Inspiration for improvisers
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Composition, Playing Techniques, Premium Only, Tunes
If you’ve ever been to a jam session before, you’ve probably encountered the famous Thelonious Monk tune Well You Needn’t. Over the years, it’s become one of the most popular jazz standards, but unfortunately, this is one of the tunes that the infamous Real Book got wrong… The chord progression of Well You Needn’t written …
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Composition, Jazz Standards, Transcribing
Tune Up is one of those classic up-tempo jazz standards that every player should work on. Composed by Eddie Vinson, It became super well known when legendary trumpeter player Miles Davis recorded it on his 1956 album Blue Haze. And over the years, it’s turned into a popular jam session tune that can be pretty …
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Composition, Jazz Musicians, Tunes
Maiden Voyage is a classic jazz standard that all improvisers will encounter at some point in their musical journey. With only four chords, beginners tend to gravitate toward this Herbie Hancock masterpiece because it seems like it would be an “easy” jazz tune… While it’s true that there are only four chords and that the …
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Chords, Composition, Jazz Advice and Tips, Premium Only
Learning jazz chords can be a frustrating obstacle on your path to becoming a better improviser. But what a lot of players forget is that the process isn’t just about memorizing chord symbols from a lead sheet and hoping for the best… The key to improving lies in understanding how each chord functions and developing …
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Composition, Jazz Advice and Tips, Tunes
Learning tunes goes hand in hand with being a jazz musician. But if you’ve ever tried to learn a tune by ear or attempted to memorize a list of jazz standards, you know it’s not the easiest task in the world… In fact it can be downright frustrating. Like many musicians, I struggled for years …
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Composition, Jazz Advice and Tips, Playing Techniques
You dream of becoming the type of player that can improvise with ease over any tune. A musician with an endless supply of creative ideas to play at a moment’s notice… But right now you’re struggling to create compelling ideas over the jazz repertoire. Maybe you don’t know which notes to choose in your lines …
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Chords, Composition, Jazz Advice and Tips, Jazz Musicians, Tunes
There are a lot of skills you need in jazz improvisation…Developing great ears, a knowledge of tunes, instrumental technique, and a mastery of jazz language… But there’s one question that gets to the heart of the matter for any soloist… Can you come up with interesting musical ideas over a single chord? Without the aid …
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Composition, Ear Training, Jazz Standards
Bebop “heads,” what jazz players sometimes call the melody of a tune, tend to be some of the trickiest and most technically demanding strings of notes you’re likely to encounter. Much busier than classic jazz standards, these intricate melodies are generally more difficult to learn, understand, and commit to memory. So what do you do …
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Composition, Jazz Musicians, Music Theory, Tunes
Always searching for a new sound to explore and share with the world, jazz musicians are constantly trying to evolve and push the music forward, reaching for something different and exciting… And this is exactly how modal jazz came about. Legends like Herbie Hancock, Bill Evans, Joe Henderson, Wayne Shorter, and Miles Davis began exploring …
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Chords, Composition, Jazz Advice and Tips, Music Theory
When I started learning how to improvise, the one thing I really wanted to figure out was how to create improvised lines like my musical heroes… Listening to players like Miles, Bird, Coltrane, and countless others, I wanted to learn exactly which notes to choose on a chord and how to turn these notes into …
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Composition, Jazz Musicians, Jazz Standards, Rhythm
Phrasing is one of those things that everyone talks about, but most cannot clearly define. Like the concept of “swing,” it’s something you can feel and hear, but as soon as you start trying to use words to describe it, things get pretty ambiguous. First, let’s talk about musical phrases… In music, a phrase is …
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Composition, Jazz Education, Music Theory
Music theory is packed with quite a few dense explanations of esoteric concepts that plague the performer, and while music theory can be incredibly helpful to performing musicians, it has unfortunately steered so many players in the wrong direction. Recently we’ve had a handful of people write in asking about The Circle of Fifths and …