Billie's Bounce Melody (Charlie Parker) - Bebop Jazz Guitar Lesson

In this lesson, you will learn the melody of Billie’s Bounce in two octaves. Practicing the melody will help you get a better jazz phrasing and feeling for syncopation.

The melody is characterized by syncopated rhythms, the major blues scale, chromatic approach notes, and enclosures. You will learn more about them in the melodic analysis later in this lesson.

The harmonic form of Billie’s Bounce is a bebop blues in F.

[lovefitzy]

Hey Dirk - thank you so much for this lesson! I am really enjoying this and all the lessons in your blog!

[AT-]

Thank you very much for this helpful and enjoyable lesson.

[jpm]

thank you for that, lesson, so clear and useful.

[guitar.knackshack]

So smooth! Thanks for the great lessons Dirk 🙂

[Arriscraft]

man, you are the best, !!!! great lessons !!!!

[londonwontstopcalling]

If you could just lift the tablature so the sound bar isnt constantly blocking it, otherwise great video!

[jesuscristo]

I appreciate your channel and the wealth of info you contribute but I gotta call something.
In the head, when you reach the Gm chord around measure 9, the descending arpeggio is (Ab to F# to D to Bb to Gb) resolving to F note. You have it as (G to F# to D to Bb to G) resolving to F. Yeah big deal right?

They both work. The difference is two notes. The correct one is weird sounding and abstract, your version is "vanilla" playing it safe outlining the Gm chord. The way Charlie played it was outlining a descending whole tone scale based on an F# augmented chord that sort of resolves to the C7 but more to the tonic F. Its Charlies way of pissing off the establishment I guess, while flexing his knowledge of theory. Charlie carried around a copy of Slonimskys thesaurus of scales and obviously incorporated it into the head of this piece. Now, after doing it your way of outlining the G minor, instead of the F# augmented, I am torn between both. I guess Ill play it both ways depending on the crowd or my mood. Cheers