Jamie Taylor - Jazz Guitarist

Peter Bernstein's solo on "Someday My Prince Will Come" from Dr. Lonnie Smith's "Too Damn Hot"

The great Jim Hall once said in an interview that "a solo on Stella By Starlight shouldn't sound the same as a solo on All The Things You Are", the implication being that a song's melodic shape and phrase structure should inform our improvisation on it. This fantastic solo from Peter Bernstein, whose approach is sometimes reminiscent of Hall, exemplifies this principle. Whilst Bernstein does demonstrate some advanced harmonic ideas, his constant references to the melody and the song's general shape are what give the improvisation its cohesion. The solo shouldn't present too many problems in terms of technique, being somewhat of the 'less is more' variety. However, it is extremely creative rhythmically, so take care with note placement.

Time feel - Bernstein plays a long way behind the beat at times, creating fantastic tension as the rhythm section drives forward. There are places where the effect of this almost defies notation (that's my excuse, at least!). Try playing straight quavers with a slight up-beat emphasis against a metronome to develop this. Meanwhile, he also liberally mixes triplets and quavers, to generate some very creative rhythmic ideas - e.g. the quarter note triplets that start on beat 3 of bar 13, thereby crossing over the bar lines. (crotchet triplets against ¾ are also worth practising!). Finally, a common mistake when delivering jazz lines in this style is to 'over swing' the quavers. Bernstein varies the amount of swing, but sometimes his quavers are dead straight, as in bars 12 and 13.

Harmonic techniques - The frequently occurring F7 - Bb progression is spiced up in various ways: Tritone substitution is used in bar 32, where Bernstein arpeggiates a B major triad against the original F7 chord. Meanwhile, side-slipping is used in bar 48 - the line 'slips up' a semitone, this time arpeggiating F#9 against the original F7 chord. On another occasion, (bar 40) Peter uses pitches from the F altered scale to create tension against the F7. The simplest way to find an altered scale is to play the melodic minor up a semitone - e.g. F# mel. min over an F7 chord. As usual in a great jazz solo, however, there is also some playing that doesn't fit neatly into a specific theoretical explanation - check out the brilliant passage between bars 75 - 79, which uses a mixture of perfect and augmented fourths to get an 'outside' effect; the very fast 'raked' arpeggio in bar 78 is not that clear but, at risk of over-analysis, it may be an A major triad, which might suggest C# diminished scale over C#dim7.

References to the original melody - As I said in the introduction, what really marks this solo out is the extent to which it is informed by the melody and general shape of the song. The more adventurous passages have greater impact because they are offset against fragments of familiar melody. A great example occurs in bars 72-74, where Bernstein references the tune, just before diving into the more oblique passage of fourths described above. See also the last phrase (from bar 88 onwards), which uses the melody to bring an effective end to the solo. To play like this on a standard, you have to know the tune very well. A possible practice exercise could involve switching between melody and improvisation - for example, play 4 bars of improvisation, then revert to the tune for the next 4 bars, switching back and forth through the whole chorus, over the whole of the fretboard.

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