Bach Jazz Lines
I recently posted a series of videos demonstrating how jazz musicians are using the different concepts employed by the impressionist composers, namely Debussy and Ravel. In this lesson I step further back in time to the baroque period, in order to demonstrate how the melodic essence of many jazz lines date back to the music of whom many believe might be the most pivotal composer in Western music...Johann Sebastian Bach.
In this lesson I teach you, several II-V-I lines straight out of Bach’s music that you can incorporate when soloing over countless standards. This by the way, is the reason why several great jazz teachers such as the late Mick Goodrick assigned Bach violin partitas to be played by some of his guitar students. Regardless of how old and unrelated to jazz all this may seem to many, trust me…it isn’t! I even show you how Charlie Parker was influenced by it!
There is a wealth of information in Bach’s music which holds the key to what we are doing several centuries later when improvising over the standards that comprise the Great American Songbook. So I hope you will take a closer look at the beautiful concepts we have inherited from Johann Sebastian Bach.
PDF & AUDIO DOWNLOAD:
The “Bach Jazz Lines” lesson files, can be downloaded for $9.50. The download includes the following files: PDFs with 17 II-V-1 examples featuring both regular notation and detailed TAB, plus the “Autumn Leaves” & “All The Things You Are” Bach examples . Also MP3s of all the examples & Band in a Box and Midi files of everything!
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It is good to see you back again, Richie. This lesson certainly contains a large amount of interesting and useful material.
Obviously, Bach read and wrote music, but I heard somewhere that part of his creative process involved improvisation. I gather that this improvisation often occurred during public performances, where he would play a developing piece of music and add improvised material. Unfortunately, I cannot provide any examples. Do you know anything about the veracity of this idea?
Thanks Duncan! Yes, there are lots of sources that say that Bach and the musicians of his day incorporated improvisation during their performances. These were actually embellishments around the written music, or what present day jazz musicians might call “approach notes”, of course in a much more limited and restricted way. They even had a form of notation to suggest these embellishments. That’s why I like to half jokingly refer to Bach as “the first jazz musician”.
Thank you, Richie. I am not sure when I first heard about Bach’s “embellishments”. Most of my college work at three campuses of the University of California involved mathematics and computer science; however during the late 1980s I took a few basic music courses at a community college in Santa Cruz County in California. I distinctly remember taking classes from two excellent teachers, one of whom had two BA degrees in music: one degree in piano and one degree in guitar. He also played jazz locally. I believe that he was the first person that I heard refer to Bach’s method of composing as a process that involved combination of music reading, music writing, and improvisation. He might have even used the word, “embellishment”. It certainly is likely that I ran into a reference to Bach’s improvisation in some of your work as well. Your approach to music instruction is certainly much more complete and more detailed than what I received in “junior college” back in the late 1980s, but, of course, the Internet gives you a big advantage when it comes to presenting your ideas and your excellent instruction. Thanks again for all that you do!