I think the absolute best thing that you can do in the beginning is to memorize repertoire. I've met so many aspiring jazz bassists who will:
1. Buy a fake book
2. Read some scattershot combination of stuff on harmony, like some chord/scale relationships, or one of those books about how to formulaically construct walking bass lines.
3. Get a play-along and try to play some notes from the formula while staring at the chart.
When I was a kid, I did exactly this, and it was an abject failure, so much so that for a while I quit playing jazz because I didn't see how it was possible to do it.
Then years later I got hooked up with a teacher, and the lesson plan was identical every week. Once every few months we would pick out a handful of standards, and we would get together and play them every week. Everybody took a solo on _every_ tune. There was no rule about whether you could look at the chart, but it became apparent pretty quickly that the players who took the chart home and memorized them had far less difficulty than the players who relied on the charts.
Playing standards is a lot like juggling, and when you rely on the chart, you're working with two extra balls in the air- knowing the form and where you are in it, and knowing the changes. If you're trying to make a hip sounding walking line while your hands are also occupied with these other objects, it doesn't leave a lot of space for creativity.
Here are several of the important lessons I learned after doing this every week for several years:
1. Transcribe every time. After I started to figure out the process, I found that the first thing to do when I got a new standard to play was to listen to various recordings of it to see which one had the hippest bass line, and then I would memorize the head and at least a chorus or two from the recording. Learning to play jazz is exactly the same as learning to speak a language. You absolutely have to imitate before you can innovate. Transcription takes some time, but if you start trying to play a tune by looking at a chart, it'd be like if someone gave you a book of grammar rules for a language you don't know and then asked you to write a short story.
2. Get off the book. You need to _know_ the tune to be able to play it. If you've transcribed the head and a chorus, chances are that you know the tune well enough to ditch the chart. It's like jumping into a cold pool, the longer you drag out the process, the more it sucks.
3. Do not focus on exotic tunes first. Like, it is an achievement if you can motor through a tune like Stablemates, and you should definitely make time in your life for learning the oddball yet beloved tunes, but if you spend more time on blues tunes, rhythm changes tunes, and bird tunes first, you will find that you already know how to play a bunch of the other jazz canon as well and you will be comfortable playing over ii-V-Is.
4. Practicing with recordings is useful but not enough. I think playing with recordings is like going to the gym if you're an athlete. You should absolutely do it since it prepares you in a lot of ways, but it's nothing like the actual sport. Human beings playing jazz are wily devils with an endless number of tricks that will wreck you if you try to play jazz with them. Recordings don't screw up, so if you're doing a lot of practice with backing tracks, you will find when you try to actually play the tunes that you don't know them nearly as well as you thought because you unwittingly were reliant on the backing tracks to keep things together.
So much of the theory stuff that I thought that I needed to know before I could play but had trouble memorizing turned out to be a piece of cake when I was learning it on the job so to speak. Chats between songs with a pianist were an endless fountain of learning. I'm very grateful for having learned some harmony in this way, but at least as a bassist, whether I knew that stuff or not turned out not to matter much until I was competent enough at walking to need to start expanding my knowledge to help develop as a soloist, and I regret that theory is often the cart that gets put before the horse with younger players.
Anyway hope that helps and good luck! It's a slog, but a noble one!
1. Buy a fake book
2. Read some scattershot combination of stuff on harmony, like some chord/scale relationships, or one of those books about how to formulaically construct walking bass lines.
3. Get a play-along and try to play some notes from the formula while staring at the chart.
When I was a kid, I did exactly this, and it was an abject failure, so much so that for a while I quit playing jazz because I didn't see how it was possible to do it.
Then years later I got hooked up with a teacher, and the lesson plan was identical every week. Once every few months we would pick out a handful of standards, and we would get together and play them every week. Everybody took a solo on _every_ tune. There was no rule about whether you could look at the chart, but it became apparent pretty quickly that the players who took the chart home and memorized them had far less difficulty than the players who relied on the charts.
Playing standards is a lot like juggling, and when you rely on the chart, you're working with two extra balls in the air- knowing the form and where you are in it, and knowing the changes. If you're trying to make a hip sounding walking line while your hands are also occupied with these other objects, it doesn't leave a lot of space for creativity.
Here are several of the important lessons I learned after doing this every week for several years:
1. Transcribe every time. After I started to figure out the process, I found that the first thing to do when I got a new standard to play was to listen to various recordings of it to see which one had the hippest bass line, and then I would memorize the head and at least a chorus or two from the recording. Learning to play jazz is exactly the same as learning to speak a language. You absolutely have to imitate before you can innovate. Transcription takes some time, but if you start trying to play a tune by looking at a chart, it'd be like if someone gave you a book of grammar rules for a language you don't know and then asked you to write a short story.
2. Get off the book. You need to _know_ the tune to be able to play it. If you've transcribed the head and a chorus, chances are that you know the tune well enough to ditch the chart. It's like jumping into a cold pool, the longer you drag out the process, the more it sucks.
3. Do not focus on exotic tunes first. Like, it is an achievement if you can motor through a tune like Stablemates, and you should definitely make time in your life for learning the oddball yet beloved tunes, but if you spend more time on blues tunes, rhythm changes tunes, and bird tunes first, you will find that you already know how to play a bunch of the other jazz canon as well and you will be comfortable playing over ii-V-Is.
4. Practicing with recordings is useful but not enough. I think playing with recordings is like going to the gym if you're an athlete. You should absolutely do it since it prepares you in a lot of ways, but it's nothing like the actual sport. Human beings playing jazz are wily devils with an endless number of tricks that will wreck you if you try to play jazz with them. Recordings don't screw up, so if you're doing a lot of practice with backing tracks, you will find when you try to actually play the tunes that you don't know them nearly as well as you thought because you unwittingly were reliant on the backing tracks to keep things together.
So much of the theory stuff that I thought that I needed to know before I could play but had trouble memorizing turned out to be a piece of cake when I was learning it on the job so to speak. Chats between songs with a pianist were an endless fountain of learning. I'm very grateful for having learned some harmony in this way, but at least as a bassist, whether I knew that stuff or not turned out not to matter much until I was competent enough at walking to need to start expanding my knowledge to help develop as a soloist, and I regret that theory is often the cart that gets put before the horse with younger players.
Anyway hope that helps and good luck! It's a slog, but a noble one!
