“The Lick” has become a ubiquitous part of certain internet music sub-cultures. T-shirts, mugs, string quartets, and likely hundreds of quotes by jazz musicians have made it quite cliche. For the uninitiated, here is the video that started it all, and here is a discussion of the meme culture surrounding The Lick, and a serious take on it.
What I never really realized about The Lick, was how pedagogically interesting it could be. In David Bruce’s video above, he describes how it is constructed: a short scale fragment, followed by an arpeggio and a resolution. How convenient! So I figured this might be a reasonably useful tool for practicing patterns around the instrument.
So I quickly made this preliminary sheet up that has The Lick in all the standard playable range of the bassoon, with the lowest iteration bottoming out on our lowest B-flat, and the highest topping at E5. I then created a modal alteration that puts it more or less in Lydian, if the original is in Dorian, which hits a different scale fragment (all whole steps) and different arpeggio type (minor instead of major). Then I figured I would invert the figure. This is intervallically inverted, not diatonically, so we end up with a fragment that kind of sounds like minor but after landing on the last note could retroactively be viewed as being mixolydian.
This may be a test draft of something more interesting where I can treat the pattern as being more diatonically transposed to create a long figure that could then be transposed into all major and minor keys. If I have time.
Suggestions for practice:
- Skip the whole notes completely. When doing the ascending pattern this creates a voice leading half step between each iteration of the figure, extending the scale figure. It makes for an interesting connection in the inverted version.
- Swing or straight rhythm, pick various articulation patterns.
- Switch the rhythm to be 1/8 1/8 1/4, 1/8 1/8 1/4, whole. This highlights the arpeggio figure a bit more than the regular rhythm. This is noted at the end of the document.