Thanks for this video. As one of those adult students, it’s also overwhelming given the sheer lack of time available to practice and study, and my untrained tin ears. Transcribing is nearly impossible if you cannot hear the notes accurately or relatively. I’ve kind of decided that my goals should align with my capacity and capability. How simple can I get; what are the easiest tools I could use to still have a moderate amount of ENJOYABLE ability. It will take me easily the rest of 2025 to learn pentatonic scales, blues notes, and chord tones while playing nice melodic lines through chords. With some sight reading skills, maybe I’ll be good enough to join a community band (big maybe), play in a jam session, or entertain friends and family. TH-camrs think we’re all high school or college players with gigging futures in mind or retirees with hours a day ( everyday) at our disposal. Thanks for asking!
If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been doing this professionally for nearly half a century, and my goal is still to play nice melodic lines through a chord progression. I don’t mean this to sound disingenuous; I’ve got many years of experience on my side. But my point is that this is not a short term goal. Oddly enough, after working with young aspiring professionals for decades, I now find myself part of an older demographic. (!) Most of my online students are adult amateurs or semi pros, some retired and some not, and this is where my focus is leading me on this channel. The response to this video suggests you are not alone in the boat. Think of transcribing as something in which you invest a little time each day, like any other element of a practice routine. Rather than setting a goal to transcribe an entire solo, look for short, simple phrases that may give you a fighting chance, even working on one note at time. If you transcribe one measure a day for a year you’ll be way ahead of where you would have been if you hadn’t. And don’t worry about errors; you’re only doing this for yourself and it’s the process that matters, not the end result. I’m glad I asked and I’m glad you responded!
Times have changed, of course, and not many people are going to get by solely on their ear in the modern musical landscape. But it is true that jazz pedagogy grew from what began as a primarily aural art form, and it's as true as it ever was that the ears are the most important tool in the arsenal.
From Facebook: It’s a language. If you want to speak Mandarin, you can learn it in a classroom but you’ll speak it much more fluently after spending some time in China. Many will make the mistake of thinking the study is enough.
Immersion is the best, maybe only way to really learn a language. Maybe the best thing would still be to live in New York and hang out in the clubs every night, but that's impractical for most, and in any case would be more productive with a bit (a lot) of preparation. Everyone who succeeds does a lot of it on their own; students should not expect to be taught, but to receive guidance and encouragement as they teach themselves.
My main issue with modern jazz pedagogy is that the model is essentially something like this: learn theory, apply theory to your instrument, apply theory over tunes in real time, repeat. If there is ear training, it's always oriented towards learning to hear isolated intervals/chord qualities outside of the context of a tune rather than learning to hear language that utilizes various theoretical devices in the context of a tune. In Jean Michel Pilc's book "It's about Music" he talks about teaching students who were getting their master's degrees in jazz performance who couldn't sing a dorian scale or scat over a basic blues even though they could shred through the scale or manage over a blues on their instrument. This seems to suggest that there is a whole group of players out there who are playing from a place where there is little to no connection to their internal voice. Instead, their internal voice is silenced with actively thinking about theory while playing. What I find to be most frustrating is that there is little to no content online about how to bridge the gap between understanding and applying theory to your instrument and playing from a more intuitive/ear driven place. Instead, you get advice like "don't think about theory when you play, just play by ear!" but it seems patently obvious to me that if all you practice is playing from a theory driven place then you will have an extremely difficult time "shutting it off" when you go to play live. I think a great topic to address in future videos would be how to go bridge the gap between the ear/intuition and the intellectual understanding of theory/the form of a tune etc.
The irony is that theory is the easiest thing to teach--it's facts and figures, basically--but it is the least effective path to developing a student's musical understanding and ability to connect with a listener. It's true that we learn it to forget it, but that's easier said than done. These are all things I have in mind as I ponder videos that offer some degree of clarity rather than contribute to the confusion. (I've already made plenty of videos that do that. :) Thanks for your comment!
From Facebook: As a player and teacher, I’ve thought about this a lot. With my students, it’s common to help them isolate and develop similar phrases they’ve transcribed.
In the beginning especially, I recommend transcribing short phrases to reduce the anxiety about tackling an entire solo. Later on, individual phrases expand the language, especially when transposed. Longer length transcriptions offer additional insight into how to contour a solo. I find that's often a tough concept for students to grasp, especially how to end gracefully and transition to the next phase of the music, whether that's handing off to another soloist or back to the head.
