When you start to transcribe and discover what your musical heroes are doing, you begin to open up a whole new understanding about how to improvise and approach chord changes. But then the problem soon becomes, how do you take this understanding and put it into your musical practice?
In other words, transcribing is great and all, but if you can’t apply the things you’re finding, then what use is it?
How do you get beyond an intellectual understanding of how to play jazz and turn your knowledge into an intuitive skill set that you can utilize in real-time?
After years of practicing improvisation, I’ve found no better way to do this than to deeply study jazz language.
And I like to think of jazz language like this…
You take small melodic bites from your favorite players and work on them in all keys. Gradually you accumulate more and more of these melodic bites for all the basic chord types that you encounter.
Over time, what you end up with is a plethora of kickstarter ideas…a basic vocabulary that you have available to you all the time for any chord symbol that you see or hear.
So for example, if you see an F minor symbol in a chord chart or hear an F minor chord, you’ll have more than just a scale, arpeggio, or some abstract theory concept to draw from….
You’ll have some simple ideas that your fingers and brain can easily build on in the moment to create new and interesting melodic ideas in real-time, and that’s what jazz language really is.
So today, we’re going to build up your jazz language by studying the language of the great Roy Hargrove, but rather than tackling his entire jazz vocabulary, we’ll zoom in on one specific chord type – minor chords.
By selecting one of your favorite players and a single chord type to study, you’ll quickly develop your vocabulary over a particular sound and add it to your knowledge base in an accessible way.
As you’ll soon see, this pick-a-player-and-chord-type tactic is a great strategy to use in the practice room that will allow you to easily focus your practice time and improve fast…
Roy Hargrove’s Minor Language: What is This Thing Called Love
Roy Hargrove was one of my favorite musicians to ever live…
Having the opportunity to see him perform live several times, I witnessed his greatness first-hand…his energy, vibe, and true surrender to the moment were like nothing I’ve ever seen or heard before.
But under his mystery and larger than life musical voice lies an effortless command of jazz language: simple melodic bites over each chord that he’s meticulously gathered over the years.
And that’s the focus of today – these little pieces of minor jazz language that he uses on his solo over the classic standard What Is This Thing Called Love.
The process in today’s lesson will be very easy to follow…
- We’ll first transcribe a minor line for you – Every line we’ll look at will be over F minor making it easy to compare and contrast our findings
- Then we’ll break it down into the several pieces – We’ll aim to make 1 bar pieces from the larger line so that we can practice the language more easily
- And finally, we’ll give you Practice Exercises – These exercises will be progressive and help you master the line by addressing each piece
By understanding how each line is constructed and working on each exercise, your minor language vocabulary will easily grow ten fold in the upcoming weeks.
And with all this language, your understanding of how to improvise over minor chords will be clearer than it’s ever been before.
Let’s get started with the first Roy Hargrove exercise…
Roy Hargrove Minor Exercise #1
For each exercise, we’ll start with a transcribed line from the A Section of What Is This Thing Called Love, a minor ii V i i in the key of F minor…and we’ll be looking at what he plays specifically over the F minor part.
So for this first exercise, have a listen to Roy play this line over this place in the changes…
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