Figuring out what your favorite musicians are thinking when they play is an essential part of getting better. It allows us to get deeper into their playing and incorporate our favorite material into our own solos. It's like having a jazz legend giving us a private lesson in our own home! It is also an important ear and rhythmic training activity. We are figuring out hundreds of notes just using our ears and our instrument. You'll be amazed by how your ears open up and you can start doing so … [Read more...]

This week we are going to learn how to do one of my favorite things. Learning vocabulary has paid off in a huge way for anyone who has ever practiced this important part of improvising. Just like when we speak a language, we have to have a good base vocabulary to be able to converse and make sense. When it comes to jazz, this means taking some of our favorite players' material and putting it into our own playing. In this episode, I will take you through an overview of the way I take a phrase, … [Read more...]

This week's episode brings you a lesson on the bebop scale. This device is a great way to quickly incorporate some chromaticism into your playing and get those snaky lines you always wanted. I have to warn you though, this might be the biggest amount of work I have given you in any episode so far. We start by learning the dominant and major bebop scales and then learn them starting on every chord tone available to us. This seems like a lot of work but isn't anything worth practicing a ton … [Read more...]

In jazz, timing is everything. In this week's episode we will take a look at structuring our solos in such a way that the important notes fall in the right place. We want to make sure that we are putting chord tones on the strong beats of each measure. This gives our improvisation some direction and is the number one way to make you sound like you know what you're doing quickly! We come up with the skeleton of our solo and then build a complete melodic statement around that skeleton. With a … [Read more...]

This week we discuss one of the most important concepts in building a good solo. Motivic development is the principle of taking a short idea and learning to manipulate it in many different ways. This gives our listeners something to grab onto in our solo and provides us with a launching point that can go in any direction we would like it to. We are going to start by taking a simple idea and base the rest of the episode off of it. In a way, the episode is an example of motivic … [Read more...]