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?
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?