Play the Tune Not the Changes

I am sure if you have played jazz guitar for even a little while you have found yourself in this situation. You are working on a tune, you bring it to a jam session, gig or even just with a play-along. You get through the head, and start to improvise, but your solo is based purely on the chord changes to the tune and not really connected to the melody at all.

This is a normal approach to jazz improvisation, but when you hear the greats improvise they seem to always have a connection, even if it’s subtle, to the melody line of the tune they are improvising over. They are blowing over “All the Things You Are” not just the vi-ii-V-I-IV progression.

One of the best lessons I ever learned as a student came back when I was studying with Roddy Ellias. During one of our lessons Roddy said “whenever you solo, someone should be able to walk into the room half-way through any chords and within a few seconds know what tune you’re playing. Not just by the progression but by the melody lines you are playing. And further, if you are playing a blues they should know you’re blowing over “Straight No Chaser” or “Now’s the Time” and not just a generic 12-bar blues form.”

It took me a while to get my head and playing around this idea. Whenever I tried to stick to the melody it would often sound like bad quoting, not really improvising, or I would just go back to playing the changes and not keeping the melody in the listener’s ear during my solo.

But, after sticking with this approach over the years I’ve come up with a couple of ways that you can use to keep the vibe of the melody going in your solos, enough to be recognizable, without simply quoting the melody itself. These two ideas involve finding key notes/intervals to focus on as well as key rhythms and accents to bring out in your lines.

In this lesson we’ll break down these two approaches over Charlie Parker’s tune “Now’s the Time,” a 12-bar blues in F, but feel free to take any/all of these approaches to any tune you may know or are working on in the practice room.

Melodic Inspiration

Before we dig into the melody as the source for our improv lines, let’s just review or learn the first four bars to “Now’s the Time.” We’ll focus on this section of the melody for today, since it makes up the bulk of the melodic content of the tune, but when you do this on your own you can pull ideas from any line or section of the tunes you’re working on. Here are the first four bars of the tune.

Now that you’ve checked out the melody, we can dig into some of the melodic content as the basis for our improv over this tune. The first thing I would grab is the first and last two notes of each phrase in this line, C-F. Those notes are probably the two most important when trying to bring out this melody in your soloing so they are a great place to start.

As an exercise, in order to really get these notes in your ears over these changes, try improvising for a while over “Now’s the Time” using only the notes C and F. You can play them on any string, in any octave and with any rhythm, the only rule is you have to stick to only those two notes. This will get them locked down in your ears, but also force you to be very creative as you only have a small amount of melodic material to improvise with.

Here is an example of this approach over the first four bars of the tune.

After working out the two most important notes of the melody you can add the next most important note, the G. Since there are only four notes in this melodic phrase, C-F-F#-G, it’s a pretty simple one to use. If you are working on a tune with a more sparse or more busy melody you can pick out the most important notes, and ignore others, in these exercises. You also might want to focus on important intervals, such as 4ths that make up a large part of the melody line to “All the Things You Are.”

Here is an example of C-F-G over the first four bars of “Now’s the Time.”

And finally, you can add in the passing note F#, which is not only the last note of the melody line, but the only chromatic note of this phrase. When dealing with chromatic notes like this, since you are thinking of it as a melody note and maybe not a passing note, it’s probably a good idea to use it as an anticipation, F#-G for example, an upper neighbor, F#-F or a passing tone, F-F#-G or G-F#-F. If you stop on the F#, even though it’s a melody note, it will sound pretty out there, and if you aren’t ready for it can catch you off guard a bit. So try to deal with chromatic notes like this in the same manner that you would any chromatic note.

Here’s an example of the notes C-F-F#-G in an improvisation over the first four bars of “Now’s the Time.”

Now that you have separated them all, you can try freely improvising over the entire tune, but keep coming back to these main notes and intervals. You don’t have to only use C-F-F#-G in your solos, but returning to these notes, especially the C-F interval or the F-F#-G pattern, will bring out the vibe of the melody when soloing over “Now’s the Time.”

Also, take any tune you are working on and see if you can break down the melody into it’s characteristic notes. Is there one interval that stands out more than others? For “Stella by Starlight” you could start with Bb-A, a semi-tone, as a good source of improvising material. Or for “Oleo” you could start with Bb-G-C, m3-P4, which comes from the melody, and after transposing it around to different parts of the scale, and moving it to other chords in the progression, you can develop a nice chorus or two of soloing and get all your source material from the melody alone.

Playing off the melody is a great way to keep the vibe of the tune going in your solos, and the melody line itself can be an almost never ending source of melodic material if you dig into it, find the key elements, and translate those ideas into your lines. With some exercises worked out over the melody to the tune, let’s explore some ways that the rhythm of the tune can inspire our improvisations.

Rhythmic Material

Along with the notes of the melody, you can also use the rhythmic elements of any line to bring a sense of the melody to your improvisations. You can approach it in a similar way to the melodic exercises in the previous section, by breaking down the rhythm into separate motives that you can then focus on in your solo.

With “Now’s the Time,” you could take the first rhythm, the & of 4 and 1, C-F in the melody, and just solo using only that rhythm as an exercise. You could also take other parts of the line such as the sixteenth notes on the second half of the first beat and the next downbeat to solo with, giving you short-long feeling in your phrases. Whatever you decide to pull from the melody is cool, just stick to it throughout an exercise to help you develop the control it takes to solo using only one element, in this case a rhythmic motive.

One of the rhythms I like to pull from “Now’s the Time,” are the “pillars” of the first phrase, C-F-G-C. So I would take that rhythm, & of 4, 1, 2 and 3, then solo with that rhythm using whatever notes I was inspired to use. Here is an example of using that rhythm over the first four bars of “Now’s the Time.”

There are many ways to find rhythmic ideas from a tune’s melody and use them in your solo. If you don’t like taking melody’s apart in the above manner to break up the rhythm, you might like using the rhythm as a whole. This is an exercise that I got from Montreal guitarist Greg Clayton.

During my improv class with him at McGill, he gave all the students a Bebop tune to learn. After we had learned the melody, we had to improvise using the exact melody of the tune, but with different notes. So, the solos sounded very similar to the tune, but the notes were completely different. And, doing this exercise really woke me up to thinking about rhythms, in both melodies and my soloing, in a whole new way.

Give it a try, see if you can play the melody to any tune you know, maybe “Summertime” or “Blue Bossa,” and then during your solo, play the same rhythm from the original melody but change the notes. It is a great exercise that can really take your rhythmic playing to the next level, while sticking to the vibe of the melody line at the same time.

Using the melody of any time is a great way to keep things connected to the song in our solos. Whether you choose some melodic idea, a particular rhythm, or both, the melody can be a deep source of inspiration and content when it comes time to improvise over a tune. Give some of these ideas a shot, they can push you into very cool and unexpected directions in your playing.

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