Our second installment of the Lick Of The Month series brings you an awesome bebop iii-vi-ii-v-I line. Also known as a turnaround, this progression is widely used in tunes, bebop tunes in particular. One place that you can immediately start to apply this material is over rhythm changes. You'll notice that this line contains a lot of chromaticism and this will be tough to figure out at first but give it some time and effort and you will be hearing and playing this in all 12 keys. This part is … [Read more...]

One of the toughest things to do in jazz is incorporate chromaticism. It's so easy to just stay inside of the diatonic scale, after all we have been working on scales since we first picked up our instruments, right? Starting to incorporate chromaticism sometimes feels like jumping off a cliff with no safety rope. It sounds and feels foreign to us. In this episode I  give you some exercises that utilize chromatic approaches in relation to diatonic triads. Diatonic triads are built off of each … [Read more...]

I got a questions from one of our listeners, Andrew about how he could improve his skills of learning tunes by ear. I thought that this was a great topic to do an episode on as it concerns one of the most important parts of playing jazz: ear training. This is a particularly hard part of ear training because it requires us to figure out harmony as well as melody and rhythm. This skill can also come in very handy when we want to play a tune or piece that has not been charted out anywhere. This … [Read more...]

This weeks episode is all about triad pairs. This is going to be the first in a series of shows on this topic but fair warning, they won't be in order week after week. I'm going to pepper them in every few weeks to give you a chance to work on them. The first episode in the series will be about major triads a whole step apart. The first thing you need to do is get familiar with the pattern of these triads played back to back. You're also going to want to get used to the sound so that when you … [Read more...]

We are starting a new monthly thing here at the 10 Minute Jazz Lesson Podcast. Every month, on the third episode of the month, we will learn a new piece of vocabulary over a commonly used chord progression. This is meant for us to learn great material over chord changes that we will see everyday as an improvising jazz musician. If you aren't dedicating at least a part of your practice routine to learning new vocabulary, you should be! This week we take a look at what is perhaps the most … [Read more...]