Stanley Turrentine I-IV

hard bop blues licks Aug 24, 2018

Stanley Turrentine played plenty of blues on plenty of albums, especially in the first part of his career on Blue Note. For maximum exposure to the twelve-bar form it's hard to beat his 1962 Release That's Where It's At, featuring Les McCann (of later "Compared To What" fame) on piano. Turrentine's solo on McCann's mid-tempo "Pia" includes a I-IV move similar to the one below. Like the Tina Brooks lick, this example also plays off of the idea of creating a ii-V approach to the IV chord, but in this case, you just play the root and b7 of the the "V" (Bb) before resolving to the IV, or Eb.

As before, I've indicated the various chord tones relative to the imagined substitute chords implied by the solo. Click on the playlist below to hear fast and slow demonstrations of this move: