Beebop over Boomchick

[Victor Saumarez]

I thought this title had a kind of lyrical incongruity to it. How would
Pat Martino have sounded in the Hot Club setting? Well the massive
sized amp and speaker he uses may have blown everyone away, but there
are many similarities. Pat is a master of technique, and plays the
guitar as a guitar, whereas many bop players listened to sax or other
instruments. Some things are just difficult to finger on the guitar,
such as beebop heads, so simplifying or perhaps demystifying is an
appropriate word is sometimes necessary. Pat has a concept called
'minorising' which reduces soloing to essentials and is worth checking
out. Getting back to the similarities, gypsy players also tend to take
advantage of the guitars geography to great effect. Try playing Pat
Martino liners over a chunker tune and you'll be surprised at how
effective it can be.

[Bill Cohen]

Actually, once you know it fits on the neck, bebop fingering is extremely easy on guitar.

Rock guitarists lead with their ring finger as they jump up the neck. To play Parker heads, I lead with my first finger. Its harder for me to play a Django style which involves moving all over the neck because its easier to miss a fret. Bebop stays in one fret area very nicely.

 

Its hard to imagine Pat's style without Wes Montgomery and the organ trio style. Historically that is later than bebop. And Coltrane, the streams of even 8th notes, which are also not in the bebop or swing styles.

 

Of course one could play his riffs regardless of where they came from over any kind of rhythm.

I dont think the boom chick style is really that different from bebop. Bebop comes right out of this style.

 

I use the Martino minor conversion theory often. I saw him give a lecture on it at Sam Ash. He passed out a workbook. That contained an example chart, Welcome to a Prayer. Within 48 hours my band was playing it on a gig.

 

Minor conversion is a tiny window into chord melody playing, which Jazz Improv magazine takes issue with. However, they did publish my rebuttal to their complaints in its entirety. In a word, I dont see what's wrong with using it. Jazz Improv wants you to just play without thinking about theory. Ironic, since they publish hundreds of pages of theory every issue.

 

But minor conversion is just a tiny piece of the larger chord melody concept.

In other words, if you have an A7 and Pat tells you to play an Em7 over it...

thats only one of many of the same set of substitutions. Basically you assume A7 is the 5th of Dmajor and then substitute any of the other chords in the D major scale over the A7. One blues-y sounding one that I use a lot being C#m7b5.  Another small window into this theory is triad pair soloing, if you ever encountered that. There are good books by Gary Campbell and Walt Weiskopf on it.  Like the Bergonzi pentatonic books, it would take a few years of effort to effectively put it into practice.

[Victor Saumarez]

Thanks for that very insightful essay. I agree with most of what you
are saying, but I still find show tunes easier than beebop to finger.
It must be my stubby little fingers and impatience. Truth be told, I
actually prefer other tunes to bebop.