Your analogy of expressing an idea in English but with overly complicated grammar and esoteric words is very helpful and gets me to think about what I’m doing in a different way. Thank you
Chase, I didn’t even know you had a channel. It awesome that I ran across this because I’m working on putting together a video on the same basic premise. What to do about information overload and how to make things easier when someone’s trying to wrap their head around it earlier on. Good one!
I just wanted to say thank you for all the info you have put on this channel. I was a classical trumpet player and i always regretted not taking the jazz route. I cant afford to go back to school and now i play mandolin, but your videos (especially the jazz history) have allowed me to feel like im back in college but playing jazz on mandolin lol
Studies show that mandolin players are, on the whole, more emotionally stable than trumpet players. :) Glad you're enjoying the channel, and thanks for saying so!
@@chasesanborn haha, I won't lie I have definitely been more emotionally stable since I switched, but I do miss never worrying about if I'm playing loud enough and also making that horse sound lol
Nice talk. I also recommend transcribing solos and bass lines to my bass students, and I make sure the assignments match the students' technical capabilities and audiation skill levels.
I encourage them to choose the solos they want to transcribe. If pressed, I'll suggest, but I think it's an important part of the process that they find solos they like and are within their ability to transcribe and perform. It also boosts the incentive to do the work.
While it is true that one gets better at transcribing the more you do it, if that was the sole reason it would have little benefit for me. What's your more efficient alternative approach?
this is actually really helpful. when I watch theory content I usually just recognize it, then practice it, then force it into a song, but I think now I'll try to focus more on recognizing the sound certain ideas from theory make and what feeling they give rather than just knowing of them. thanks!!
As I clicked on this video my attitude was “here we go again another get good fast magic key to greatness. But to my surprise you hit the nail on the head. I’ve been playing over 50 years and still am looking for that magic key. I need to be reminded even after all these years that it’s a lifetime journey of enjoying the process. Funny story: When I was a teenager I’d wait for my friend to come home from his lesson on Tuesdays and brother him to share. He’d tell me “screw off I paid money for this”. So I’d say let’s just jam then. I’d pull out all the great licks I’d learned from records that week. Eventually he gave up the goods if I’d trade. I’ve subscribed and look forward to hearing more from you like when I’d pester my friend for his lesson notebook.
It is a fact of life on TH-cam that offering a quick fix produces quick clicks. In this case, I'm happy to defy your expectations, but will do my best to live up to them in the future!
As an older “student” I really relate to this. I am somewhat jealous of your university students who get the full experience: personal time with qualified teachers, interactions with like minded students/co-participants, and the more immediate feedback these experiences provide. TH-cam helps me scratch the itch, but at a slower, less effective rate than a dedicated 4 year program. However, I am able to take a lesson every week or two with a retired band director/teacher who teaches some improv along with my sax lessons, and a key part is the assignment of listening to good stuff and then learning to play it (this week it’s the Paul Desmond solo from the Chet Baker recording of Autumn Leaves). Assigning this to me and then playing it for him provides me that feedback loop. Good, thoughtful video you produced here: thank you! I’m subscribed.
It's hard if not impossible to replicate the full experience of music school outside of that environment, and learning as an 'older' student is different (slower, potentially more frustrating) than when we are young, but it sounds like your teacher has you on the right track. More thoughts on music school here: th-cam.com/video/d9VWRecCmc4/w-d-xo.html
From Facebook: I agree with everything you said in the video; I have been wondering about these questions for a long time too. It seems to me that a serious, thinking teacher comes to your conclusions sooner or later.
It’s one thing to come to the conclusion; it’s another to figure out how to implement it. I learned the jazz language via hundreds of hours spent transcribing solos from LP records. As I made the point in the video, the best thing I could tell an aspiring student is that’s what they need to do too, ‘cause it’s the only way I know how to do it. But they come to a teacher for something more than to be told ‘you need to figure it out on your own’, true as that may be. So we write books, make videos, design courses, all in the hopes of fulfilling the primary role of every teacher, to provoke a quest for knowledge and understanding.
PROFOUND PROFOUND PROFOUND AND HONEST....This eliminates a huge waste of time, tranceibe transcribe, transcribe....period...and transpose to other keys .....
From Facebook: I'm curious if you think that jazz pedagogy generally shortchanges discussing emotion since it's such a difficult topic to ascribe words to?
