devices to try to remedy the boring major chords – triadic-pairs, hexatonics, superimpositions – but no matter what we try, we’re still not getting where we want to with these simple major chords…
What happened?
What went wrong in our musical development as an improviser such that major chords, the easiest of all chords, are just no fun to improvise over – as if we can only create the most mundane of phrases over them?
I’ll give you a hint. It all has to do with our perception of major chords: we think they’re easy.
When we view something as “easy” we’re likely to move past it quickly and not give it the true attention it deserves. This is exactly what happens with major chords. Once we learn our major scales and a few ways of applying them to a major chord – perhaps a bebop scale, or an intervallic pattern – we continue on to things like ii Vs or more appealing topics.
We will always be limited in an area where we’ve avoided work.
But not to worry. These mistakes are easily corrected. First, rid yourself of the notion that major chords are easy. Playing over them well is a lifetime pursuit just like the other chords.
And second, get pumped that there’s a whole lot more to playing over a major chord than knowing a major scale!
1. STOP depending on the major scale
Take a step back in time and think back to those first few months you learned to improvise. You might even be in that stage now…
And think about how crucial the major scales seemed to be. Everything you played was in some way related to a major scale because that’s the information you started with. Naturally, everything grows outward from there.
The problem: we move past the study of major chords because we’re so familiar and bored with the major scale.
But these are two very different things. How well you know your major scale does not correlate to how well you can solo over a major chord. You can practice your major scales until you’re blue in the face, but you still need more information to hear and create melodies in real-time, aka improvising, over a major chord.
Even when it comes to a major chord, you still need a model. And this model comes from listening, studying, and transcribing jazz language. The more language you understand and master, the better you can speak.
One of my favorite saxophonists who has more language at his fingertips than a dictionary, is Dexter Gordon. Listen to that sound – how it fills the room and vibrates the air. One idea leads into the next as if he’s singing throughout his entire solo on You Stepped Out of a Dream.
Listen closely. He plays melodic statements over major chords, not just a random mix of notes from the major scale or some intervallic pattern. It doesn’t sound technical, it sounds musical.
And it sounds musical because he’s coming from a concept of language.
You can do this too, but you need to transcend the major scale and study language. By doing so, you’ll learn how to craft strong melodies, and you’ll wonder how you ever soloed over a major chord with so little information at your fingertips.
Let’s take a look at some of Dexter’s language from this solo…
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