Jazz Advice

Everybody talks about learning tunes. I mean everybody. It’s the one common thread that you hear about at jam sessions, in music schools, and conversations with great players. So much emphasis is placed upon the need for more tunes it’s not surprising that most players have this burgeoning mental complex about knowing and learning tunes that hangs over their heads day after day like a black cloud.

With this ominous mindset, the simple act of learning a tune becomes a painful, long, drawn-out process that we try to avoid at all costs.

For years, I was stuck in this mental box and would force myself to try to learn tunes by pure memorization, from a piece of paper. Hours were spent in fruitless pursuit and it became easier to read tunes than to actually learn them. When it came time to perform these tunes, I was hanging onto these mental facts like a stranded swimmer holding on to a life preserver.

If I couldn’t think of those note names I memorized or that sequence of fingerings, I had nothing to play and worse, no aural skills to keep me afloat.

When you are learning in a situation like this, building a solid repertoire can seem like an impossible task. Even when you do manage to learn a tune, are you sure that you truly know it and will remember it?

If this sounds familiar, you’ve probably had the same thought I often had: There has to be a better … Read More

It’s a question that we get asked all the time on gigs, at jam sessions, and even in our weekly lessons.

As you probably know, it’s not a lot of fun when you are put on the spot and don’t know a tune. In fact, it seems like a lot of the motivation for our practice comes from our efforts to avoid this very experience of getting caught off guard or looking like an unprepared moron.

We try to memorize as many tunes as we can, we make longs lists of standards to learn, we listen to and transcribe various recordings of the greats playing, and in our free time we try to review these melodies and progressions in our heads.

However, even after all the lists, listening sessions, and memorization practice, have you done enough to “know” that tune? Take a second and honestly ask yourself: “How well do I really know these tunes?”

Do you know them well enough to shape interesting original solos? Have you spent enough time in the practice room to be free in performance or do the form and progression feel like shackles weighing you down? Are you doing just enough to fumble through yet another melody and chord progression?

I hear musicians all the time talk about all the tunes they know, but when it comes down to it, the definition of “knowing” a tune ends up being pretty wide. For some, knowing a tune means hearing it once and faking their way … Read More

So you’ve transcribed some ii-V lines. You’ve even learned a few solos note for note directly from the record, but, despite your efforts, you’re not seeing the results you expected. Transcribing those lines from your favorite player didn’t transform you into the great improviser that everyone had promised. At the end of the day, improvisation is still just as hard as it was before.

Well, what’s the deal? Is transcription just another useless exercise distracting us from getting better as an improviser?

Not at all. Transcription is just the beginning, a mere introduction to an in-depth process that is vital to your musical improvement. Figuring out the notes of a solo is an important first step, however, if you stop there you’re missing the point.

Sure, you can analyze the notes and chords that you’ve figured out and written down, but ask yourself this simple question: Do you want to be a jazz theorist or a jazz improviser?

If your goal is to improve as an improviser, you need to take this transcribed language to an entirely new level. This may come as a shock to those who’ve subscribed to the belief that writing down solos is the beginning and end of jazz practice. If you want this language to be useful in your solos, you must learn to apply it.

Below are three steps that will allow you take the language that you’ve transcribed and apply it effectively to any musical situation.

I) Do the prep work

The simple … 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

We practice long tones. We work on two-five progressions until our fingers bleed. We work on new ideas and concepts. The work is mostly enjoyable, sometimes frustrating, and hopefully productive. But what is all this diligent dedication for?

Tunes. What else is there?

Everything we do is to play tunes in the way we so desire. Think about it. Nobody cares how great you sound on a G7 chord, but if the G7 is part of a tune, then it matters. It sounds so simple yet I’m not convinced that most people have connected the dots on this subtle fact: All the hard work we do is for the purpose of playing music in the form of tunes.

The standard way of thinking about tunes is that they are this separate entity, a chore, a task in isolation to tackle, just like anything else we practice. From this mindset, people transcribe a solo, they practice the hell out of licks, they even work on developing their own vocabulary…but…they never connect all these things with the tunes they are working on.

If the ideas and techniques you’re practicing are not available to you when you go to perform a tune, what’s the point of practicing them? The goal is to have everything available to you, as if every single thing you’ve ever worked on is a piece of ammo at your disposal ready to be fired at will when you perform a tune.

Everything is connected

Why for most of us … Read More

Repetition. It’s one part of learning to improvise that’s par for the course. We practice scales over and over again until the technique is securely in our fingers, we spend hours repeatedly working out ii-V7 lines that we’ve transcribed, and we memorize the melodies and chord changes to numerous tunes until we can play them in our sleep.

The great part about all of this repetition is that when we finally have something ingrained into our ears and fingers, we can play it anywhere, especially under pressure.

However, the one drawback with this type of practice is that it’s extremely easy to get stuck in a rut. If you aren’t continually incorporating new language into your playing and searching for new creative approaches to those familiar progressions, you’ll be left with your same old musical approach – and this can be a problem.

