Chris Parks · Stage 6: Line devices
Master-level phrasing: a pivot, then a surround
Chris takes a second and a half of Barry’s piano solo on Perdido, from a 1979 live recording with Benny Carter, where Barry follows a pivot straight away with surrounding notes. Chris works the device down every degree of a C7 scale, fixes the degrees where the pivot already lands a half step above the target, and adds sixteenth-note triplets.
Step by step
- 0:32Find the spot: Perdido’s bridge is the I Got Rhythm bridge in B flat (D7, G7, C7, F7); work on the C7
- 1:43Pivot from the flat 7th of C7: hit B flat, then grab D, F and A an octave lower instead of going straight up the chord
- 2:15Learn the pivot from every degree, e.g. from the 3rd: E, then G, B flat and D an octave down
- 2:49The pivot ends on an ‘and’, so the next scale note down falls on the beat; delay it with a half step above and a half step below before landing on it
- 4:32When the pivot already ends a half step above the target (from the tonic or the 5th), play the scale note below the target and climb chromatically into it
- 5:10Run the pivot and surround from every degree in turn: from the 2nd surround the flat 7th, from the 3rd surround the tonic, and so on
- 7:23Make it slicker by playing the surround as a sixteenth-note triplet
- 8:30Chain several pivot-and-surround figures in a row down the C7 scale
- 9:20Chris’s point: with a true master, almost any two seconds of a record can teach you something deep
Chords and notes in this video
Tap a time to jump to it in the video.
- B♭
- D
- F
- A
Barry’s own words on this
In the course
Eighth- and sixteenth-note triplets in linesPivotsPivot then surroundSmall things
Transcript
- 0:00hello and welcome to episode 126 of things I learned from bear Harris and today I thought uh I would share this beautiful idea of berries actually that’s on this recording that was just released on YouTube that I’ve never heard it before it’s uh from 1979 it’s actually a Benny Carter uh recording it’s a live recording and Barry’s on piano and interestingly enough uh Dizzy Gillespie is in the band too so it’s Barry with Benny Carter and Dizzy Gillespie and it’s just fantastic
- 0:32I’ll leave a link in the description and one of the songs that they play is Perdido which is a beautiful song which happens to have the same Bridge as I got rhythm in B-flat so it would be D7 G7 C7 F7 and Barry happens to play I mean the solo is incredible but amongst all the other incredible things he plays there’s something that really stuck out to me and that was how he put certain things together for instance he puts together um pivot with surrounding now some people call it enclosures but Barry always
- 1:08refer to it as surrounding it does to me it doesn’t matter what the term you want to use it’s okay as long as we’re talking about the same thing so what he did was he did now he’s we’re thinking C7 so you have to know your C7 scale C7 and thirds Triads chords and if you know your chords you have to know what a pivot for each of the chords is and for those of you that don’t know what a pivot is is instead of um playing a chord let’s do it from the uh flat seventh so if we did it from the
- 1:43flat seventh it would be um B flat if we went up a chord it would be B flat d f a so B flat d f a is going up a chord now what a pivot of that chord would be would be you hit the B flat in the same spot but then you come down and grab the d f and the a an octave lower so now you got here’s the normal chord and here’s the pivot so now you have to be able to do that
- 2:15from every degree of the scale so if I said um here’s a chord up from let’s say the third you have to be able to do so the third of C would be E G B flat D so again E G B flat D is a chord but if we pivoted the chord it would be e now we gotta grab the the G down an octave G I’m sorry uh uh B flat T so it be this instead so now instead of saying this
- 2:49you got this so you have to know pivots from every degree of the scale Just So You Know chords up you have to know uh you have to know a pivot from every degree of the scale but then he does this other interesting thing he says because a pivot does this so it’d be like one two three four one and two and so it ends on the end of a beat now if you wanted to come down one more scale note that’s going to start on the beat again so it’d be like one and two and three
- 3:23there’s your third beat right there one and two and three so the downbeat would be the next scale note down but what he does instead of just coming down that next scale note he says he takes this scale note which happens to be G and he surrounds that scale note with a half step above and a half step below so he says which is beautiful and actually he puts three half steps first beforehand I mean we don’t have to do that but the phrase is [Music] a beautiful phrase but let’s just take
