Jazz Advice

Every so often we make a musical discovery that drastically changes the way we approach improvisation. One day we are struggling over the same tunes, growing more and more frustrated with our own predictable patterns and then it hits us – we suddenly discover a secret that was hidden right before our eyes.

A subtle mental, aural, or physical shift occurs and we are able to approach improvisation in an entirely new way. From then on, our eyes (and ears) are opened to a wealth of new possibilities.

Looking back at the last fifteen years or so of my own journey to learn improvisation, I have made some very important musical discoveries that have changed the way I look at the music. Some of these discoveries came rather quickly, with a small amount of practice and others I had to struggle with for years before I had control of them.

Regardless of how long the discovery took, the result was the same: from that point on my ears changed and I took on a deeper understanding of the music. Most importantly, I now went into the practice room with a renewed excitement for improvising.

On my journey to find these breakthroughs, I looked for information in all sorts of places. Some of this information I found in books on how to improvise and some of it, in contrast, was not mentioned in any texts, videos, or lessons. Some of it was handed to me numerous times while I foolishly ignored … Read More

When you’re frustrated with your playing it’s difficult to excel at all. It’s difficult to make a coherent musical statement, let alone even listen to yourself. These bouts happen to everyone. The key is to not get too discouraged and press on…

Turn off the play-alongs

We all love jamming with a play-along, but in times of frustration, they can be extremely detrimental to your progress. What happens is you’re soloing with a play-along and you’re not content with the result, so you click the back-button on the player and give it another go.

The second run through is still not quite there, so you do it again. This behavior gets you more and more frustrated, yet with each attempt, you feel a stronger need to try it one more time to “fix” the problem.

This scenario is like beating your head against a wall, then forgetting how much it hurts, and doing it again and again. It’s human nature to want to fix our problems right away; nothing can wait, we must fix it now, and we’re oblivious that our frustrations consume us in the process, but you must rise above this natural tendency.

By trying to fix the problems you’re frustrated with by taking chorus after chorus with a play-along, you’ll ingrain horrendous habits and dig yourself deeper into the depths of frustration. When you’re frustrated with your playing, turn the play-alongs off.

Turn on your favorites

When you’re frustrated, where better to turn then to your heroes? … Read More

Why is it so difficult to learn jazz standards even when we have access to so much information about each and every one? We can bring up recordings with a few clicks of mouse via Youtube, we can find plenty of fakebooks with the chords and melody written out for us if we’re too lazy to learn them from recordings, and we can even slow down anything that’s too fast for us in programs like Transcribe.

With all these resources at our disposal and even using them, how is it that we still have trouble with the jazz standard repertoire? It comes down to one main thing: we’re bored with standards.

Why we’re bored with standards

The jazz standards come from the “Great American Songbook.” Essentially, songs that infiltrated Broadway musicals and popular movies of the past were adopted and modified by jazz composers and performers to create versions of a tune for the jazz idiom.

Why was it so easy and natural for the legends of this music to learn these songs? Simply put, because it was the pop music of their time. For instance, Charlie Parker was born in 1920. Body and Soul was written in 1930, All The Things You Are in 1939, and Stella By Starlight in 1944. So Parker was 10, 19, and 24, when these three standards came out. He grew up with this music! Not growing up the music you’re going to play is a huge disadvantage.

Chances are, you … Read More

Learning to improvise is a path with many steps leading to many different levels.

Contrary to the belief held by some that improvising is a talent, or even a skill allowed to only a special few, the truth is much simpler. Time and again we must tackle new concepts and tirelessly practice them until we have them in our ears and fingers. The wondrous aspect of learning improvisation is that it is a process that never ends – you can always improve and there will always be another level to strive for.

The difficult part, however, comes in pushing yourself to get to that next level.

In the process of learning to improvise, we immediately make big jumps in skill level. We go from knowing a few major scales to understanding chord structures, from hearing basic chord progressions to playing improvised lines over entire tunes. Eventually we transcribe a solo and begin to think about the concepts of phrasing, motivic development, sound, time, and articulation.

All of these steps are huge and it truly feels great when we accomplish them. We go from dealing with music superficially to actually creating something meaningful and personal. With each level, a whole new world of sound and possibilities is discovered.

As we become more advanced technically and more sophisticated harmonically however, it takes more and more work to break through to the next level. Despite our previous successes, roadblocks inevitably pop up in the way of our improvement: we get lazy, complacent with … Read More

Daily practice is the key to growing into the player you wish to become. Everyday, building upon the knowledge you learned the previous day, moving forward, getting closer and closer…that’s the goal.

But what if with each day, you’re just more and more frustrated? What if you’re simply bored with your sound and most everything you play? We’ve received dozens of emails about people feeling this way, unmotivated and uninspired.

While daily practice is a must, practicing with such a negative mindset  will cause more damage than improvement. You’ll be ingraining a sound you don’t like, with lines you’re not fond of, playing in a manner that is simply not you.

Want to play the way you want to play, playing with a sound and vocabulary that constitutes your ideal? If done thoughtfully and intentionally, taking time away from your instrument can actually help you achieve this. It can give you the much needed time to stop and reflect on what you truly want to sound like. And when you return to daily practicing, you can start with a clean slate, as if you reset yourself, starting anew and feeling re-energized.

Taking time off

Should you really take time off? For how long? If you do, won’t you lose everything you’ve worked on? These are all valid questions and things to think about before you decide to put down your horn for a bit. As with everything having to do with learning this music, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer.

