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Microtones in bebop?

2K views 7 replies 7 participants last post by  turf3 
#1 ·
I was playing around with microtone fingerings today, and since what I mostly listen to and (try to) play is bebop, it struck me that microtones can be really useful in bebop lines. Dividing a tone in three rather than two gives you an extra note which can line up the melody with the beat, just like the added semitone in the standard bebop scales does. For example, take an eighth-note line like:

D Db C C+ C++ E D

-- where C+ is a pitch between C and C#, and C++ is a pitch between C# and D. The added note makes the last D land on the downbeat.

Some of these microtone fingerings are pretty readily available (in combination with lipping up or down). So did any bebop players use them? I don't mean people like Ornette or Trane or Pharoah Sanders who all used microtones but were playing outside the standard bebop idiom -- I mean straight-up bebop players. This seems like a useful enough device that Bird or Diz might have used it, but I don't think I've ever heard microtones in their solos. But then, a line like the above sounds logical enough that you might not even notice anything weird going on until you tried to transcribe it... so maybe they do and I've just been missing it?
 
#3 ·
Seems to me that if it's standard bebop, your microtones are just going to sound like bad intonation.
 
#5 ·
They don't have to. I can scat them and they just sound like bop. Don't know fingerings well enough, but when you think about it, so much of bop playing is about fitting in the passing tones, chromatic or otherwise, on the way toward a resolution note on a downbeat. By that logic, there's no reason you can't start on the 9th on beat 1 and take 4 micro-chromatic 8th notes to get to 1 on beat 3... I saw a video of Andrew Gould working something like that into a jazz solo recently and I was like... dammit, he beat me to it! Been digging a lot of flamenco lately and the embellishments are often microtonal, so I'd had the theme on my mind.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/jamoftheweekgroup/permalink/1353011001462387/
 
#8 ·
I haven't listened to the videos yet but I once read that Paul Chambers would occasionally do something like this. Maybe he wanted to go from C to D but instead of two beats to do it, he wanted to do it in three, he'd play C, C#-flat, C#-sharp, and D. I play bass along with saxophone and someday maybe I'll try working on some of that (the bass is an inherently microtonal instrument).
 
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