It's clear that music has to reach people on an emotional level if it's to reach them at all. Pedagogy applied to good effect would increase a person's ability to communicate what they are feeling, and hopefully a listener would feel something in response. But it’s not a critical factor-who hasn’t witnessed a technically flawed but heartfelt song sung by someone at an event? If your performance reflects genuine emotion, a listener will feel it. Worrying about whether you're doing it right or wrong can be an obstacle to that goal. I don’t know if we need to ascribe words to it, but certainly students benefit from encouragement that we all feel things just as deeply as anyone else, and tapping into that will have a greater impact on their music than practicing the bebop scale…
Excellent video. Two points... 1. Jazz pedagogy seems to revolve around harmony and melody. Although more people talk about rhythm these days compared to the past, most books and courses are focused around some iteration of chord scales. When I ask about rhythm, I usually hear the old adage "you've just gotta feel it." Then those same people will talk about which scale to play on a chord for hours on end. I think that jazz is built from the rhythm up. There's so much nuance that goes into time feel, phrasing, and rhythm. Dare I say, if you have a solid concept of time--you can play just about anything and sound like a pro. Conversely, if you know all the scales and substitutions but your time is crap... well, you know. In other words: scales and harmony are the raw materials. Rhythm is how you organize, synthesize, and perform everything you know about music. 2. Learning how to listen is also about aural memory and orchestration. Musicians play cohesive solos by remembering what they played before, and accessing those notes and shapes later on in their improvisation. Bach was a great improvisor--his lines weave in and out of each other because he could hold onto those melodic ideas in his inner ear while he played. Same with Charlie Parker. Orchestration is also key. I mentioned in an older video that you sound like Art Farmer. Even though I don't play trumpet, Art Farmer is my favorite trumpet player because everything he played fit the place and people he played with. Being able to step outside yourself and hear the mix, hear where you fit in with the blend of the band. I'm still working on both of those points decades into my own practice. I'm just ready to see jazz pedagogy turn away from a scale and harmony focus--so that we can understand how scales and harmony work through the lens of rhythm and sound. Sorry for the long comment, but you've probably seen my essays on your videos before ;) Keep on the keeping on, as another great trumpet player once said.
I put it this way: melody and harmony make your music sound good. Rhythm makes it feel good. As another great musician said: "It don't mean a thing..." No need to apologize for a lengthy comment--if a video sparks commentary I know I've touched a nerve. So far, this appears to be one of those. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Amazing explanation of the problem im facing right now, even though I didnt even realise it... I think its time to start listening and transcribing... look forward to your next videos coming up!
Although I have heard people argue against transcribing, I think of it as an intensive form of listening. I've never heard an argument against listening. (And if I did, I wouldn't listen...:)
Guided self discovery is the best thing I've heard in years. I've played trombone for decades (bass trombone in an 18pc jazz orchestra--not professionally). I'm trying to find a good way to re-teach myself piano after 40+ years, as well as improve my horn skills. keep teaching!! I'll learn eventually 🙂
You attacked the core of the problem. Information overload affects improvisation by overthinking. We need just a lesson per week but on TH-cam you get 100. Your ear probably can’t integrate all this so fast, and worse if you don’t practice.
@@chasesanborn with patreon you create your own rhythm and don’t get the pressure of external forces like the algorithm, this is why i am trying to get people there and i am member myself
You do have to find a way to sift through content to find what is relevant to you. I will say the algorithm is very good at exposing me to channels I wouldn't otherwise find--sometimes quite small ones. I also get a kick when it decides one of my videos should be shown to a new collective of people, as appears to be the case with this one.
Practical and useful considerations regarding our theoretical understanding and application of music. This drummer thanks you for helping me to understand the motivations of my fellow musicians. 😊
I appreciate what you are doing here. I am one of those older players who came back to music after a long layoff. I never went to college so my musical knowledge is mostly limited to what information I have gathered over the course of the last few years of reading books/methods, watching youtube and playing in ensembles. The thing that I have the hardest time with is what and how I should be practicing to get to a point I can hack though a solo and feel like I presented an idea rather than just a bunch of random nonsense. If you were to present some ideas of how to tackle that targeted at the high school/comeback trumpet player population just starting to work on this it would probably do well. Regardless, I have learned a lot from your channel and your books.
That is my current line of thinking. We live in a golden age for information, which creates as many problems as it solves. Thanks for adding your voice to the conversation!
