Here’s a question for you…Are you making the process of learning to play jazz standards harder than it has to be? …searching for answers in theory books, obsessing over scales, and turning your daily practice session into a soul-searching quest for your personal sound when you just want to be playing music?
The thing is, learning to play a great solo doesn’t have to be overly abstract or even complicated.
If you want to see results in the practice room, it comes down to something much more concrete: b>Find someone who sounds good and figure out what they’re doing.
It’s as simple as that. The process is the same for learning to play over a single chord as it is for learning to navigate the progression to a jazz standard.
And it’s the same for learning to create a great solo on Rhythm Changes.
So if you’re frustrated with your playing, stop guessing, stop worrying about hundreds of scales and stop mindlessly jamming for hours with a play-a-long track.
With some key techniques ingrained from the right sources, you’ll go from scraping by in frustration to playing better than you ever could’ve imagined.
In today’s lesson we’ve taken 6 rhythm changes solos from the masters and highlighted dozens of specific techniques that you can begin practicing today.
Ready to get started? Here we go…
1) Lester Young: Lester Leaps In
Before you get obsessed with scales and before you start worrying about turnarounds or ii-V licks, you need to remember one thing – you’re playing music.
Each time you take a solo your goal should be to create melodic ideas based on what you’re hearing. But this can be harder than it seems coming from the entrenched chord-scale approach to improvisation.
A great lesson in the art of simple melodic construction and musical phrasing over Rhythm Changes comes from Lester Young. In his famous solo on Lester Leaps In he creates melodic phrases with surprisingly simple material.
Many musicians practicing improvisation are simply trying to tackle too much at once. A valuable exercise is to limit your note choices and create a solo with only a few key techniques. Do more with less material!
On first listen the recording and musical style may sound dated, but the musical lessons inside are timeless. In the opening of his solo he states a simple musical idea with rhythmic clarity and swing and develops it in the phrases that follow – the essence of improvisation in any tune that you play.
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