One thing that we probably all love is the sound of great jazz phrasing in a solo. In this video, I am going to take a look at a great example from George Benson and talk about why these jazz phrases sound great. In that process, I will also go over some ways to turn the lick into exercises and use those to make your own licks that have great phrasing.
I also explain how jazz phrasing sometimes clashes with some of the other skills we teach for jazz improvisation and how to work around that.
The George Benson Solo Example
Here is a transcription of the phrases from the Benson solo that I am using
I am going to use the 2nd line as an example.
#1 Why does it sound great?
I have talked about what makes jazz phrasing great in other videos, and there are many things that come together to make a jazz solo great, but one thing that is a huge factor is how the line lets us give some notes an accent.
Let’s focus on the last part of the example and get a little scientific by slowing it down. You can hear that in the video.
When you listen to the slow version you can hear the accents on the high notes that are not on the beat:
I am sure you already have an idea about this, and one way to access this is to sing bop lines in terms of phrasing, that really helps you realize that you probably hear it and you just need to figure out how to get it on to your instrument.
But two of these examples are similar in a way and you can practice getting that into your lines quite easily.
#2 What Should You Practice
If we look at this fragment (D# to E in bar 2) then what happens here is Benson is playing a blues phrase, but the effect is really just a leading note resolving upwards and then a lower not.
If we apply this idea to an arpeggio then you would have an exercise like this:
And at the end of our example, Benson does something similar with this arpeggio, one way to look at that is as a way of playing a 1st inversion Cmaj7 arpeggio. If you take that through a scale then you have this:
#3 How Do We Play Licks that Sound Like That?
Usually when you start playing Jazz then you have a really hard time playing logical melodies that follow the changes. And one of the first things you learn, or at least should learn, is that if you play chord tones as target notes on the heavy beats of the bar then you connect with the phrase.
This might sound like this:
Where I am playing an F on beat one and an A on beat 3, but the line doesn’t really give us a nice flow with some accents. As my old teacher used to say: “It doesn’t make me want to dance”
But with the exercises, you can start putting together your own lines and in that way getting it into your playing.
Here I am using the exercise from EX2 on the Dm7 (play that) and leaving a little more space to go from G7 to C
Another one could be something like this:
Develop your phrasing
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