Mel Bay's Creative Keyboard® Webzine | Per Danielsson - Expanding a Musical Idea

Expanding a Musical Idea

On June 26th I had the pleasure of performing with the Corey Christiansen Group in Lincoln, Nebraska. The group consisted of Corey on guitar, yours truly on piano, Ben Wheeler on bass and the world renown drummer and MelBay author Danny Gottlieb. We played an outside concert by the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and not only was the weather perfect, but 6500 people showed up to hear Corey’s group. If you haven’t heard Corey play, I highly recommend you check out his CD Awakening on MelBay records. We also did a clinic that was sponsored by Dietch Music. Dietch Music has stores in Lincoln and Omaha and carries a wide variety of instruments and print music. Many thanks to Ted Eschliman for taking such good care of the band.

Most of the clinic centered around jazz improvisation and how to learn the jazz language. A young student asked if learning licks and phrases is really improvisation, which is a valid question. All of us in the band agreed that learning licks and practicing them in all keys is not necessarily improvisation but it is a useful tool when it comes to learning the language of jazz. The improvisation part is what you do with a learned idea and how you apply it to your own playing. Therefore, in this month’s article I will show a few concepts on how you can develop and musical idea.

Corey picked a Charlie Parker lick to show how to practice phrases in all twelve keys.

Now that we have a definite phrase that we have mastered in all twelve keys, how can we

change it and develop it for our own benefit? Well, it comes down to the three basic elements in western music, melody, harmony and rhythm.

Lets’s start with altering the lick melodically.

Rhythmic alteration of our main idea.

There are countless possibilities available when altering a musical phrase rhythmically. Maybe the easiest approach to begin with is to start the lick on different beats. This will displace the lick and in a live improv situation this can create a very neat effect.

Harmonic alterations.

The harmonic alterations can open up a whole new musical world. In a short article like this I can only scratch the surface of possibilities that are available. The main thing is that the concept of how to harmonically expand on the given phrase is understood.

The illustrated concepts are also used in composition (by the way, improvisation is composition).
Using a few melodic ideas and re-working them, is the basis of most compositions. Listen to Beethoven’s fifth and count how many time he uses the main idea. That is probably one of best demonstrations of how a musical phrase can be developed.

Good Luck,
Per Danielsson

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