Here’s a bold claim: One short lick can save your jazz solos from sounding like an endless row of notes. When I discovered this Grant Green lick, it changed my playing in a way scales and arpeggios never could. So in this video, I’m going to show you the lick, the problem it solves, and how you can make it a part of your playing.

If you only practice scales and arpeggios, your solos will always sound stiff and mechanical. What’s missing isn’t talent—it’s vocabulary. This Grant Green lick teaches you an essential jazz technique that stops your solos from sounding robotic and adds some real Jazz flow, but it also does a lot more.

Grant Green’s Genius (and a mistake)

First, let’s talk about how Grant Green uses this lick in his solo on ‘I’ll Remember April’, and then I’ll show you how that is a part of something bigger that is very useful.

Now, I think he actually makes a small mistake in this example—but that’s not the important part. There is a part of this that is instant jazz magic. Before I learned to use that, my solos sounded like this:

I was using all the “right” notes and arpeggios, but it still sounded heavy and kind of boring. All the great syncopated accents and interval skips were missing.

The first lick I checked out from Grant Green was this:

Can you hear how the flow is completely different? The line has some surprises built in, and especially THIS short phrase caught my attention because of the large, very melodic interval skip:

I didn’t have any melodies like this Grant phrase in my playing. If I tried to use large intervals, it sounded abstract and unnatural. At first, I didn’t know what to call it, and there are few common names.  But really, it’s just a Cmaj7 arpeggio. Check it out:

Grant actually uses this idea more than 10 times in the same solo!

He’s playing it over the Am7 chord, which is the II chord in G major. That means he’s using a Cmaj7 arpeggio over Am7—what’s often called “the arpeggio from the 3rd.”

If that sounds confusing, here’s a shortcut:

An Am7 chord has these notes: A C E G, , the 3rd is C,

And that diatonic arpeggio on C is Cmaj7: C E G B.

Most notes are the same, but you also get a 9th, B. All notes that sound great over Am7. This is something you want to explore on all chords; it is a great trick!

Just to show you how to find the arpeggio from the 3rd: If you are in C major, then the II chord is Dm7, and the 3rd is F. Which gives you an Fmaj7 arpeggio.

Now, about that “mistake”—in Grant’s solo, he starts the line with a Db going down to C.

That’s not a very smooth way to use chromatic notes on Am7, and if you listen closely, it sounds like he accidentally missed a note.

In other spots, he leads into the lick like this:

I am pretty sure he meant to play that. But in a way, it is refreshing and human. Everything doesn’t need to be perfect all the time.

As you probably guessed, this lick is more than a fancy way to play a maj7 arpeggio. A lot more is possible both with scale and arpeggio melodies. Barry Harris has a great explanation that we’ll get to next.

Pivot Arpeggios – The Barry Harris Method

So, what’s the secret behind that Grant Green lick? Barry Harris calls these “pivot arpeggios.”

Here’s what that means, because that works for any chord. It is a simple recipe:

Take a regular 7th chord arpeggio—like Cmaj7:

But instead of playing the notes in order, you move the root (the first note, C) up an octave.

You could explain it in a different way as well, but this is easy on the guitar. Moving the note up an octave gives us that large interval skip that sounds so melodic.

But why is it useful to turn this into a recipe? Because this works for any chord.

Let’s try this with a II V I in C major using the arpeggios from the 3rd of each chord, like I showed you in the previous section.

For these chords, the 3rd of Dm7 is F, for G7 it is B, and for C it is E. If you fill in the diatonic chords for these notes in C major, you get:

And if you create the pivot version of each of these, you have:

Of course, it is a bit much to use all 3 as pivot arpeggios, but like this, you can really hear how much better the flow is:

Most people refer to these as pivot arpeggios, but sometimes you will also come across the name “honeysuckle rose arpeggios” Because the melody of that song is built around a motif with a pivot maj7 arpeggio.

Since this is useful for all chords, it also makes sense to take it through the scale as an exercise. That would be something like this

You can, of course, download this and the other examples on my website if you want to try to play them yourself.

Now you know how pivot arpeggios are created by moving a note up an octave, but this is not limited to arpeggios. Next, I’ll show you a Charlie Parker lick that uses this in a different way, and it will also teach you something important about the rhythm.

Charlie Parker: Simple = Genius

Let’s take this pivot idea a step further, straight to the source: Charlie Parker.

In Parker’s solo on ‘Anthropology’ he uses this super basic trick that makes a simple scale run sound amazing!

Check this out:

When you hear it like this, it sounds pretty advanced, but if you don’t include the octave-displacement, it gets.. a bit boring:

Why does this work so well? Because our ears get used to hearing melodies move in steps. Then a sudden leap up, grabs attention and makes the melody pop, but you do need to go about it the right way.

1. 1. Octave displacement on offbeat
   2. Interval Leap is a 6th interval

There are 2 things you want to notice from this and also from the pivot arpeggio: 1: The octave displacement happens on an offbeat,

and 2: The large interval skip sounds more natural if it is a 6th interval.

Why is that important? Keeping this in mind makes it a lot easier for you to make your own octave-displacement licks, even if these are not strict rules.

Let me show you: Intervals are paired with inverse intervals.

If you have a 6th interval from C up to A,

then moving the A down an octave gives you the inverted interval, which is a 3rd:

Of course, the same is true if I have an ascending 3rd so C up to E:

This makes it a lot easier to create octave displacement lines: Use it when there is a 3rd interval. Here’s a II V I with a 3rd interval on the G7:

You have the 3rd interval between B and G, and you can shift everything up an octave. Check this out:

But there is actually one more place that you can add an octave displacement, which sounds great: The last two notes:

And that spot is great in a lot of phrases for adding a bit of Bebop Sparkle to your solo! There is another common trick with octave displacement that is a variation of this, but it uses only a single note. Let’s look at that.

A Single Note Makes All The Difference

Let’s look at one more way to get that classic bebop sound—by moving just one note. This trick is so close to the pivot arpeggio sound that it makes sense to group them together, even if you could also explain this differently. Here’s how it works: Take a simple line—like this famous David Baker lick:

Now, if you use octave displacement on the high note, A, and move it down an octave, you get this:

Hear the difference? That single move gives you a big, descending 6th interval—a big skip down. Suddenly, the line sounds way more interesting and melodic.

This one is on a m7 chord but you can do the same thing with major chords. Take this descending C major melody:

If you move the G down an octave, you get:

But, there is also a Bonus tip you want to add: You can add a “leading note”—a quick note that slides into the displaced note. For example, add a G# before the A:

Or make it a “turn”—a quick twist around the main note, like this, which I learned from Doug Raney’s  solo on “Mohawk”:

Of course, this gets very powerful once you start combining these short fragments with the rest of your jazz vocabulary. That’s how you get lines like this:

As you can tell, this gives you some amazing lines, and is a great way to finally start sounding like all the cool bebop lines in your favorite solos. Another essential aspect of this is having a system for adding chromatic notes to your lines. Luckily, Barry Harris has the best approach for this that even lets you transpose licks in scales and improves your phrasing. That’s what I talk about in this video on one of the most important parts of Barry Harris’ method. Check it out!

Learn Jazz, Make Music

Why Barry Harris has the Best Method for Chromatic Notes

Why Barry Harris has the Best Method for Chromatic Notes

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