From my … Read More

Clark Terry is one of the living legends of this music.

He has played with every big name in jazz over the last half-century from the likes of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson, to Ella Fitzgerald…the list could go on forever. With such a rich performing career spanning over six decades, he continues to play with today’s top musicians and inspire up and coming improvisers.

During school, I was lucky enough to have an impromptu lesson with the trumpet master. One night after a rehearsal for a gig, Clark came in unannounced to the practice rooms at our school looking to impart some wisdom to some aspiring musicians. Before I knew it I was sitting inches from Clark Terry’s bell and he was teaching me a tune by ear.

That sound that I had listened to for years on record was coming out of a horn a foot away from me. It was an experience that I will always remember. I don’t know what was more impressive, the fact that I was sitting down with a jazz legend or that Clark, age of 89, came into the music school practice rooms around 10 at night to hang out with students for free.

Pretty amazing, but then again Clark Terry has been dedicated to educating young jazz musicians for decades. He mentored a young Miles Davis and encouraged Quincy Jones as he was starting out as an arranger and trumpet player. With a track record like that, it’s … Read More

In practicing improvisation, one common pitfall that we run into is expecting to find the secrets of jazz all by ourselves. We gather our books and recordings and head into the practice room determined to overcome the difficulties of improvisation with an army of one. What’s the big deal, you taught yourself Spanish, so how hard could jazz be?

Eventually, we encounter the inevitable – we get frustrated with our progress, hit a wall with our ear training skill or harmonic knowledge, and lose motivation. Not to worry. You are not alone.

While it is necessary to spend hours in the practice room by yourself studying records and working on instrumental technique, we can’t figure everything out for ourselves – we need some sort of guidance. If you look at the history of jazz, the best improvisers had mentors and studied intently under the guidance of their heroes. This is easier than it sounds. There are resources all around us – we just have to seek them out.

Looking for guidance

We have opportunities to talk to and take lessons with great musicians everywhere. Learn to take advantage of these situations. Find the players that you admire and aspire to sound like. These players may be local heroes that you see every week or huge names in jazz that you only have access to through interviews. Find out what makes them tick. What specifically did they practice? How long did it take them to get where they are today? Who … Read More

We get hundreds of questions every month. We do our best to answer as many as we possibly can and write articles about the most provocative ones. Below are answers to the most common questions, pointing you to the many articles that will help resolve the question. Enjoy.

Who should I transcribe?

Transcribing is an extremely personal process. I remember asking one of the great tenor saxophonist of today a similar question when I was 19. He told me that no one can tell you who to transcribe because that’s essentially who you’re going to be influenced by the most. He asked me who I listened to a lot. Who could I not get enough of. And said, “That’s who you should transcribe.”

Hopefully that gives you a better understanding of what transcribing means to your  development and how important it is you make your own decisions about it. Everybody’s list of who to transcribe would be completely different because we all have differing ideas of what we want to sound like and what kind of language we want to absorb.

Refer to these articles:

• Transcribing is not Transcribing
• Transcribe With a Purpose
• How transcribing One Solo Can Change Your Approach
• Practicing less and improving more through transcription
• Overcoming Obstacles in Transcription
• Isolating Each Chorus in a Transcription
• Getting More From Transcribing

I’m learning language but now I feel like I’m just playing practiced material. How do I get beyond this?

Learning language often starts out like this. You memorize … Read More

When I think about what it means to “let go,” detailed scenes from Hollywood hits come to mind. Scenes like Neo in The Matrix learning that “there is no spoon,” and Tom Cruise in the Last Samurai being taught to think “No mind.”

There’s a good reason these type of scenes take place in so many films: to achieve our potential in activities that occur in the moment (things like combat, public speaking, and improvising), we must surrender to the moment. Film writers know that this message plays an important role in reality and that we relate to it on an intimate level, hence they include it in many movies.

Like Neo in The Matrix and Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, we too can learn to control our thoughts and free our mind to make way for our creativity.

Letting go: performance versus practice

Too much conscious thought during performance impedes our ability to perform at our optimum level. For this reason, it’s important to learn how to not think so much while we perform.

Believe it or not, this skill is something that we actually all tend to do quite naturally. How many times have you gone to the practice room and just played for hours with no specific direction? If you answered “yes”, then you’re human.

The problem is that when you’re alone in the practice room, for the bulk of your practice session, it’s the wrong time to play with the let-go-mindset. At the end … Read More

Over the years, in learning this music and working on improvisation, I’ve encountered a lot of educational information: how to learn, how to practice, which scales to use, how to learn bebop in a week, etc. Looking back, the hardest part can be deciding which method is best or which information to trust. Sometimes the best bet for getting the “real” information is to go directly to the source, the words of the masters.

Whether you come across these words in books, interviews, masterclasses, or even in person, be sure take these words seriously. If someone is playing at the highest level, then you can be sure that they know a thing or two about how to learn this music. Even a comment or remark in passing can carry great weight and might just be the insight you need to get your playing to the next level.

One book I’ve been checking out recently is To Be, or Not…To Bop by Dizzy Gillespie. Along with biographical details and recollections from other notable musicians, are some passages with valuable musical insight. One such item, is a list of essential qualifications for jazz musicians, a musical “to-do list” for all improvisers. Any words of wisdom from the masters of this music is worth taking a look at and this list is no exception.…Read More