Practice This! is an educational project of Earshot Jazz with sponsorship from The Seattle Drum School. Each month in Earshot Jazz a new lesson by a different local jazz artist will appear for students to learn from and for non-musician readers to gain insight into the craft of improvising.

Practice This!
February 2007
Jay Thomas on The "Bepop" Scale

Click here to listen and download audio clips of Jay playing examples of these ideas.

Jay Thomas is one of the most versatile instrumentalists and improvisers on the Seattle scene today. Not only is Jay a great trumpeter, he is also a wonderful saxophonist. Jay’s performance and recording credits include the likes of Cedar Walton, Mel Lewis, The Machito Orchestra, Ira Sullivan, Jessica Williams, Slim Gaillard, and Herb Ellis. He can be heard on more than 60 recordings. Jay is perhaps one of the most in-demand musicians in Seattle, performing with the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra as well as leading his own small groups and big bands. He is a member of the Earshot Jazz Hall of Fame and a winner of multiple Golden Ear Awards. In this edition of Practice This! Jay talks about the “bebop” scale.

When you listen to the masters of the bebop style, one of the hallmarks of their playing is that they tend to play the chord tones (root, third, fifth, seventh) on the downbeats. If you were to do this with a regular seven-note scale and start your phrase on the downbeat, you would soon find that the chord tones weren’t lining up with the downbeats. The beboppers were able to get around this by adding a passing, or chromatic note to the regular scale.

For example: The scale corresponding to a G7 chord (GBDF) would be the following notes: G, A, B, C, D, E, F, & G. If we were playing in 4/4 time, and started our descending eighth note line (eighth notes being important in the bebop style) on the root, we would soon have our chord tones on weak beats: G, f, E, d, C, b, A, g (Downbeats in capitals letter, lowercase letter are upbeats). The chord tones (GBDF) are all on the up beats, or the weaker beats, which doesn’t sound good.

In order to get around this, we place an extra note in the scale between the root and the flat seven. So our new scale (for G7) would be G, F#, F, E, D, C, B, A, G. If we were to start this scale on the down beat and play it descending starting on the root we would get: G, f#, F, e, D, c, B, a, G – all of the chord tones lining up with the downbeats, which is what we want.

The key to using this scale is to learn them in every key and to get comfortable enough with them to play them starting on any note of the scale, and on every chord tone. The beboppers probably didn’t think of what they were doing as “the bebop scale,” but that’s what we call it today and there are other types of bebop scales as well, but this is the most basic.