- 3:58the one little spot where he puts so most of us would just play [Music] he adds the surrounding thing on it too so so since this is the and and instead of getting to this right away on the next beat we add two more notes which is the surrounding ones so a half step above half step below and then the note now if we decided to take his idea of practicing it on every degree of the scale the next one is going to be messed up because then we have to be able to
- 4:32say if we say so then we’re going to start on the tonic and we’re going to do our pivot but now we want to get down to this scale note so the only problem is that we’re already on the half step above it because we’re on the scale now so now we have to do something different to this one so what you could do is play the next scale note below it and come up chromatically so it would be this so be fifth to sixth
- 5:10still coming up with the same rhythmic idea one and two and three oh one and two and three and four so you’re still coming what one and two and three and four one and two and three and four same idea now let’s do the next one so we did the flat seven we did the tonic let’s do the second pivot now the next note scale note down would be the flat seven but we can surround it with a half step above half step below so let’s do that
- 5:44pretty now let’s start on the third we’ll do a pivot and now the next scale note down is tonic which we can surround with a half step above and a half step below so we’re going to say now we’ll do the fourth now we could do that one too that’s a pretty one let’s do the fifth uh let’s see now here we’re gonna get that same problem again
- 6:17so instead of since we’re already on a half step above the note we’re going to it happens to be we’re going to do that thing where we go down uh a scale tone below the note we’re about to get to and come up a chromatic so we’re going to say which is pretty so we did it for this one too uh let’s see we did for this one uh we did it for the one starting on the tonic and we’re gonna do it for this one [Music]
- 6:48which is also really pretty let’s see the next one uh uh now you’re back to just the normal so let’s do let’s try to do all of them so we’ll say this one second yep third fourth fifth there’s that weird one next one and so on but you see how pretty that is
- 7:23if you start really doing things with that so normally it’s not but now we’ll say and and if we want to be slick we could put a 60 no triplet on that surround note so instead of doing this maybe we’ll put a 16 no triplet on that note so we’ll say next one next one that’s a pretty one
- 7:55[Music] oh what if we do too bad in a row that’s a pretty one wait but let’s put 260 in our triplets oh man that’s on C7 but let’s put the 16 hour Triplett again but you see how pretty that is oh my
- 8:30goodness that’s pretty stuff because anywhere oh man let’s try let’s do a bunch of them let’s say [Music] boy that’s a bunch of them in a row but do you see the and and again this it literally takes up a second and a half
- 9:05of his solo and he also puts three half steps I forget what he does after that but it’s of course also beautiful and could also be dissected the same way we’re dissecting this so that’s another thing that’s true uh and I think I brought this up before there are many great players in our music really a lot of great players but I think the thing that separates the the true masters from the great players is the Masters you can almost just put on any song
- 9:41at any spot and listen to a couple of seconds and stop the recording and you’re going to learn something really deep about music in that whatever one or two seconds and that goes for all the great ones you know Sonny Rollins Bud Powell Coleman Hawkins all the great players Barry all the all of the master players I should say those are all the Masters not to say that great players don’t have moments like that but I really think if you break down what is the difference between a master and a great player which we’re kind of you know and there
- 10:16is a difference there’s a distinct difference it’s that a master you could almost do this at any point of their recording but a great player you know has moments of this has moments of this so we’re all shooting to have moments at this but the real Masters everything they do is like this everything so I’m going to leave a link in the description for the solo um that I’m talking about and you should definitely check it out and see if you can hear the part I’m referring to I think it’s like his second chorus maybe in the bridge it goes into this phrase but it was just so beautiful I had to
- 10:49share it and um you know have fun practicing um a pivot and then immediately after a surround until next time thanks