Oh I dunno. I prolly just haven't given it enough thought. I've only fooled with them sort of in passing.
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Jazz soloing technique
- Thread starter Keith Berrigan
- Start date
Oh I dunno. I prolly just haven't given it enough thought. I've only fooled with them sort of in passing.
True. But that never stopped anybody from chiming in here before.
Truth is, for me it isn’t so much jazz itself that was the turnoff. It was a certain clique within the jazz crowd. Same with upright bass which is what I started on and played for the first seven years I played bass. Adore the instrument. Have no use for the cult surrounding it.
But it’s a big world. Something in it for everyone.
Note: just for the record I did contribute my two cents on one way to approach soloing earlier. So it’s not like I’m just firing off editorial comments here.
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As bass players and musicians, do people here really need to be told that? Rhythm is what we supposed do.
Thank you.
I am in it with you. I am all for a kinder and gentler TB, but I feel I need to speak up feel when I hears stuff that I believe ain't necessarily so. So my personal creed is as follows:
1) If you can hear and immediately comprehend and replay what you hear, you are a superstar.
2) If you can't, you need metronomes, music theory, scales, sight reading, instructors and lots of woodshedding as required to make up the deficit.
Before I went to school to study jazz, I was a p.o.s musically illiterate eric clapton clone guitarist who gigged and did light studio work. If TB existed back then, I probably would be writing about the snotty jazz clique also. What I learned from playing jazz in college and then for club gigs for years enriched me for the rest of my life as a musician for all styles. I understand a very big palette of music, not just jazz, as a result of this training.
A short time ago, there was a thread on Billy Sheehan playing jazz. I personally dig Billy's playing including his foray into jazz (some obvious shortcomings, but pretty cool just the same). What appalled me was the TBers that used this as justification that you didn't need theory to play jazz. I think some of those posters have very novice and limited ears. Likewise, there are folks over in the DB classical section who can probably shame me about my classical ears (memories of bowing in a DB section stage production and the guy next to me hissing Don't swing those Notes!)
So if I want to get advice on jazz improvisation, I am going to ask someone who actually does play jazz well.
I'm no jazz solo expert, but I do have a pretty good understanding of what it is and what it takes to learn it. The guys I play with both have music degrees in jazz performance, and we've been together for 5 years, last month. For myself, I just took some lessons, but my teacher is pretty well known, so I got some good instruction.
Anyway, my teacher had me working on those various diatonic patterns from day one pretty much, and after awhile, I'd be listening to some Pat Metheny, or Coltrane, or whoever and say, "wow, he's playing steps of 4 there, or that's just a broken 3rd pattern". That pattern stuff is what all of the greats use all the time. Coltrane himself said you can't improvise what you've never played before. If you put in that time, when you transcribe solos, they will start to make way more sense and you realize it's not just a bunch of random magic notes that happen to sound good because Pat Metheny played it. I mean... You're not making up words when you speak. Music works the same way.
If you don't actually play this stuff and try to apply it, none of it will make sense and people think it's just BS. But once you start to get it, you see it's not magic and it's not rocket science.
Anyway, my teacher had me working on those various diatonic patterns from day one pretty much, and after awhile, I'd be listening to some Pat Metheny, or Coltrane, or whoever and say, "wow, he's playing steps of 4 there, or that's just a broken 3rd pattern". That pattern stuff is what all of the greats use all the time. Coltrane himself said you can't improvise what you've never played before. If you put in that time, when you transcribe solos, they will start to make way more sense and you realize it's not just a bunch of random magic notes that happen to sound good because Pat Metheny played it. I mean... You're not making up words when you speak. Music works the same way.
If you don't actually play this stuff and try to apply it, none of it will make sense and people think it's just BS. But once you start to get it, you see it's not magic and it's not rocket science.
There are some serious jazz mofos over on the DB side...got the tattoo, know the secret handshake, black robes, etc.
If you wanted advice on how to learn to do jazz solos, i would ask over there .
If you wanted advice on how to learn to do jazz solos, i would ask over there .
I know man, but I have so much stuff to work on, It's pathetic. I was reading some stuff over there that had my head spinning and I can only focus down on a few things at a time. I'm not gonna be any great soloist, but I can make some progress a little at a time.
I didn’t see anybody here say they weren’t important. What I’ve said is that they are overemphasized in a lot of Jazz and pop music instruction, and they are.
