Blue Bossa
written by Kenny Dorham
Scales to practice:
Concert C minor (Natural minor and Harmonic minor)
Concert Db major
(hint: for trumpet that's D minor and Eb major)
Learning the melody
Practice your concert D Natural minor scale over the whole range of your instrument. This scale makes up 75% of the tune so get comfortable with it. The Concert Db scale is used for the third phrase of the melody so you should also practice it over your whole range. Then try learning the melody by ear, listening to the original recording on Joe Henderson’s album which fetaures the composer, Kenny Dorham on trumpet. Copy their phrasing.
Learning how to follow the chord changes when soloing
Horizontal approach
It’s possible to solo quite nicely on this tune using a horizontal approach where you just consider the key area and don’t worry about individual chords. Try and use the Concert C natural minor scale for the first 8 and last 4 bars of the tune. For the 3rd block of 4 bars, you’ll need to add two more flats into the scale and use the Concert Db major scale. It sounds pretty bad if you forget those extra 2 flats – in fact, you should target them at the start of the bridge to really highlight the move to a new key area.
Vertical approach
Another approach to soloing is to consider each chord change and learn how to spell out the changes. Start by practicing a simple pattern using the first 3 notes of each scale
When you can play along with the backing track with your set pattern using 1,2, 3 of the scale you should then try and improvise along with the track using the 3 notes that belong with each chord. You might find that you get a funny feeling in your brain and you can’t quite keep up at first – don’t be alarmed, that’s a sign that your brain is learning something new.
Try another set pattern using the 3 notes in reverse order i.e. 3, 2, 1 from each scale. Then you should have another try at improvising
Why not try another set pattern such as 3 2 3 1? Then try improvising again and you might fid that after laying some foundations for your brain using set patterns you can follow along a little easier, panic a little less, and maybe use some more creative rhythms.
After getting comfy with those first 3 notes in the scale there are several approaches we can use to broaden your note choices for each chord.
Let’s add the 5th note of the scale, so you’ll have 1 2 3 5, but leave out the 4 for now. Some people prefer going straight to learning 1 2 3 4 5 – sure, if you like… but let’s consdier some cool orderings of 1 2 3 5
.
Obviously in ascending order you get 1 2 3 5
Descending order gives you 5 3 2 1
One of my favourites is 3 5 2 1. Does that make you think a little harder trying to start on the 3rd of the chord?
After trying a few set patterns and being able to keep up with the chord changes (try slowing the backing track down to 0.75 speed in Youtube to start with), then go back to improvising. Try with a vertical approach just using 1 2 3 5 in various orderings (you don’t have to use all 4 notes every time each chord appears – you may only feel like doing a long note or some rhythms on one or two notes which is cool.
Try going back to the horizontal approach we tried first of all. Do you feel like you can really easily hear the change to the other key area in the 9th bar? Do you feel like you are drawn towards following the chord changes more than before? You can use a combination of horizontal and vertical as your brain will be able to keep track of where you are in the chord changes and you can target certain notes whenever you feel like it.
You could consider practicing the chord tones 1 3 5 7 and getting comfortable as we did above using a set pattern which you’ll transpose to each chord change. Once you can play them in ascending order you may do different permutations such as 7 5 3 1 or inversions such as 3 1 down to the lower 7 and down to the 5, for example.
Take a timeout and practice each 4 note arpeggio over your whole range and try messing around with the notes to get a little creative rather than just running the arpeggio up and down. Put a few zigzags and skips into it as that’s kind of stuff you’ll want to try in your improv. Once you get really comfy with the 4 note arpeggios over your whole range you can then try soloing using just 1 3 5 7 on each chord and try to move to the closest chord tone on the next chord when the chords change rather than just jumping down to the root note of each chord as you may be tempted to do.
After that, comment on the blog below for some next steps 😉