Piano: A Mixolydian Bebop Over the Changes

Where A Mixolydian Bebop lies at this seat, and what a chorus takes out of it.

A Mixolydian Bebop runs 8 notes to the octave, laid out here across 88 keys with every A flagged. Mid-chorus the pattern is not what you need; where the root is when the chord changes underneath you is.

Mixolydian with a passing major 7th between the b7 and the octave — the bright, bluesy dominant sound with a chromatic slide that keeps every chord tone on a downbeat. Slick, swinging, and quintessentially bebop.

Heard in: Jazz lines over dominant seventh chords, blues changes, and rhythm changes — the workhorse bebop scale.

The right hand takes the line and the left keeps stating the chord under it, which makes a scale at this seat a two-handed problem: the notes have to work against a voicing you are choosing at the same time.

Play it slowly against the audio until it stops being a shape, then put it over two bars of a form and let the chord tones decide which of the notes you actually keep.