Jazz Trumpet Licks

Here is a pretty easy dominant scale ii V7 I Jazz lick I got from a friend of mine some time ago. It simply starts on the tonic of the ii chord and goes up the dominant scale until hitting the 3rd of the I chord and then ending on the cry me a river Jazz riff. You can play the lick faster depending upon the tempo of the tune you use it over and hit the 3rd on the V7 chord like I do in the below video clip.

Here is a sound sample over the Bb Blues on trumpet:

How to memorize this lick in 12 keys:

The reason I call this a dominant scale ii V7 I Jazz lick is because it is simply a dominant scale pattern in whatever whatever key you’re currently in going up the scale. In the above example were are in C Major. What’s the 5th of C? It’s G7, so we play the G7 scale starting on the 5th. You repeat the pattern until you hit the 3rd of the I chord. In the above example that would be E. So if you know your dominant scales really well, you’ll have this lick in 12 keys really fast.

It ends with the cry me a river Jazz lick, which is something you can work on separately. For me, that lick is best learned in 12 keys simply by feel.

I’ve been listening to this YouTube video almost every day for the past week. The head isn’t all that impressive, but it’s definitely catchy. What you are going to want to do is take a listen to Arturo Sandoval’s flugelhorn solo at about 3:15 on the trumpet video. Just amazing. I’m going to be stealing a few licks from this video and posting them on the site because there are some really good ones in it.

I would love to get your opinions on this awesome flugelhorn solo by Arturo Sandoval.

I’ve been recently working on the chord changes to Autumn Leaves. So I decided to browse You Tube a little bit to see if I could find some good ideas. Low and behold, guess what I found? A really cool and awesome trumpet solo of Freddie Hubbard taking a ride on Autumn Leaves. Plus you can hear how he interprets the head of Autumn Leaves as well as Freddie Hubbard’s usage of the 3rd valve on As and Es on the flugelhorn.

A couple other things to note about this great trumpet clip. Freddie Hubbard does a nice cadenza at the end and shows off his trumpet style in so many other ways. There is also another trumpet player in the video that sound pretty good. I don’t know his name though. If anyone could help me out with this it would be greatly appreciated.