This idea comes from a brief moment in the first chorus of Hank Mobley’s solo on “Remember” (Soul Station) — an enclosure pattern that’s mostly diatonic, with a #4 creating the half step below the 5th. It’s a phrase you’ll find throughout bebop vocabulary, not just Mobley. Instead of just learning the lick, we build it into a set of exercises that expand your range and make the sound part of your playing.
In this video, we’ll cover four things in sequence: the original Mobley idea, then three preparatory exercises — half step below each chord tone, diatonic step above, and the full enclosure combining both.
EDIT – ~3:40 I describe the enclosure as “whole step above” but I meant to say a “diatonic step above”.
Download the exercises:*
This content is for members only.
Timestamps
- 1:39 — Original Mobley idea (extended range at 3:06)
- 5:36 — Half step below
- 8:00 — Diatonic step above
- 10:14 — Full enclosure (triplets)
What to listen for throughout
- Metronome as 2 and 4
- Keep your fingers moving as you breathe — this keeps you connected to the time
- Take each exercise through the full range of the horn
*These come from Joe Viola’s fantastic book of chord exercises
Related:
Listening Lab & Piano/Singing Challenge: Hank Mobley’s solo on “Remember”
Listening Lab: Hank Mobley’s melodic turnarounds (and more) from “Dig Dis”
Enclosures: 12 Exercises to Help You Understand (and Practice) Them
Beautiful line. Reminds me that Oliver Nelson took this enclosure line over a minor 7 and created the tune “Cascades” on Blues and the Abstract Truth.
https://youtu.be/wlAk1ntQuWg?si=J8EGQsWA4rqbPhk3
What a wonderful lesson! An amazing way to break a line down and analyze it and play in three different distinct parts. Thank you Bob for this excellent lesson!
I’ve been fooling around with this lick — here’s how I’ve been getting a foothold on transposing it around the cycle. I’ll proceed to doing this with the whole phrase. The way he exits from the pattern is just so elegant.
https://youtube.com/shorts/bGLPBR8GOh4?si=S4RegmWyERpHLd3I
Hi Bob, around 3:40 you describe the enclosure as whole step above and half step below. While this is true for the root and fifth I believe that it is half step above and below for the third (for major). So I think that the best way to describe this enclosure is “upper diatonic neighbor and half step blow”. This would also work for minor…
Yes. Good catch. I meant a ‘diatonic’ step above.
Hi Bob, a quick question: Over the years I’ve been a saxophone owner I been prone to buying various books on jazz method/etude/etc books that I’ve only briefly paged through before forgetting them on the bookshelf… so now I’m kind of reluctant to buy more. But for some reason I don’t have the Viola books. And after seeing that you label Viola’s volume 2 as fantastic I’m considering getting it… is it a must-have ?
Thanks in advance
Well, it’s been on my shelf for decades too, and I’ve never exactly gone through it start to finish. It has versions of what I attached here for every type of chord, but you also can figure a lot of that out yourself. There are five exercises per chord for every single key, like A-flat AND G-sharp minor and major dominant half diminished, etc. It’s a lot of reading, to be honest.
If you can kind of get the gist of it from this, you could really do a lot to make strides yourself without the book.
Making little notes to yourself in a notebook of this and, in doing it mentally instead of reading, is actually going to be more beneficial.
Of the five exercises he has for every chord, the last two are always kind of like an etude, again more reading. The first three are the most beneficial, and they’re very much like what these go through, so the answer is: maybe wait on the book.