Inspiration for improvisers
Eric 
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August is finally here and with the approaching end of summer looms the shadow of the fall marathon season. Across the country runners are stepping up their training for races that they’ve been preparing for since the beginning of summer. As I have started to prepare for my own race, I’ve thought about how the …
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At a certain point in your development as an improviser it becomes necessary to evolve beyond just playing “right notes” and using your favorite licks and move onto playing longer coherent musical phrases that develop over the length of your solo. This can be an especially frustrating stumbling block to overcome in that it takes …
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Chords, Composition, Music Theory
The melodic minor scale is a scale that every musician should be familiar with and eventually master. But what many players don’t realize is that this scale encompasses much more than 8 notes to drill in the practice room… Aside from a minor scale variation to memorize, the melodic minor scale presents a number of …
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Ear Training, Jazz Advice and Tips, Perspectives
There are really two areas of musicianship, aside from technique on an instrument, that a jazz musician requires to be a complete improviser. One is developing great ears and the other is an intellectual understanding of harmony. These two qualities can especially be found among the countless innovators of the music. Take the musicians of …
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Jazz Advice and Tips, Playing Techniques
Articulation…tonguing notes, it seems like a pretty simple concept, right? Well, not exactly. It has taken me quite a while and a ton of practice to figure out how to articulate my lines correctly when I’m soloing. If you think about it, articulation is not really focused on in jazz education when compared to the …
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Kenny Dorham was one of the first trumpet players that I checked out when I was starting to listen to jazz and after years of studying the music he is still one of my favorite trumpet players. K.D. was a prominent figure throughout the stylistic changes of the music from bebop to the modern jazz …
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Playing Techniques, Premium Only
After playing a tune for a while, it can seem like you are playing the same ideas or licks over the changes every time. For example, you see a D minor chord and think “okay D minor, I can play a D dorian scale or a D harmonic minor scale or arpeggiate from the third…” …
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Inspiration, Jazz Advice and Tips, Playing Techniques
For a lot of musicians that are working to improve, it is easy to spend most of our practice time working on really complex harmonic and rhythmic concepts while fundamental skills, that we all basically know, are pushed to the back burner. This happens easily if you think about it; after progressing to and achieving …
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As improvisers we are always looking to create new harmonic concepts or to find new ways of soloing over traditional changes that are innovative and creative. Actually, for the past sixty years jazz musicians have been playing the same basic set of standard tunes, each generation making their stylistic mark on the history of the …
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It seems like jazz musicians are always thinking about tunes; knowing tunes, learning tunes, how does that one go again? Performing in different situations we are expected to know certain tunes that other musicians will call or even people in the audience will request. This can seem like a very daunting task at first and …
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Playing Techniques, Transcribing
Transcribe, transcribe , transcribe. It is what you’ve been hearing since you started to learn how to improvise…and for a good reason. Transcribing is one of the best ways to learn the stylistic language of jazz, improve your ear and in short, become a better all around improviser. The mere act of learning a solo …
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Practicing jazz improvisation is a life-long pursuit. But just because you put in the time, doesn’t mean you’ll improve. HOW you spend that time is just as important… Here are 3 keys to practicing as effectively as possible: 1. Create your own space As a musician, time spent working in the practice room is an …