Inspiration for improvisers
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Inspiration, Jazz Advice and Tips, Playing Techniques
Open up a music theory book and you’ll likely find pages and pages of definitions. Terms like apogituras, retograde inversions, mordents, hemiolas, turns…Good information, but not exactly stuff that you’d want to put into your next solo. I mean what did stuffy old composers know about improvising anyway? But before you dismiss all that tedious …
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Composition, Playing Techniques, Premium Only
If you’ve spent any time practicing jazz improvisation, chances are you’ve heard of the turnaround. Those little two bar chord progressions that pop up at the ends of tunes or in the middle of your solo, leading you back to the top of the form. But what you might not realize is that these turnarounds …
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Composition, How to Practice Jazz, Jazz Advice and Tips, Jazz Education, Transcribing
Since the time of Art Tatum and Charlie Parker, the practice tools of the jazz musician have consisted of three basic things: a room, your instrument, and a record player. If you wanted to get some work done in the shed, that’s all you needed… Nearly 70 years later, things are still the same for …
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How to Practice Jazz, Premium Only
In case you were starting to mistake jazz musicians for super-humans…Or highly talented individuals that know thousands of tunes, have perfect pitch, and transcribe solos in mere minutes, I thought I’d write a post to correct that picture in your mind. In fact, I want to show you one of the most important rules when …
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Doxy is one of those classic Sonny Rollins tunes that gradually made its way into the jazz standard repertoire. Originally recorded in 1954 and released on the album Miles Davis with Sonny Rollins, its compact form and changes make for a great improvisational vehicle. And today, Doxy has become one of the most recommended tunes …
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There are certain composers in the jazz tradition…ones that have such a uniquely personal style that their compositions seem to take on a life of their own, becoming part of the jazz pantheon long after the lifetime of the writer. Composers like Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Wayne Shorter, and especially Thelonious Monk come immediately to …
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Chords, Jazz Language, Transcribing
The ii V progression makes up the vast majority of chord changes within the jazz standard repertoire. Much of our success or failure as improvisors comes from being able to navigate this deceptively simple progression. Learning how to play over ii Vs is actually much easier than you think. The mistake most people make is …
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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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Chords, Composition, Playing Techniques
We all have lines we use frequently. Some lines we use so much, that we can’t stand them, criticizing ourselves for playing them over and over, thinking we’re being unoriginal and uncreative… It’s ok. Even the masters repeat themselves often. When you’ve got some specific language to this point, where it’s coming out naturally and …
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Jazz Advice and Tips, Transcribing
It’s just past one in the morning. I’m standing on the sidewalk in lower Manhattan as garbage trucks rumble by and panhandlers hustle for loose change. I’ve just stepped outside of Smalls, the last note of the show still ringing in my ears… After a few minutes, a well known trumpet player steps out and …
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Jazz Language, Perspectives, Playing Techniques
We spend a lot of time thinking about what we want to play, but how often do we think about what we don’t want to play? I’m sure if you spent some time recording yourself or simply observing what you play, you’d find you’re playing some things that you actually do not want to play. …
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Chords, Composition, How to Practice Jazz, Music Theory, Playing Techniques, Scales
You want to play exciting solos. Ones that will make the audience sit on the edge of their seats, that’ll make you stand out from every other musician in the room. But when you improvise everything ends up sounding exactly the same.. Many musicians share this frustration and for many it goes right back to …