How do I learn jazz improvisation?
This is actually a simple question.
Jazz is a language and it is learned like any other language: listen and repeat.
That is the way you and I learned our native languages and it is the only critical
ingredient in learning a new one: listen and repeat. Can you imagine learning
French from a book exclusively? How would you ever have a chance of speaking it
if you never had a teacher, or a tape, speaking it. Books and written exercises
can help, but are not essential. Listen and repeat. Most students these days,
when beginning to improvise are given scales. While scales are useful in learning
your instrument and have some applications to advanced improvisers they do not
in any way reflect the real work that someone who wants to learn a language like
jazz needs to do (listen and repeat). I feel that giving a beginning improviser
a scale is like trying to teach a 6-month old baby the alphabet.
A good place to start is the blues. Get a recording of early musician playing the blues. (Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Johnny Hodges among many others). Do whatever you need to learn a song from the recordings- get help from a teacher or friend and pick out what you can. Get these sounds and licks into your ears and fingers. Next get a recording of the blues with a well-recorded bass. Usually more modern recordings are better for hearing the bass lines. Anything Ray Brown recorded is highly recommended. Then learn and memorize the walking bass line. If this proves too difficult, don't give up, get a transcription book or have a teacher show you some walking lines. But learn to walk a bass line through a blues regardless of your instrument. This is critical. I have given over a hundred clinics and have yet to meet a bass player, no matter how inexperienced, who couldn't solo through a blues and keep the form by him/herself. I have met about five saxophone players (out of over five hundred) that can do this. The only explanation that I can come up with for this phenomenon is that bass players are given lines of notes that outline chord changes and saxophone players are usually given scales without any information about where in the measure to play which notes! This is not a small issue. Horn players need to be able to play the form! It's not up to someone else.
Once you can play a blues bass line through from memory for several choruses, record yourself doing it. Then experiment playing the melodies you learned from your first transcription along with the bass lines. Try playing the bass line along with your recorded version, then vary the line adding different rhythms and sustain melody notes before returning to the original line.
Remember that anything you get off a recording is great. Make sure you transcribe the melody! No body knows how to play a melody anymore because everyone goes straight for the "hot lick" in measure 138 instead of getting inside the melody. Even if you can't figure it out the first time, just the act of listening to the recording that intently will give you so much information that you aren't aware of, but is crucial to your learning to "speak" the language authentically. And if it's really causing you problems, go to something else that's more simple or get help. It is wonderful that CD's are available now that play in tune! When I was learning, I always had the problem of figuring out which key the tape was in and it was invariably in between two keys and made me doubt every pitch. All the information you'll ever want about this music is on the records. Listen and repeat.
A good place to start is the blues. Get a recording of early musician playing the blues. (Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Johnny Hodges among many others). Do whatever you need to learn a song from the recordings- get help from a teacher or friend and pick out what you can. Get these sounds and licks into your ears and fingers. Next get a recording of the blues with a well-recorded bass. Usually more modern recordings are better for hearing the bass lines. Anything Ray Brown recorded is highly recommended. Then learn and memorize the walking bass line. If this proves too difficult, don't give up, get a transcription book or have a teacher show you some walking lines. But learn to walk a bass line through a blues regardless of your instrument. This is critical. I have given over a hundred clinics and have yet to meet a bass player, no matter how inexperienced, who couldn't solo through a blues and keep the form by him/herself. I have met about five saxophone players (out of over five hundred) that can do this. The only explanation that I can come up with for this phenomenon is that bass players are given lines of notes that outline chord changes and saxophone players are usually given scales without any information about where in the measure to play which notes! This is not a small issue. Horn players need to be able to play the form! It's not up to someone else.
Once you can play a blues bass line through from memory for several choruses, record yourself doing it. Then experiment playing the melodies you learned from your first transcription along with the bass lines. Try playing the bass line along with your recorded version, then vary the line adding different rhythms and sustain melody notes before returning to the original line.
Remember that anything you get off a recording is great. Make sure you transcribe the melody! No body knows how to play a melody anymore because everyone goes straight for the "hot lick" in measure 138 instead of getting inside the melody. Even if you can't figure it out the first time, just the act of listening to the recording that intently will give you so much information that you aren't aware of, but is crucial to your learning to "speak" the language authentically. And if it's really causing you problems, go to something else that's more simple or get help. It is wonderful that CD's are available now that play in tune! When I was learning, I always had the problem of figuring out which key the tape was in and it was invariably in between two keys and made me doubt every pitch. All the information you'll ever want about this music is on the records. Listen and repeat.