In the eternal quest for meaningful melody, or what my jam host always refers to as “story arc,” today I hit upon a solution: to let rhythm lead the way. At the rhythm’s resolution, the melody will land—or briefly alight, before taking the dance in its own direction, trading licks with the rhythm.
In my outdoor music studio, anything goes, but lately I’ve been refining the most harmonic variations to play for a given scale or chord progression. Here for example are two of the most useful progressions. Note that the chord tones are marked as the most harmonic choices in the respective scales.
Note that between the four constituent scales/chords, all the notes of the root scale (Bb^) are covered. The characteristic 3 (B) of the VI7 scale (G Dominant) adds an eighth note to the scale, whose most natural root becomes the ii (C), the Dorian Bebop Alternate scale. Played from there the rhythmic downbeats will alternate (bold notes), but I’ll leave that nuance aside for now, and let the rhythm and melody improvise itself, given the inherent harmony of all these notes in the overall progression.
At this stage of my practice, in other words, I’m not following a strict sequence of the progression, nor of rhythmic emphasis, but just expanding the basic root scale to include one extra note (the B) as a variation. As a shortcut we can think of the extra note as a b2, relative to the root (I).
Let’s turn to the minor modes. In this case, C- (aeolian minor) is the root (i), from the relative major Eb^. The ii and V7+ (alt) are both relative to the i.
The same principle applies here. All the notes of the root scale are included as harmonically successful possibilities, and the additional 3 note (B) from the V7+ scale provides a simple scope for variation, among many other possibilities of the alternate scale. In this case the resulting 8-note scale is C Bebop Harmonic Minor: which just means the b7 can at times be played as a 7, for additional flavor.
Where to do with all these possibilities? Again, once a given scale and progression is chosen, or begun, the lead can be handed off to the rhythmic improviser, and the intuitive fingers and ear can provide a pleasing melody, on the fly.
As usual, hat tips to my top 2 self-learning resources: the JazzAdvice.com newsletter, and Ian Ring’s Amazing Scale Finder.