Piano Fills With D# Dorian Bebop

D# Dorian Bebop runs 8 notes to the octave. Below it is lit across two octaves of this chair's keyboard with every key numbered by degree, because what a fill needs mid-song is not the run — it is which degree the right hand is sitting on when the chord changes under it.

Dorian with a chromatic passing tone slipped between the b3 and the 4 — eight notes, so chord tones keep landing on the strong beats in a run of eighth notes. Cool, flowing, and swinging.

Heard in: Bebop and straight-ahead jazz lines over minor seventh chords — Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and the Barry Harris approach.

A piano fill lives in the right hand over a left hand that never stops comping, so the scale is read two ways at once — which notes sing over the held chord, and which ones walk the song into its turnaround.

Work it over a held left-hand chord until the right hand stops thinking about the order, then take it to a song in D# and let the melody choose which notes the fill keeps.