Category Archives: Practicing Improvisation

The Beginning Jazz Improviser’s Biggest Mistake

Improvisation can seem like a mysterious, almost impenetrable process to those new to studying it. The idea that a musician can generate cogent, beautiful melodies on the spot seems almost superhuman. But in fact, it is one of the most human characteristics we possess.

We’re actually natural improvisers. We speak and move spontaneously everyday with no real struggle or wonder about the process. In short, we improvise. Mostly we do this because we practice doing it everyday (it’s called living).

Yet when it comes to musical improvisation, we can sometimes find ourselves in a state of doubt. (This is because we don’t yet have enough specific experiences to strengthen our faith.) For something as seemingly complex as jazz improvisation it is easy to get overwhelmed with where to start and how to proceed. There are so many elements to deal with: tonality, harmony, song forms, time and rhythm to name a few.

I notice that many people who are new to studying jazz make one fundamental mistake: They place far too much emphasis (and study time) on trying to figure out which notes to play as they improvise:

“What should I play over this chord?”

“Which scale ‘works the best’ with that chord?”

“What are the ‘hip’ notes to play on the blues?”

“Is it okay to play F natural over a C major seventh chord?”

Now, for sure, you have to pay attention to note choices, tonal colors, harmony/scale relationships, melodic construction and the like. These are absolutely fundamental to the expression and language of jazz, and studying them requires a huge commitment of time and will.

But studying the tonal aspects alone neglects the most fundamental elements of making jazz sound like jazz: Time, feel (this includes articulation and sound), rhythm, meter and form. You need notes to make music, but you really, really need rhythm. Many things make a jazz artist distinctive, but it’s the artist’s feel, sound, sense of space and form, and rhythmic conception that creates the most immediate, visceral distinction.

Your first goal as a jazz musicians should be on moving the notes. Again, time, feel, rhythm and form. You might know all the music theory in the world, but if you can’t create clear, intentional movement with it you’re going to end up being one frustrated musician.

These days it can safely be said that jazz is a vast, ever expanding language. There really is no such thing as a series of notes (a lick, phrase, etc.) that by itself sounds like “jazz”. What gives it the jazz sound is how it is played. What is the rhythmic feel? What is the expressive intention?

You can play an excerpt from a Bach sonata with an intention of making it sound like jazz, and it will. You can also play a Charlie Parker solo with no clue about the jazz language (or with another, specific, “non-jazz” intention) and it won’t sound like jazz at all.

When I first fell in love with jazz, I didn’t think about notes at all. I used to play completely by ear, “faking” my improvisations. I never gave a thought to the notes I was playing, I just let my ear take me places (I learned early on that if a note sounded bad against what the band was playing, all I had to do was move it up or down a half step and I was fine).

I was more interested in sounding like I was a jazz saxophonist, so I mimicked some of the great jazz saxophonists by how they were moving the notes they were playing. By how they made the notes feel.

As my curiosity grew, I began to study rather extensively my chords, scales, harmonic relationships, etc. My playing grew exponentially, because no matter what I learned, I could immediately express it through my feel and intention. I began to understand what I was doing (and hearing!), and I was also finding so many other melodic possibilities. It was like all that “fake” jazz I’d played set up a marvelous foundation to take on all this new “note” information.

So if you’re new to jazz improvisation, by all means study your chords, scales, harmonic relationships, etc. This is the material of improvisation. But make your main focus be time, rhythm, feel and form. (You’ll find that all these elements are related and support each other).

Here’s a few things you can do to start cultivating these skills:

Listen, listen, listen-Listen to as much jazz as you can. Find players of your instrument and other instruments and listen very carefully to how they make the music feel. Notice, time, rhythm and articulation.

Sing-Find a particular solo that you really like and listen to it over and over until you can accurately sing it note per note. This takes a great deal of time but is so worth it. Not only will it improve how you understand and conceive the feeling of jazz, it will hugely improve your ears for hearing pitch.

Work on two-bar phrases-With your metronome set on beats 2 and 4, practice improvising phrases that fit into 2 bars. If you can’t think of any of the top of your head, take time to write some down. Use eighth and quarter notes to make phrases that are easy to hear and internalize. Aim for musical. You want to get to the point where you can feel a two-bar phrase with no thought at all. This will come in very handy as you start improvising over more complex forms (like standard songs, or the blues).

Play jazz etudes-There are so many resources on the Web to find good, free, jazz etudes. It is also worth it to buy a nice jazz etude book. Randy Hunter has very nice material for the beginning improviser, as does Greg Fishman. You can also play any transcribed jazz solo that makes you excited. Remember, feel is the essence.