To be more specific, I’m talking about Chord Scale Theory. The fact is that none of the originators of jazz and bebop were thinking in terms of chord scales. Chord Scale Theory came later with the advent of jazz pedagogy in university music programs.
It's not a terrible way to approach jazz; I was taught CST as a beginner. But it can get a little "paint by numbers" when students are just running different modes over each chord change with no thought or ear toward how they're connecting those chord changes.
That's why I think that jazz instruction in general needs a bit of a course correction in this regard, one that balances the study of scales and modes with that of outlining chords and connecting them together.
That's why I suggested Bert Ligon's "Connecting Chords With Linear Harmony" as it focuses on just that kind of balance.
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Yep, it aint rocket science and I use it every day. You can even do it in your head on a plane trip.
Absolutely. I have to admit, that working a day job really takes away a lot from my actual practice, so I'm probably worse at it than I used to be. I've been getting back into working on fundamentals and some new stuff, but there was a long period where I was pretty much just playing gigs and not touching my bass until the next one. Not good...
From Bert Ligon's Jazz Theory book.
Here is a very simple article to start,
"How to Improvise Jazz Melodies."
The pdf file has EVERYTHING you need to start improvising.
Everything else depends on you, your talent, your passion, your time spent, your ability, etc...
https://www.cs.hmc.edu/~keller/jazz/improvisor/HowToImproviseJazz.pdf
The rest is just rhythmic placement/interpretation/articulation of those notes.
Here is a very simple article to start,
"How to Improvise Jazz Melodies."
The pdf file has EVERYTHING you need to start improvising.
Everything else depends on you, your talent, your passion, your time spent, your ability, etc...
https://www.cs.hmc.edu/~keller/jazz/improvisor/HowToImproviseJazz.pdf
The rest is just rhythmic placement/interpretation/articulation of those notes.
Thank you for this! I would add that there is no such thing as a "blues scale." The blues sound is more of a "raga" when you really look at it.First of all, jazz players don't usually think in terms of "scales"; that is a myth. Nobody who pays big bucks to go to a jazz club wants to hear musicians practicing scales on stage!
Second, a good place to start is to learn the melody (or "head") of the song. You can play a nice solo just by embellishing some "theme and variations" on the melody.
Third, once you've mastered the melody, the next step is to transcribe and study some solos from famous recordings of that tune. For example if you were learning "Body and Soul" you could listen to various recordings and transcribe a Lester Young solo, an Oscar Peterson solo, and a Louis Armstrong solo.
I don't know where you're at on your learning path, so let me know if you have questions about anything I just said. Or if you are an advanced student, please forgive me for stating the obvious.
What jazz songs are you working on right now? Do you know any other jazz musicians you can get together with and jam? Do you have a teacher, and if so, does he or she have jazz experience?
If you play upright or fretless, there are more than 12. An infinity of them!
I think the analogy between musical Improvising and creative writing is right on target. We all know words but how many of can assemble like Hemingway, JD Salinger or James Joyce ?+1
IMHO scales to improvisation is like the alphabet or words to writing. You can memorize the dictionary, but you still have to know how to put the words together in order to say something. You can get wrapped around the axle worrying about scales, but in the end you have to know how to use them.
I'm learning jazz guitar and one of the things I'm doing that really helps in soloing is transcribing solos and writing them out along with the chord structure. That way you can understand, when there is a ii, V, I; they do this, four bars on a single chord, they do this, etc. STUDY someone else solos then make them your own.
Carol Kaye talks about improvising around chords, not scales; Henry Johnson talks about 'centers'. If you base your solos on scales, it's going to sound like it.
A good example regarding this thing about "scales vs. not scales" is Clifford Brown's famous solo on "Daahoud." What gives it such richness and three-dimensionality is the way he toggles between playing scale-ish vs. chord-specific, vs. home key-specific lines. It's not one or the other. It's also useful, once you have basic scales locked in, to be able to tweak them on the fly. Just because you raise a fourth degree in some lick in major doesn't mean you've suddenly veered into "lydian mode." It's just a thing that can happen in major keys. Scales, as scales, are important for a lot of reasons but entirely overrated in teaching jazz.
dig it! And the major third in blues (and bluegrass) is frequently a tad flat.If you play upright or fretless, there are more than 12. An infinity of them!
