Every single musician to ever embark on learning to improvise jazz runs into countless musical problems. That’s just the way it is. One problem after another, figuring out different ways to approach a progression in hopes of clarifying their musical ideas and better communicating them to the listener.
So if you want to play jazz, then being a problem solver is where it’s at. And the more you can understand about the problem solving process as applied to learning jazz, the better equipped you’ll be on your journey.
Over the years I’ve had tons of musical problems, but the most common one is simple – having difficulty playing over a few bars of a tune.
This single problem sums up why you can’t play a jazz standard the way you want to and why you prefer some over others. You see, if there are a few bars in a tune that you stumble over every time you reach them, well it pretty much ruins your entire solo.
I can recall having this problem with the famous Tadd Dameron tune Lady Bird. For the life of me, I never felt creative or inspired playing over the first few bars of the tune.
Now it wasn’t that I couldn’t play them or didn’t know the chord changes, in fact I knew the theory, scales, and chords really well…I just felt as though nothing sounded good coming out of my horn, despite knowing all the theory behind the changes.
I was lost…
And I’m sure you can relate – you know the theory, you know what’s supposed to work, but no matter what scale you use or theoretical concept you apply, nothing seems to actually sound good.
But the bottom line is this – If you don’t like the way you’re playing over a tune, it’s up to you to isolate the specific problem and solve it rather than reenforcing poor soloing decisions and musical ideas that you don’t actually like.
What’s your Problem?
No matter where you’re at in your development, you’re going to have musical problems…
But having problems over a tune like this is actually a positive thing. They’re the fuel that feed your motivation to improve.
Think about it…if you never had any musical problems and were in love with how you played over every piece of every tune, why would you need to practice? Why would you need to improve? Why would you need to continually search for ways to better approach something?
But just like me and every other jazz musician, you have dozens of musical problems that you hope to solve too.
Each one of these problems is not an obstacle in your way, but an opportunity to grow beyond your current skill level, a chance to open your mind and musical perspective.
As you progress in your jazz improvisation journey, the problems never end, which means your opportunities to grow as a musician never end…
Today I want to share with you a process of how to solve your musical problems so you can continuously face your challenges and move forward.
So let’s take my problem from Ladybird and really dive into how we might solve it. First, have a listen to the tune to get familiar with the composition.
Now here’s the problem that plagued me: Every single time I tried to improvise over the first part of the A Section (the first 5 bars or so), I felt bored, uninspired, and formulaic, as if nothing I played really mattered…
I would improvise with a background track on repeat, hoping that something good would come out, but it never did…
Eventually I realized that I needed some help…but not in the form of a private lesson or a book. I needed to be shown what was possible in the form that musical solutions actually come in: sound.
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