Practice whatever you already know with a jazz feel-Whichever scales, arpeggios, phrases, etc. that you easily know should be played with your new, ever developing jazz feel. Make sure you’re working on something you know so well, that you can give most of your attention to your time and feel.

So put feel, time, rhythm, and form first. Make tonality a very, very close second, and you’ll start to sound like a jazz musician in no time.

How Often Do You Stop Listening To Yourself As You Practice Your Instrument?

A Master Musician Talks About Growth And Improvement

Want To Find Your True Voice As An Improviser? Transcribe Yourself

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One of the standard practices in studying jazz music is to transcribe improvised solos played by great performers. From the more “classic” masters such as Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Charlie Parker and Bill Evans, on up to contemporary artists such as Brad Mehldau, Mark Turner or Dave Douglas.

Transcribing a solo that you really like reaps many rewards. It dramatically improves your ear (in my opinion, this is the greatest benefit), narrowing the gap between impulse and expression.

It helps you to expand your harmonic and melodic conception as an improviser. It presents new technical challenges for you. It inspires you by giving you a firsthand aural and kinesthetic experience of how absolutely beautiful and complete an improvised solo can be (it helps you to raise your own standards).

But transcribing solos can have a down side for some musicians. For some, the main aim of transcription is to find phrases (licks, patterns, fragments, etc.) that can be memorized and later used for material during an improvised solo. An arsenal of pre-formed “ideas”, if you will. Though this is expedient, and will certainly help you play more fluently, it doesn’t really do much to help you to find and cultivate your authentic voice as an improviser.

Now, for sure you need to work on patterns, ideas, etc. This is the “material” of your improvisations. But you need to transcend that material to be able to play freely and personally. As the great improviser and teacher Warne Marsh would tell his students (after he was sure they’d worked hard on a particular pattern or idea, “Very good. Never practice that again. You don’t want your playing to become hard, to become mechanical.”

Now, Warne, like many great jazz musicians, transcribed solos. He could play many Lester Young solos easily by ear. But you never, ever heard those Lester licks in any of Warne’s solos.

In fact you never even hear any Warne Marsh licks in any of Warne’s solos. That’s because Warne didn’t have any licks. He instead relied upon his ability to make music in the moment with his own impulse to create. He wanted only to play what he felt and heard. He wanted to express his true voice.

To find that true voice you need to explore what you really hear and feel as you improvise. What is your voice? What do you hear? What do you feel as you improvise? What would you play if your instrument and technique were never in the equation, only your creative spirit?

A great way to explore those questions is to transcribe yourself as you sing your improvisations. That’s right, sing your improvisations.

There are two main benefits to be gained from this.

First, you’ll get a chance to free yourself from your “isms” You know, “saxisms”, trumpetisms”, “pianoisms”, etc., whatever your instrument is. If you transcribe your sung solo and play it on your instrument, you can find all kinds of ways of moving through melodic material that you’ve never explored before. We often get stuck improvising with what feels kinesthetically familiar, rather than what we hear or would like to express. By playing something outside of your “isms” you develop technique and conception in an integrated, practical way.

The second benefit is you’ll get a chance to see what you actually do hear up to that point, so that you can compare that to what you’re studying and practicing. As much as you might like to have all those advanced harmonic and melodic ideas integrated into your solos, you might find that you just don’t hear them yet. No problem, keep practicing them and start singing them (if you aren’t yet doing so).

So here’s a simple way to get started. Choose a standard song (or chord progression, mode, etc.) that you know well, and that you enjoy. Get some kind of a music-minus-solist type of play-along recording (Band In A Box, Jamie Aebersold, etc.) Play and listen several times in a row to the pre-recorded track. As you listen, hear an improvisation in your head (not yet sung). After a few times repeating the track, start to sing your solo. Do this several times, until you really feel connected to the music.

Now record yourself singing your improvisation with the play-along track.

Listen back to your work. See if you can find a solo that you really like. (If you can’t, just see if you can find a chorus or two.) Transcribe it. It is most important to find the notes on your instrument first, but you also might want to eventually write down your transcription. Analyze it. How would you talk about if you were teaching a class in jazz improvisation? What do you like about it? What do you dislike? What are you hearing?

If you practice this regularly (as I have, and continue to do), you’ll gain great confidence in yourself as an artist for one main reason: You’ll realize that nobody in this world imagines and plays music quite like you. You’re literally one of a kind. In my book, that’s a lot, and nobody can take that away from you.

To quote the great improvising pianist Thelonious Monk, “A man’s a genius just for looking like himself.”

