The Lesson Library

10 Must-Know Jazz Chord Progressions
Getting to the next level as an improviser means moving beyond the basics of chords and scales. Specifically, it’s all about focusing on the harmonic relationships in the jazz repertoire – what we call jazz chord progressions. You see, there are a finite set of harmonic relationships that pop up in the majority of popular ...

Jazz Chords – The Definitive Guide to Mastery
Jazz chords are at the very heart of why jazz sounds the way it does and as a player, these sounds are essential to have in your ear on a deep level. But what makes this so difficult? What are jazz chords and why do they sound different than regular chords? And what makes them ...

3 Roy Hargrove Minor Exercises on What Is This Thing Called Love
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 ...

Jazz Scales – Everything You Need To Know
Jazz scales are something everyone talks about. Chances are, you’ve been told that you need to know dozens of scales to play jazz and that these structures hold the keys to unlocking jazz improvisation. But what you might not realize is that you don’t need to know a million jazz scales to construct a solid ...

Mastering Chords in Jazz: The Flat VII
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 ...

The Art of Playing One Chord: A Lesson with Miles & Trane
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 ...

Modal Jazz 101 – Tricks, Tips, & Approaches From Miles Davis
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 ...

Jazz Harmony: Why You’re Overlooking This Crucial Skill
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 ...

Music Theory Basics: The Circle of Fifths
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 ...

The Two Types of Chords You’ll Find in Any Piece of Music
Here’s something that you’ve probably realized by now on your musical journey…that jazz improvisation can get very complicated, very quickly. In the blink of an eye your enjoyable musical hobby can transform into something that feels a little bit like homework – a tricky exercise with right and wrong answers. Suddenly the simple act of ...

Miles Davis: The Power of the Triad
Perhaps the most impressive thing about the musical masters that we look up to isn’t their ability to create incredibly fast and complex lines or even their vast library of harmonic knowledge… It lies in something much more simple – their uncanny ability to take the most fundamental elements of music and create meaningful ideas ...

Essential Progressions – 4 Sonny Rollins Tools to Tackle The V7 of V7
I can still remember the day I discovered how amazing the ii V7 chord progression could be. After struggling for years, It was as if a locked door finally opened and I was granted access to a secret society… I finally saw what all the fuss over ii Vs was about and why they mattered ...