Here we are again for LOTM#10 and we've got another gem from Miles Davis. This one is taken from my transcription of 'Blues By Five' and is played over a ii V I progression.
This lick starts on the upbeat and is a mixture of eighth notes and quarter notes. It has been written very straight so the best way to get a proper feel for this lick is to play along with the man himself (about 1:15 on the video above!)
When I'm trying to understand any new pieces of jazz language I'm working with I usually start by trying to spot chord tones in each bar to match with the chord it's played over, with this lick there are a few but not as many as I was expecting!
After getting to this point I try to see what scales fit over the whole lick, this time Bb Maj Pentatonic seems to be the best fit, the only note that stands out is the Eb on the first beat of F7, Eb being the 7th of the chord.
Apart from the great phrasing of this lick I also love the idea of mixing a fairly basic scale that will fit over every chord with tones from other chords in the sequence that don't appear in the scale. When listening to this lick when I first started working with it that Eb was the one note that stood out to me as a 'juicy note' and it's was the only note following the chords rather than a scale for the key centre.
Mixing up scales and chord tones is something I'm definitely going to be working on more in the future!
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