It’s important to remember that the vast majority of great jazz artists “looked” (okay, actually “sounded”) like themselves. And this is why we still cherish them.

Want To Improve Your Time? Call Upon Your Imagination

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To me the most fundamental skill for an improvisor to have is good time. Specifically, being able to perceive and control tempo. It’s probably impossible to create rhythmic interest and thematic development without first having a strong internal clock as a point of reference. (You never hear a beautifully improvised solo where the player’s time is unsure and squirming all over the place, do you?) Even when you’re playing with some kind of outside time keeping source (whether a rhythm section, conductor or metronome, or?) you have to be able to internalize and respond to the time.

Good time in music is always flexible of course. If you’ve ever played with a rigid, metronomic drummer, you’ve probably found the time to be less than inspiring, and even somewhat suffocating. The tempo needs to be clear, but it needs to be able to breathe, too. That said, the good time keepers have a tremendous internal sense of the default tempo of the piece they’re playing and don’t stray too far from it, always seeming to come back to it. Doing so helps maintain the integrity of the music.

For the improvisor, one of the fundamental skills is to seamlessly integrate melodic thinking and construction (pitch choices) with the perceived (internalized) tempo. Of course, playing with other musicians means being able to be primarily responsive to the collective tempo by the group. This, too, demands the ability to hear and imagine the collective push and pull of the time.

If you listen to Thelonious Monk, you can often hear the rhythm section pushing against his very strong sense of tempo. Monk was a master of finding the tempos in the “cracks” (you know, those tempos that are either a metronome setting too fast or two slow to stay at comfortably). Whereas most players would default up or down with the tempo to get out of the cracks and back into the “comfortable” (familiar is more like it) tempo, Monk would just sit there in the middle of it. This is what often created such excitement in his music and often characterized the piece he was playing.

To develop this kind of strong internal sense of tempo you have to be able to clearly perceive time as it passes inside your body and mind. That is a matter of imagination. Imagining how the time passes is what it really means to “internalize” the beat. I’d like to offer three exercises (games, really) to help you to imagine the time more vividly (and accurately). They involve working with a metronome, with and without your instrument. I’ve presented them in a sequence, the idea being that you build one skill solidly before you proceed to the next. Here they are:

Canceling the click-Set your metronome to about 80 beats per minute. Listen for at least a minute to the clicks. In your mind, really try to hear each oncoming click before it actually arrives. Now clap your hands on each click. If you can hear the click, you’re either early or late. If you hear nothing but your hands clapping, you’ve landed precisely in the middle of the beat, thus “canceling” out the sound of the metronome. See if you can clap for at least 30 seconds without hearing the click. If you can make it to 30 seconds, slow the metronome down to about 76 and try the same thing. Each time you’re able to cancel the click for at least 30 seconds, lower the tempo setting more. See if you can make it all the way down to 30 beats per minute (this might take weeks to master). If you can imagine the time at this slow tempo, you will have really strengthened your internal clock, and your sense of time will become noticeably better.
Finding the cracks-Take a standard song that you know well, or choose a mode or theme to improvise over. Start at the most comfortable tempo and play a chorus or two (or if it’s an open ended form, just play for a minute or two). Next, move the tempo down one metronome setting and play a chorus. Notice if it’s any less comfortable to play at this tempo. If it is, then stay at this tempo and improvise for a while until you find comfort. Then keep moving the tempo down in increments until you find the tempos that are difficult to internalize. Make a note of these metronome settings. You can do the same as you increase the tempo. Obviously as you increase the tempo upward you’ll run into other challenges with technique and with improvising good quality material. The aim here isn’t to see how fast you can play. You’re just trying to see if it’s (for example) more difficult to improvise over Confirmation at 182 beats per minute as compared to 186 beats per minute.
Fading the click-Find one of those “in the crack” tempos that is challenging to internalize. Set your metronome to click on beats 2 and 4 (in 4/4 time) in that tempo. Improvise for about 4 or 5 minutes in that tempo. Then, turn the metronome off as you continue to improvise in real time, not missing a beat. Improvise for about a minute or so, then turn the metronome back on to see how close you are to the original tempo. If you can stay fairly close to the metronome tempo for a minute, work on increasing your time away from the metronome. The more vivid your imagination of the tempo becomes, the longer you’ll be able to improvise with a solid sense of the original tempo.

These are just a few basic ways to get started in improving your time. In my experience both as performer and teacher I’ve found these to be the most fundamentally effective. I’ve since devised many other games to play with the metronome to expand upon this. I’ll be sharing those in future posts. Enjoy the exploration!