Walking Bass Over a ii-V-I (3 Lines You Can Steal Tonight)

Added: 2026-06-06

[00:00:00]What's up everyone? Cole Davis. Today I'm going to show you how to walk through the most common chord progression in jazz. If you can play this, you can play 90% of what's in the real book. Today I'm going to give you three walking lines. Each one is built the same way a jazz legend built theirs.

[00:00:19]Let's get right into it. Line number one.

[00:00:32]So, I have a rule with my baselines. I want my baselines to sound like a solo or a melody. And of course, a solo and a melody can be very similar. The reason for this is because we often don't realize how melodic or how soloistic our baselines really are. We often think of baselines as these stock meat and potatoes boring almost phrases.

[00:00:58]But if you play that way, you might not get hired. People actually don't want to play with that. If you're going like this and that's your 251, you might think you're being solid if you're doing.

[00:01:30]You might think that that's functional and that's solid and that's what the people want to hear. Unfortunately, that is not what the people want to hear. The people actually want to hear something that's interesting. Because if you think of jazz as collective improvisation, everybody's in motion at the same time.

[00:01:48]Everybody's moving at the same time.

[00:01:50]Everybody has a part, but everybody has to inspire each other in some way. The best jazz ensembles I've played in are not necessarily the ones where everybody has great technique or everybody has great knowledge of harmony or everybody has great even knowledge of the tradition or whatever we expect of jazz musicians. It's when everyone knows how to play something that motivates the other players. Think about like a great drum fill. Think about a great ride symbol pattern where the ride symbol creeps up on the band. Think about that. Think about Elvin, Tony, the great drummers that knew how to create drama in the way that they played. That inspires the band. That motivates the band. And the way you motivate the band is by being clear and functional, but also melodic or soloistic. So this first line comes from Paul Chambers. And what was incredible about him is that he played like a soloist. He was friends with Charlie Parker. He got a lot of his lines from Bird. And he didn't just use them in his solos. He used them in his baselines.

[00:03:16]Now, let's say I play this in a solo or even down here.

[00:03:45]So that actually has a soloistic quality. That's a Bbop lick. And the genius of Paul Chambers is that he was able to use those licks in his baselines. So it's a functional, clear, beautiful walking baseline. And at the same time, it's a solo. So this is a great lick. You can use this in all 12 keys. You can use this over pretty much any tune because pretty much all tunes in the real book have 251s. You can just plug and play this wherever. I've got the tabs and I've got the notation. So, use this in your playing. Add this to your vocabulary. It's a great lick. Lick number two, also over a 251, but a completely different flavor.

[00:04:40]I'm going to do that again. Amazing, right? So, that's the same chord progression and many of the same notes and the same bass function, but a completely different character. And the great thing is you can play both in the same chorus. I often space out my baseline so some are more intervalic and spread out like that and some are more chromatic like lick number one. That's the beauty of the 251. You don't only have to play it one way. You can use multiple concepts even in the same chorus. So this baseline comes from Israel Crosby who I talk about a lot but he might not be as much of a household name to bass players as Paul Chambers is. Israel Crosby played in the Emage Jimal Trio and his signature was playing baselines that sound like melodies. Now, how did he do this? Because you could say anything could be a melody. You can play this and you can say, "Oh, that's a melody to me. That sounds melodic to me. Da da da da da da da da da. Anyone can sing that.

[00:05:53]That's melodic."

[00:05:55]Okay, that's fair. If you think that's melodic, then that's melodic. It's all about how you respond to it. But the genius of Israel Crosby was he was creating melodic baselines by spreading out the intervals. Before him, a lot of the great architects of bass playing like John Kirby and Jimmy Blandon and Walter Page, they played exclusively in a chromatic way. For example, they would play something like this.

[00:06:29]It's very straight down the middle, very easy to follow, very chromatic. You can hear right away where it's going. Israel Crosby broke it up.

[00:06:38]When he played, he wanted to think not necessarily like a soloist, but like a melodic player. He was playing the melody a lot of the times, and the soloist would actually give him some space. The soloist would leave space in their solo to give him space without even realizing what was happening. And then they'd listen back to the record and be like, "Wow, the baseline becomes the melody." It's really amazing. You think about a lot of the great bass players like James Jamerson who played a lot of basselines that actually became as important to the song as the melody.

