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...]

Caravan is a tune that everyone who plays jazz must know. It also happens to be a really fun tune to improvise over if you know what you are doing. The 'A' sections of this tune only contain two chords so one must be able to stretch their ideas over a long period of time and not run out of things to say. This tune also happens to extensively use the diminished dominant scale which we have explored in previous episodes of the podcast. In this episode we learn to use this scale and particular … [Read more...]

This is our third installment of our series on Rhythm Changes. Last week we took a look at the 'A' sections of the form and learned some exercises to get us through these rapid fire chords. This week we will focus on the bridge, where the chords spread out considerably. Because the chords come at us a little bit slower, we have to approach this section in a different way than we did on the 'A' sections. In this episode we look at a couple of different approaches. The first, is using our … [Read more...]

In today's episode we get deeper into rhythm changes and start working on a couple of concepts that will start you into the world of improvising over this important form. In this episode we will be concentrating on the "A" sections of the rhythm changes progression. We'll save the bridge for the next episode. We will start with an exercise that explores a simple linear concept over the chord changes that will start you on getting familiar with each and every chord. We then move into a more … [Read more...]

This week we start looking at another concept that is a must for any improviser to master. Rhythm changes are a staple in the jazz language and happen to be a little more complicated than the blues. We use part 1 to tach you some quintessential rhythm changes melodies. If we hope to master rhythm changes we need to have some heads to play over these changes. This will also serve the purpose of getting used to the sound of rhythm changes if you have never played them before or have limited … [Read more...]

In Part 2 of our series on diminished dominants, we get a little deeper into this concept and create some vocabulary we can use in real life improvising situations. Our vehicle is going to be ii-V-i progressions, which are the most common progression in almost any tune you will see. By learning this vocabulary and plugging it into our solos, you will start to hear this concept reflected in your playing. Once you have incorporated the scales from part 1 of the series, start working on these … [Read more...]