jazzlessonsonskype.com sample lesson: Playing Outside the Harmony

[Music] hi this is George witty welcome to my studio for what is one of my favorite

lessons because we're going to start taking everything that we've been working on the bbop scales the the exercises on working in sync the Harmony

and so forth and we're going to take those and work on going completely outside the harmony with those same techniques to be honest even the same

lines um but I'm going to show you how I think about it when I'm in and out of the harmony it's pretty simple and as a way of illustrating where we're going

with this I'm going to play I've got my C minor funk groove here which is available as a download for you to practice on and I'm just going to work out on it and what I'm going to do is

kind of every few bars I'm going to start superimposing a different tonality and I'm going to go through all 12 keys so the first thing I'm going to do is play something in c minor we'll hear a

lot of C minor pentatonic in there then I'm going to go up to C sharp minor and I'm going to play then D minor and play E flat minor all the way up and you can

get a a listen to what's what we're working on here um on the screen you'll see what I'm superimposing as I go um

and we'll do like that uh after we do that we're going to start looking at the process of how do you get at that how do you superimpose a different tonality on

there to take it way out and then bring it back in uh in a great way so first let's just listen I'm going to kind of

wind out out here on my C minor Funk Jam and uh go to all 12 different keys

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I deviated a little just that last five seconds of it what that was was all 12 different keys superimposed on to C

minor and what I'm doing there it's it's fairly simple I am substituting a 51 and most of the time the 51 that I'm

substituting is a just a dominant altered chord so for example let's have

a look here on C minor what to to get C minor for example uh the C minor pentatonic scale that I started out

substituting there I am thinking of as something that I'm playing on a

a B flat 7 altered let's look at a line there's our [Music]

Harmony you can see the C Shar minor pentatonic in there and now if we put it over a C minor tonality

[Music] [Applause]

[Music] so you can see here taking a look at this you see the ascending C Shar minor pentatonic scale just straight

[Music] up uh and that's a nice sound here over the B flat 7

altered um but it's also a nice sound mentally if I'm playing that 51 over here you can see that it works

great on there as well there's our C minor 7th chord same exact line but we've taken it all the way out from

playing we're going out to visit this [Music] and by substituting a just a two chord

progression we can find a way to get to any other alternate tonality and that's what we're going to do we're going to look at how I get to all 12 of them uh

and you'll see that the same lines that you've been working on same ideas even if you just used the tools of a pentatonic scale and an approach pattern

you can get to all this stuff essentially by playing it's not even bbop it's simpler than bbop it's a five to one um and it gets a lot more sophisticated than this but this is a

good way to start looking at creating a lot of tension in your line taking people on this really weird trip and stick in the landing and that's what we're after here uh we're going to look

at one more in this lesson and this one is really simple because it doesn't require you to create a Cadence at all uh the next thing I played was just a D Minor 6th

pentatonic and that gives you the sound of a C minor major 7 which is a nice place to go and I just kind of played some stuff you know you could also throw

in there anything like the g7th bbop scale the eight note scale with the E flat and [Music]

and you can hear my Approach patterns go by in there so this is step one in how I look at playing outside we're going to look at a variety of other techniques as

we go but once again to me the essence of jazz is to use my my gymnast metaphor you don't want to see some person get

out there and just sit on her derriere on the bar you want to see her get all the way off the bar so that you can't believe it's creating all this tension in you because you can't believe

she's up there and she's going to actually land it and then she lands it um the further off the bar she is and the more she's doing up in the

air the the more thrilling it is when she brings it back in and then goes on to the next one and that's what the idea is behind this sort of taking it out so

we're going to explore probably three different keys at a time as we go with these lessons that's the first one try experimenting with that put up the C

Minor 7 uh funk groove or the C minor7 Latin Groove they're fun to play with see if you can get on the slowest tempo of these if you can get some of your

bbop lines to work some of your stuff over B flat 7 to E flat major 7 and I

will see you for the next one [Music]

let's play another