[00:07:17]Israel Crosby was doing that 10, 20 years before.

[00:07:22]So why is this particular baseline a melodic baseline?

[00:07:31]It has a unique approach with this nine here, this E.

[00:07:40]So instead of which also has that note, we're going that is melodic by its very nature because of the intervals. Everything's spread out. It sounds like it's reaching for something. It sounds like it's moving somewhere, but not necessarily in a chromatic way. It sounds like it's taking you on a journey, which is the whole point of a great melody.

[00:08:10]Like if I play that out of time, it sounds like I'm beginning a melody.

[00:08:39]That sounds melodic. Someone hands out an original chart and they've got a melodic baseline, it's probably going to have a 159 in it. That's just a melodic sound.

[00:08:55]So that right there is also very melodic. What's melodic about it? Again, the intervals. So this is a tritone. You probably knew that already. What makes a trionee so powerful? It's the cornerstone of a dominant chord.

[00:09:15]That trionee is saying, "Move me. Move me somewhere else." The dominant chord is the most powerful of all chords because it's giving you a call to action. I talk about this in my ear training course. The dominant chord says, "Move me. give me a direction.

[00:09:32]It's giving you a call to action. That's why dominant chords are the hardest chords because they give you so much responsibility. They carry so much weight harmonically, texturally, emotionally. The dominant chord is the hardest chord. It gives you a ton of responsibility.

[00:09:53]And that's how Israel Crosby often started his baselines with a trionee to convey the dominant chord. Not just a root and a third, but a tritone.

[00:10:06]And then he resolves.

[00:10:11]And he resolves in the bar, which is very interesting.

[00:10:18]So that beat four is actually the resolution preparing you for the next chord.

[00:10:42]Pretty amazing. So once you have that, you understand how your baseline can actually be a melody as well as a functional part within the band. Then on the C major 7 again with those nines. So here I'm just doing 3 5 7 9.

[00:11:10]That's all I'm really doing there.

[00:11:18]That's it. 3579. That's all you need.

[00:11:22]So, this baseline because of the intervals and because of the trionee and because of the resolution on beat 4 actually sounds like a melody. One more time.

[00:11:44]All right, baseline number three. You'll probably be able to guess who this is.

[00:12:10]That was a Ray Brown baseline. Now, what was the thing that made Ray Brown so great? It was the fact that he was able to be functional and play baselines that sounded like meat and potatoes baselines, but actually had a lot of poetry. Now, let's play what I played earlier when I talked about a meat and potatoes baseline. kind of boring, kind of obvious, not going to get you called back.

[00:12:44]And let's compare that to this.

[00:12:53]The genius of Ray Brown is that he was able to create baselines that sounded so obvious and so simple, but when you break them down, they're actually poetic and beautiful. I have a whole book on this on the Better Bass Lessons website, Walk Like Ray Brown. And I analyze all of Ray Brown's baselines, not all of them because there's a thousand of them, but many of them. And I talk about how he is able to create structure and form the same way Bach was able to, the same way a great classical composer, the same way Mozart was able to by playing the simplest baselines but in the most logical and beautiful way.

[00:13:49]Somehow that sounds melodic because of the way the intervals are spaced out.

[00:13:54]Because of the fact that you would think he would resolve to a G on that second bar, but he doesn't. He resolves to the third. These are very subtle things that make the baseline sound melodic and beautiful and separate them from the pedestrian boring baseline that we all default to playing. Now, those three lines aren't random. They all come from great players. They're three different philosophies of bass playing that you hear outlined in the body of work of those three giants of walking bass. I've built a 90-cond quiz asking you which bass player you are. If you like what you hear, take the quiz in the comments, figure out which one of these great bass players you are, and then go from there.

[00:14:39]The quiz helped me answer a lot of questions about myself. Which one are you? To build this quiz, I used a lot of recordings and a lot of transcriptions of these great masters to figure out the essence of what makes their baseline sing. For more content like this, check out the rest of the Better Bass Lessons catalog.

[00:15:02]Cydia.