How to Crush It On a “Bird Blues” and Simplify Your Solos

Welcome to episode 247 where today we discuss strategies on Charlie Parker's variation on a blues which has been dubbed a "Bird Blues." Using this song form as a vessel, I show you how you can take fast moving changes, simplify them, and start navigating them without playing a bunch of notes.

I often say that the blues is an incredible jumping-off point into jazz in learning jazz standards and how to improvise over them. And in today's episode, I'm actually going to talk about a variation on the blues called a "Bird Blues". And "bird", of course, refers to the great saxophonist Charlie Parker, the bebop legend. He kind of took those basic blues changes and transformed them into lots of extra moving harmony that just made it creative.

I think that the "Bird Blues" is an excellent example of how we can take a basic blues form and start transitioning into a more typical jazz standard harmony which is going to open up the doors to being able to improvise over tons and tons of different tunes professionally. This is going to be a really good episode. I'm going to give you some strategies and go over what "Bird Blues" is.

In this episode:
1. Understanding "Bird Blues" Harmony
2. Sensoring the chord changes
3. Using motivic development to simplify your lines

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