Jazz soloing on the double bass

How to build from a simple bass accompaniment to an improvised solo line in a few basic steps

DANNY ZIEMANN Independent music educator, Vienna, Austria

BORN Buffalo, New York, US

STUDIED WITH Jeff Campbell, Larry Grenadier, James VanDemark, Bill Dobbins

TEACHES High-school and university students; adult beginners

There is a lot of ‘wisdom’ passed on as part of the learning tradition of any instrument, and for double bass that includes the idea that we don’t need to play solos in jazz. This is not true, and it creates a lot of fear and rejection around improvising when we do have to do it. It has also led to numerous bad jokes about bass solos being boring or lame, because many players never learn how to improvise solos effectively! It doesn’t have to be that way, because if we can improvise a blues walking bass line, we’re already partway there. We just have to build on what we already know.

EXERCISES

When we learn to solo, it can be easy to get lost in music theory. Unfortunately, knowing that we can use aG major scale to improvise over aG major chord doesn’t tell us how to use that scale, or how it should sound. Just as children listen and mimic as they learn to speak, converse and finally read and write, we need to place emphasis on listening, before theory, to help us improvise. In exercise 1, begin by singing the guide tones – the internal pathways between chord changes – of a chord over a basic II–V–I jazz progression:

Sing the 3rd and 7th guide tones over the backing track at www.dannyziemann.com/strad, in the major and minor keys Play the roots on the bass while singing the guide tones (exercise 2), without the backing track

CRAWL, WALK, RUN

Many great solos are just a natural extension of what we do when we play walking bass.

In exercise 3, use the same harmonic parameters to progress from a two-beat ‘crawl’ to a walking bass and finally a solo ‘run’:

‘Crawl’: play the root, 3rd and 7th (guide tones) ‘Walk’: play crotchet (q) guide tones, with some quavers (e) if you like

‘Run’: now improvise a solo around the guide tones, using new harmonies and rhythms

Bassists are so used to playing rhythmically uniform accompaniments that we often suffer from what I call ‘bass-line paralysis’. We can use varied rhythms such as triplets (exercise 4) to avoid this.

EXERCISE 1 Play the guide tones shown for this C major II–V–I jazz progression over the backing track at bit.ly/3fsc0sa. These suggested routes show how to progress from one chord to the next smoothly without making large jumps in pitch

TOMAS FLINT

IMPORTANT INGREDIENTS FOR SOLOS

Arpeggios and enclosures (exercises 5 and 6) are impactful devices to use in any solo. By exploring these first, we can expand our jazz vocabulary before we try to integrate scales (exercise 7). In fact, to improvise over a twelve-bar blues we don’t actually need to know the blues scale at all: instead we just have to avoid playing a major 3rd in the home key on chord IV (in C major, that means no E naturals in F chords). Exercise 8 is a useful way to remember that.

A great solo isn’t just about pitches: it’s also about creating varied colours and shapes in our notes and phrases, whether we use pizzicato or the bow. If we use legato lines and breathe in the way that wind and brass players do, it will give consistency to our sound and a controlled arc to every phrase. There shouldn’t be any uneven notes that stand out unintentionally. Practise the articulations in exercise 9 to introduce colour and contrast, and try sequencing your own ideas over the empty bars in exercise 10 (page 79).

REPERTOIRE

For me, a great solo uses lyrical ideas and shaped phrases, and notes that really make the bass sing. Nuanced playing is more exciting than anything flashy, fast or high. To find new ideas, listen to recordings of solos that you like over and over, until they live in your head. Then sing and transcribe them, and figure out how to play them, to help you get away from the page. Wind and brass solos are especially great to inspire us to sustain our sound and leave breathing space. Here are some of my favourites:

Miles Davis and friends ‘Freddie Freeloader’, Kind of Blue (1959) bit.ly/3oou1dD

Dexter Gordon and his Quartet ‘Blue Bossa’, Biting the Apple (1976) bit.ly/2SXe42z

Chet Baker and friends ‘But Not For Me’ and ‘It Could Happen to You’, Chet Baker Sings (1959), bit.ly/3tTaF1t and bit.ly/3fnf9rN

Chet Baker and friends ‘Autumn Leaves’, She Was Too Good to Me (1974), bit.ly/3fp6h55

Ray Brown with the Oscar Peterson Trio ‘You Look Good to Me’, We Get Requests (1964), bit.ly/2S4tBxa

Larry Grenadier with the Brad Mehldau Trio ‘Number 19’, Internationale Jazzwoche, Burghausen (2008), bit.ly/33PxOXX

Lester Young with Jones-Smith, Inc. ‘Oh! Lady Be Good’ (1936), bit.ly/3eS4x5i

Sometimes when it’s time for the bass to take a solo, the band is so worried about burying the bass sound that it loses energy and everything suddenly becomes quiet and more exposed. I ask my colleagues to be as conversational as possible, and not to be afraid.

IN YOUR PRACTICE

When you learn a solo by ear, really take time to understand the music. Listen, sing along and work out the harmonies, then write everything down and send it to your teacher for feedback. Find out what they hear differently, and ask them to create exercises for you based on those differences. It’s a great way to assess your progress and develop your musicianship. Another way to improve your skills is to sit down at the piano, play chord changes, and sing ideas and sequences by ear over the top (you can try this using exercise 10).

Of course, your individual musical identity should be at the core of everything you play, so try to shape your solos using your own voice and personality. Take ownership of what you do, even when you go ‘wrong’. It’s all about figuring out what you like, what you want to communicate and how to support that.

TIPS FOR TEACHERS

Teaching students to improvise doesn’t just help them to play solos: it shows them how to listen to music and helps them to understand it in terms of the nuts and bolts. The more they can do that, the more complete their overall abilities will be as musicians.

When my students are having trouble improvising, I take away the pressure by removing the instrument, or by using easier tunes that aren’t jazz-specific. Sometimes I’ll sing a phrase and say, ‘Sing that back to me,’ and then, ‘Now I want you to change the last part of what I sang.’ I also encourage them to compose and write down ideas, because improvisation is just instantaneous composition.

INTERVIEW BY PAULINE HARDING

FURTHER MATERIALS

My book Topics in Jazz Bass Vol.2: Soloing reinforces all the issues in this article. I also run a six-month intensive course to help develop these skills: see www.dannyziemann.com