In the past I would find myself frustrated, bored, and completely out of ideas on the standards I was practicing. It seemed like I couldn’t think of any new ideas to use over the chord progressions and that I was playing the same stuff over and over again. Although, this didn’t happen without reason. Looking back, the way I approached these tunes mentally and technically contributed significantly to how I played over them.

In the practice room I would play a melody, reading from a page in the real book, the same exact way every time. Instead of getting out the recording, I would turn on play-a-longs … Read More

One thing you always want to be doing is learning new material. New lines, new tunes, new concepts…there’s always something new to learn.

We preach the mantra Quality Over Quantity in practically everything we write. So, while it’s true you always want to learn new things, the idea is to judiciously select what you want to learn and truly master it, rather than attempting to learn a ton, in a half-assed manner.

The way we approach practicing is closely tied to successfully integrating new material and techniques into our playing.

Breaking new material into smaller tasks

The first step to learning something new is breaking this new thing into smaller tasks that you can easily conceptualize and approach. I always use this tactic when learning tunes.

Take a tune and rather than trying to tackle the entire 32 bars, instead tell yourself, “I’m just going to learn the first 8 measures, and really get to know them inside and out.” That’s all you worry about. The first 8 measures.

You pretend that, for now, the rest of the tune doesn’t exist. Once you master those 8 bars over a period of several hours, days, or even months (it doesn’t matter how long it takes. What matters is true ownership), then you move onto the next 8 bars.

The nice thing about most jazz standards is that they are comprised of only two distinct sections: the A and B sections. This makes it very simple. Once you’ve mastered the first 8 … Read More

In a recent post: A Blueprint for Building Your Repertoire, I outlined some ideas to ponder while creating a repertoire of tunes. Concepts like how to learn, listen to, and how to approach the Great American songbook as you prepare to build your own repertoire.

However, the real work begins when you get into the practice room and start learning these tunes one by one. As I mentioned in the previous post, you don’t have to start over every time you learn a new tune. Many of the songs that are standards are related in some way, whether it’s a similar harmonic progression, form, or melodic construction.

For this article, I’ll expand on the ideas of form and harmonic construction and their use in the standard jazz repertoire.

Looking at form

Many jazz standards are written within the same common forms: 12 bar blues, 32 bar AABA, and 32 bar ABAC. If you understand the construction of these forms and can hear the different sections, your work at learning all these tunes will be significantly easier.

AABA

One of the most common forms for jazz standards is the 32 bar AABA format, 8 bar A sections and an 8 bar bridge. An immediately recognizable example of this form is the chord progression rhythm changes:

Some other common 32 bar tunes in AABA are: Confirmation, Body and Soul, Easy Living, Have you Met Miss Jones, I Mean You, Lazy Bird, A Night in Tunisia, Softly as in a Morning Sunrise, … Read More

Learning tunes. Memorizing standards. Building a solid repertoire that continues to grow. These ideas are always hovering at the back of an improviser’s mind.

We make lists of tunes, print out lead sheets to study, set deadlines to learn a ton of tunes by and so on and so forth. For years, I did all of these and more, and can tell you from experience that these methods are simply ineffective. Trying to quickly memorize a tune from a lead sheet or rushing to cram as many tunes as possible will get you nowhere.

The process of building a lasting repertoire of tunes, however, is truly a daily effort. To properly learn and ingrain standards, you need to set aside time and incorporate related skills into your daily practice routine, rather than periodically trying to stock up on standards.

While some aspects of practice for a jazz musician focus on creativity and freedom, this is one area that requires dedicated time and discipline – sitting down with the records and slowly ingraining melodies and progressions aurally as well as mentally.

You’ll quickly find that this approach is much more beneficial than making a huge list and trying to attack ten tunes at once. Here are a few key concepts to keep in mind as you get to work on building your repertoire:

There are only so many tunes

When you first are confronted with learning tunes, the sheer number of standards to learn is downright overwhelming. Pick up a real … Read More

Ever spend a lot of time learning a tune, only to realize that you’ve completely forgotten it a few weeks later?

When you’re not achieving your desired results in pretty much anything, check your methods. What’s your process? What’s your approach? After detailing your current methods, you can then easily modify them to realign yourself with your goals.

If your current method of learning a tune is: find the Aebersold play-along track, flip it on, read the written music and go on like that for hours, days, or even years hoping for the best, just stop now. While there are countless ways to use play-alongs effectively, this is not one of them.

I’m not going to dwell on this point because I say it in nearly every article: learn the tune from the recordings. I know it’s difficult. I know it takes time. I know sometimes you can’t hear what chord it is or what the bass player is playing.

For any given tune, dozens of recordings exist. On any given track, dozens of courses go by. There are plenty of opportunities to figure out what’s going on harmonically, rhythmically, and melodically in virtually any tune.

This article could end here. It could end here because if you spent a significant time to learn a tune off the record in this manner, you would have the ability to easily recall that tune. Sure, you may have to think about it for a minute, or clear your mind and hear … Read More