The "lick" is everywhere

[No Pride]

That's what I found. In Western European music, the modes of the Harmonic Minor and Melodic Minor are seen as just momentary alterations of major or minor, and not as entities in and of themselves. They're rarely dwelt upon, just passed through on the way to somewhere else. But in jazz (and Eastern European music, and some non-Western musics) they're used as modes in themselves, as alternate, spicier versions of major or minor, and the jazz guys have named them.

Yep! When I used to teach guitar, my "specialty" was ear training and theory. I encouraged my students to not think of modes as something derived from other (more well known) scales, but as separate entities, and no less important. I taught them to recognize their sounds by where the half steps (or in certain cases, the minor thirds) occur. And as it turned out, learning modes is a great way for guitar players to learn all of the "positions."

[yamishogun]

Is this supposed to come from some well known piece of music?

Huh? Everyone born between 1960 and 1980 knows "Baby Come Back"!

[A. Scherze]

Is this supposed to come from some well known piece of music?

The earliest version in those clips is the orchestra. They're performing Stravinsky's Firebird.

That does not mean that it is the original. Or, perhaps it is a case of independent invention.

[A. Scherze]

I found the page where the notation came from.

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http://www.jazzguitar.be/blog/the-lick/

You can play The Lick over a D minor chord or a 251 in D minor, like I do in this example:



The Lick can be played over other chords as well, as you can hear in the following elevator music example. Here The Lick starts over Dm7 (Im), then goes to Bbmaj7 (bVI) and Gm7 (IVm). On the A7 I play the “Cry Me a River” lick, another jazz cliche. In the second chorus I play a little variation (sorry, couldn’t stop myself):

[Progbear]

I am going to start inserting that into every solo I play and see if anyone notices.

Just like Frank Zappa and the “Louie Louie” riff.

[mjudge]

As to the C/C# thing: also the case that in most music with any kind of blues background, you can pretty freely and fluidly move between the theoretically 'proper' chord tones and the corresponding notes of the blues scale without any perceived dissonance – it just sounds "bluesy." One of the things I love about pre-Clapton blues guitarists (I'm thinking of Guitar Slim, Johnny Watson, Hubert Sumlin) is that they don't give a shit what chord they're playing over; they're there to play the blues, and if they happen to land on a chord tone with the downbeat, fine, and if not, who cares?

[Dave (in MA)]

This reminds me of the time that somebody pointed out in AFFZ that Ian Underwood quotes The Macarena (1994) during his solo in the Gumbo Variations (1969).

[GuitarGeek]

There's a lot of licks like that, like what I call the circular lick, where a guitarist plays real fast descending triplets on two strings, using pull off and hammer ons. A good example is the stop time section of the Free Bird, where Allen Collins plays a couple different variations.

There's another similar lick, where the guitarist stays on one string and plays real fast trills, where the lower note stays the same, but the upper note moves up and down. Like say if the lower is A, maybe the upper note alternates between B, C# and D. You can hear that lick in the My Sharona solo, for instance. I seem to recall Dickey Betts playing it a lot on various Allman Brothers recordings, usually when he was wailing at the end of a song like Ramblin' Man onstage.

Somewhere there's a video where a comedian talks about how much he hates Pachelbel's Canon (stemming from being a high school cellist), and he carries on for several minutes about how the melodic and harmonic configuration of that piece permeates all of contemporary popular music.

[Baribrotzer]

Although there's a slight difference: "The Lick" appears a great deal because it just sounds good - but depending upon the instrument or key it may not be effortless to play. The licks you cite appear a great deal because they're easy to play quickly on the guitar without a great deal of technique.

Somewhere there's a video where a comedian talks about how much he hates Pachelbel's Canon (stemming from being a high school cellist), and he carries on for several minutes about how the melodic and harmonic configuration of that piece permeates all of contemporary popular music.

Not surprising, because it is an earlier, slightly more complicated version of the Fifties
Progression ( ||: I - vi - IV - V :|| ),
or its more recent variant, the Axis of Awesome's Four Chord Song ( ||: I - V - vi - IV :|| )