“Beautiful Love” – Comping & Improv
In this lesson we explore comping voicings and improvisation principles over the tune “Beautiful Love” played in the key of D Minor.
“Beautiful Love” is a commonly called tune at jam sessions. The harmony of the tune is simply to memorise and fun to improvise over. Check out the famous Bill Evans recordings of this tune.
Comping Techniques & Principles
We apply a wide range of comping techniques and principles. We start with simple drop 2 and Barry Harris voicings which are a good choice towards the start of your accompaniment.
When the soloist that we are accompanying works towards a climax we can introduce bigger voicing configurations such as quartal stacks and upper structure triad voicings. These techniques are demonstrated in the 2nd and 3rd comping choruses of this tutorial.
Related Lessons
In this lesson we will combine quartals and upper structures to create some quartal upper structure voicings that are well suited to a comping setting.
The Red Garland voicing has a distinctive ‘block chord’ sound, but compared to previous styles of block chords, it has a much brighter quality.
Beautiful Love is commonly played as both a ballad and as a medium to up-tempo tune. In this lesson we create an arrangement for both of these styles.
Practice Tips
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Study the useful -11b5 voicing which is used throughout the comping and improvisation choruses.
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First master the drop 2 voicings and once these are comfortable under your fingers you can start to explore the bigger voicing configurations.
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Experiment with the tritone substitutes and how these are used in the 25 and 251 progressions to create chromatic harmony.
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Intertwine dense voicings - such as the cluster voicings - with more open sounding quartal voicings to achieve different textures in your accompaniment.
my jaw dropped 🙂 just no words really to describe how masterful this song is… Thanks so much Tuomo – I can listen to this all day…! Brilliant performance!
Thank you Tina, I’m glad you liked it!
-Tuomo
Hi Tuomo, I hope you are feeling better…
I am trying to insert a chromatic 25 into “Beautiful Love”
In bars 5-6 there is G-7 C7 and I put Ab-7 Db7 G-7 C7. It just doesn’t sound like it fits after the preceding D7. It sounds better if I tritone sub Ab7 for D7, but then there are two Abs in a row, but maybe this is OK?
Any simple suggestions? Or is this a case where chromatic 25 doesn’t work? Or just keep at it and find something that sounds good?
I also tried chromatic 25 on the D-7 G7 in bars 13-14 with lousy sounding results too.
Otherwise, having fun.
Thanks, BG
To clarify, my question above refers to left hand chords and right hand improv. Thanks.
Hi Brad, thanks for writing!
First I want to say that you are approaching this thing from the best point of view possible; trying harmonic options and LISTENING CAREFULLY how they sound. And as you have noticed, even if a harmonic variation (in this case chromatic 25) is possible, it doesn’t necessarily sound good.
In both situations you mentioned, chromatic 25 is definitely possible. As you said, doing the chrom. 25 after D7 sound a bit weird. Options are the Ab7 as you have tried, however, usually I try to keep things simple before variating harmony, and in this case I would probably not play the D7/Ab7 before, just keeping the Dminor for 2 bars.
Overall, my suggestion is to use these strong-sounding harmonic variations only in carefully thought places; maybe only one or two times per solo, so the effect is more powerful.
I hope this helped, let me know if you have any further questions!
All the best,
-Tuomo