This is a recording of Dexter Gordon playing "Move" by Denzil Best with the Fats Navarro Quintet:
At 1:43 Dexter plays a catchy riff that goes like this:
To the best of my knowledge, this track was recorded on 1948 (see here). A more familiar use of this riff was recorded a year later on 1949 by Wardell Gray in his famous solo on "Twisted". Listen to Gray play this riff here at 0:43:
Gray's solo became famous after vocalist Annie Ross added her own lyrics to it and recorded it as a song under the same title. Here you can watch Ross perform this song live with the great Count Basie:
As some of you may know, this riff is in fact a quote from a 1944 hit song called "Swinging On A Star" first recorded by Bing Crosby:
And if you're about my age, you may have first encountered this song in Bruce Willis' 1991 action comedy "Hudson Hawk":
"Swinging On A Star" was probably very well-known when Gordon and Gray quoted it in their solos, and in Gordon's recording you actually hear the audience cheering when he quotes this song. Anyway, if Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray can steal from this song so can we. Let's take a close at the first two bars of this quote:
The beginning and ending bits of the phrase imply a Bb major pentatonic scale, a typical sound in melodies of swing era songs. The middle part of the melody spells out a descending Cm7 chord. This implies a harmonic progression in ascending and descending diatonic steps - Bb-Cm7-Dm7-Cm7. On Frank Sinatra's recording of the song this harmonic progression is built into the arrangement (in the key of Ab):
However, on "Move", Gordon uses this phrase over a simple Bb chord. This implied alternation between the Bb and Cm7 chords gives this line a sense of forward motion, which is in part what makes it very catchy. It can be a very useful lick to learn as "I-chord vocabulary". At least in jazz, the major I-chord is not an easy chord to play on. Jazz lines tend to focus on the harmonically tense chords, mostly on the V7 dominant chord extended by the IIm7 sub-dominant chord. On the I-chord, or the tonic chord, lines tend to resolve and leave more space. When you suddenly come across a simple major chord for a few bars it is not so obvious what you can actually play over it. So learning some good I-chord lines can be very useful. Try learning just these two bars in all keys. This works very nicely in the cycle of fourths:
This lick can also work in other harmonic contexts, for example over 7sus4 chords (IIm7 chord over V bass) or a dominant pedal point:
In this context it would be perhaps easier to conceptualize this phrase as a IIm7 phrase instead of a major I-chord phrase.