Pat Martino’s Pet Licks
What are Pat Martino’s most played licks — and what makes them so hard to detect? In this lesson, I dig into Pat Martino’s solo over Along Came Betty using data from the Dig That Lick project, a collaboration between musicologists and computer scientists who mapped recurring melodic phrases across thousands of transcribed jazz solos. What emerges is a masterclass in musical disguise: two signature building-block phrases — one ascending, one descending — that Pat deploys across the entire solo with such fluency that most listeners never notice they are hearing the same core phrase again and again. I also show how the same lick appears in recordings by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Joe Henderson, and Wayne Shorter — proof that this is not just a Pat Martino signature, but a piece of the bebop language itself.
By studying Pat Martino’s most played licks through this lens, you will walk away with something far more valuable than two memorized phrases. You will understand the strategy behind them — how great jazz musicians disguise the same building blocks by varying everything around the essential core, keeping the phrase sounding fresh every single time. I demonstrate both licks adapted to major and minor II-V-Is, giving you four immediately usable phrases to begin weaving into your own lines. And if something clicks for you in this lesson, I would love to hear about it in the comments — studying Pat Martino’s most played licks this way genuinely changed how I listen to his playing, and I think it will do the same for you.
PDF & AUDIO DOWNLOAD:
The “Pat Martino’s Pet Licks” lesson files, can be downloaded for $11.50. The download includes the following files: –PDF booklet with Pat Martino’s entire solo to Along Came Betty, with every single instance of both licks clearly marked in the notation. Also included — 16 II-V-Is in major and minor with variations of both the ascending and descending lick in standard notation and TAB. Also included — are notation excerpts of ten jazz masters incorporating this very lick in their own recorded solos. -MP3s of every II-V-I variation, as well as Pat playing the 6 instances of Lick1 so you can hear them clearly. And for those of you who practice with play-along tools — -Band in a Box files for the 16 II-V-Is, plus -MIDI files you can import directly into GuitarPro, MuseScore, or your favorite notation app.
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