Inner Urge
Some thoughts on how to play Inner Urge…
This is without a doubt a hard tune, especially at tempo. Released in 1966 on Joe Henderson’s album of the same name, this tune contains several challenges:
The melody is not easy. It starts off fine, but gets increasingly twisted through the entire form
You have a lot of sustained, static harmony, which puts a lot of responsibility on the improviser to create melodic interest, AND…
You have eight bars of fast moving non-functional harmony at the end, essentially one tonal center per bar
All this at about 220 BPM - not crazy fast, but fast enough that most people don’t play the melody fluently, let alone solos
The trap you want to avoid falling into is reacting to the changes and addressing each one separately. You need to find ways to connect the harmonies in logical ways with good time and cohesive ideas that build on each other. That requires an intimate understanding of the tune and a lot of practice. Unfortunately, too many of the amateur renditions on YouTube miss the mark entirely. Listen to the way Joe himself handles this music. Kurt Rosenwinkel also does a great version (in fact this entire gig is awesome; check out the Along Came Betty take as well), as does Jerry Bergonzi:
So how can you start working on playing this? I’d first tackle the melody and take notice of Joe’s note choices and thematic development. There are a lot of fingering challenges as well, so try a few things and see what works best. Most importantly, the melody can serve as an archetype for a good solo. Remember, the aim is not just to “make the changes.”
Then you want to figure out some ways of conceptualizing the harmonies in this piece. Like many tunes with tonal centers that move around (Giant Steps is the obvious example), you need to figure out a few things:
What options you have on each chord - usually the main question is what to do about scale degree 4. If the underlying harmony is major or dominant, you want to raise the 4th so it doesn’t conflict with the major 3rd. That’s why some form of lydian is so common
How to connect disparate harmonies - once you know your note options on each chord, it’s important to connect them across chords, and NOT just in the same direction as the harmonic movement. In other words, if the chord moves down from say Ebmaj7 to Dbmaj7, you want to be able to build BOTH ascending and descending lines that connect these changes
The classic exercise for developing this ability is to play quarter or eighth notes along the relevant scales, changing scales when the harmony does via the closest available note in the “next” scale, without changing direction until you run out of frets in whatever area of the fretboard you are constraining yourself to.
Any “shortcuts” that can alleviate some of the brain damage. It’s important not to rely on these types of gimmicks, but they can be fun to experiment with and very useful for building some thematic content on autopilot. In this tune, there are a couple options that work well over the fast sequence at the end (see image below):
Minor followed major pentatonics (or dorian followed by lydian if you want more notes) with the same root, then descending a whole step and doing the same thing.
For Emaj7 —> Dbmaj7 —> Dmaj7 —> Bmaj7, etc. you can play:
Db min pentatonic —> Db maj pent —> B min pent —> B maj pent
Descending major pentatonics in half steps, starting on E (equivalently, minor pentatonics starting on Db). Every other pentatonic gives you a rootless lydian sound.
From there it is a matter of practicing isolated changes that are presenting challenges until the entire form is smooth, instinctual, and in your ears. Some screenshots below on “problem areas for me” where the loop function on iReal Pro is super helpful.
