Jazz Advice

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 concept of training for a big race relates to the idea of practicing towards substantial goals as a jazz musician. Part of the reason that a marathon, triathlon, or any other race is appealing, is the pure challenge: an impressive feat that takes an enormous [...]

Lately I’ve realized that to get to specific parts of a solo that I’ve transcribed to memory, I’m quite dependent on the material that comes before them. In other words, I’ve learned the solo from start to finish, the way it was originally played, and therefore, have difficulty jumping around to different sections at will. The goal is to own this material: imitate it, assimilate it, and innovate upon it, as Clark Terry so eloquently stated. Being able to accesses the material from various entry points greatly improves your mastery of the solo, as well as your understanding of the [...]

When I was younger, my father constantly cut out articles from Investor’s Business Daily that he found interesting or inspiring, and casually placed them throughout the house where I would stumble upon them. Not wanting to take parental advice, just like any other kid, most of these articles ended up in the circular file cabinet, however, albeit this childish attitude,  one in particular managed to survive to live another day. In fact, not only did it survive, but it made it’s way on to my wall where it would receive daily attention. Obviously, this one had to communicate real value. [...]

The altered scale allows access to the beautiful tensions of a dominant chord in a flash. The effective use of this scale, however, is not easy. In this article, I’ve assembled what I have found to be the keys to utilizing the altered scale to its full potential. Get beyond the shortcut to the altered scale To find the appropriate notes for an altered scale, simply go up a half step from the root of the chord and play the ascending form of the melodic minor scale (a major scale with a flatted third). So, on G7, you would play [...]

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 a great amount of effort just to be able to play the “right notes” in the first place. So how exactly do you go from thinking about which scale to play over which chord to creating long innovative lines in the style of Bird and [...]

“I’m always trying to learn new bits of language.”-Michael Brecker There are a lot of things to practice. What is truly vital to practice if you want to get better at improvising? Plain and simple: Language. Spending time with the actual language of jazz, the recordings of the greats, should be your number one priority. What is language in the context of jazz? “Language embodies the world view of a culture and is unique to the culture that created it. It reflects values and concepts that are deemed to be the most important by a culture. A language describes the [...]

The melodic minor scale is a scale that you’ve probably learned early on in your musical development, but it can take on a whole new life when applied to jazz. This scale is a very useful and versatile scale for improvisers to know and not just for soloing over minor chords or tonalities. The melodic minor presents some nice harmonic options when you are looking to get away from just playing diatonically over common chord progressions in your solos. You can utilize the melodic minor scale over major, minor and dominant chords equally well, so there are many applications from [...]

Ever go to the practice room with a plan of what you want to get done, only to realize that an hour has passed and you’ve just muddled around? Playing your instrument is fun and it is easy to get distracted by the joy you get from simply playing. No reason to totally give up those free playing sessions, just save them for later in your practice routine once you’ve covered the material you want learn. Combing two concepts, timeboxing and spaced learning, you can be sure to stay on task and achieve noticeable gains from your effort. Timeboxing Timeboxing [...]

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 the Bebop era, for instance. Musicians like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell learned the music of a previous generation by ear and as they progressed, used their harmonic knowledge to analyze what they were hearing and apply it to their own playing, altering [...]

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 time spent on teaching concepts like chord progressions and scales, but it is just as important is terms of learning the style of jazz. When we start to learn jazz early on, educators usually teach jazz articulation by showing us a major scale in eighth [...]