I agree entirely. Even as a classical composer, I find your principles to be true. The process of composing music is an intuitive one, and all forms of intuition must be developed through repetitious exposure. Composers used to expand their musical vocabulary by learning and transposing oftentimes thousands of partimento or schemata, which are essentially small musical instances generally played through at the keyboard, and using them to develop a vast repository of musical gestures that can serve as a scaffolding to a composers creativity. The absence of such a model is the biggest problem I've encountered in my time as an undergraduate. As a composer, there is no point in learning all of these theoretical principles without the necessary exercises needed to relegate them to an intuitive level. You have just earned yourself a subscriber.
Very interesting. The tricky bit is the compositional side - respecting and not completely losing the original tune - variations! Otherwise the danger is the chord sequence dominating proceedings.
The tune is defined by the melody. The chords provide context and color. An improviser would be better served to know only the melody than only the chords. The former leaves room for your ear to figure out the latter.
@@chasesanborn incidentally, now that we are talking (🙂), touched tentatively on the question of swing. Something that that I believe is impossible to formalize. Interestingly, the guy who played (plays?) with Wynton Marsalis swings on tenor but grinds to a halt on the clarinet. My advice would be to keep listening to Louis Armstrong who solved this problem back at the 20s and when playing let the beat go. It will look after itself, but you are now free to place and emphasize notes wherever you want!
Rhythm determines whether music FEELS good while melody and harmony make it sound good. We call it time feel, after all. Louis forged the path on all three. Early jazz is a study in melody-based improv, before anyone ever heard the term chord scale, let alone tritone substitution.
It’s so great that you admit you fall victim to it as well. I only just came around with similar feelings. So, me too! I’m around what you said regarding Coltrane. Apple Chord and Scales should be the foundation for hearing and adapting to gigs along with modal understanding to free oneself that much more. I’ve learned standard patterns from Bryan Lynch’s student materials packet - there’s a reason his students are winning all the international/national competitions. I think that’s why they started using him and his colleague at Juilliard. Oh and I recently purchased “Hip Licks” which I love as they’re written straight to the point. Of course I’ll still play transcriptions and spend plenty of time soloing well adding a Pop music cliché here or there at wedding gigs but in the end, it’s about having all that in your arsenal to come about organically in your soloing. To play any gig nowadays, I think l that’s what it means to play by ear.
The jazz 'me too' movement. :) Practicing licks or patterns can expand your vocabulary and technical ability, especially when they are transposed to other keys. They are more likely to become part of an organic vocabulary if they originate from something you learn by ear. That's a good way to extract additional value from transcribing solos. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
I heard some good advice from a teacher of mine- he said “Don’t ask ‘What should I play?’ Ask ‘What do I want to play?’” I think this is a great piece of advice. It’s not super useful to practice the bebop scale if you don’t like what the bebop scale sounds like (it’s me, haha, I don’t really love bebop scales). It’s good to learn new things, but it’s good to have your desires, rather than an abstract idea you have of what good jazz players should play, be the leader in your discovery of improvisation and music. I didn’t love bebop scale sounds, but just recently I was listening to some guy play the shamisen (I think that’s what it’s called) and I was like, dang, that sounds amazing. Tried to figure it out with my piano, and then looked it up afterwards- it’s like this interesting take on the Locrian scale, without the 3rd and 6th degrees of that scale. Super cool sound!
I think too much perhaps is made of bebop scales as an entity, when really all we are talking about is a chromatic passing note. Food for thought and perhaps a video. Thanks for that!
Fantastic video! I like how it's very apparent how much experience you have in your craft as a musician, what it means to learn and as a teacher. I have a couple thoughts the things you touched on. For example the analogy with the language. It strongly reminds me of the input hypothesis by stephen krashen. It postulates that there is only one and only one way to learn a language and it's by understanding messages in the foreign language. Your mind sort of "makes sense" of the underlying structures and develops abstract representations of said structures as long as it understands the gist of what is being said. Teaching grammar is also often said to be more disruptive then helpful in this process which I find also very fitting in the analogy to learning music. Another thought I had was when you made the analogy to classical students. There is an emerging field of how classical composers like Haydn, Händel, Mozart, Beethoven have been tought and it turns out that they were never explicitly taught about musical structure and rules as we are today. Their training was very much more hands on. Many scholars call it the partimenti tradition and it consits of practical exercises to learn the art of improvisation in the galant style. Essentially it's a way of aquiring the vocabulary for becoming fluent in the language of the galant style. For anyone interested, look up partimenti.org by Prof. Robert Gjerdingen. It's a very unique approach to incredibly effective musical pedaogy and I think the techniques can still be used today to learn musical vocab. Nowadays we could benefit from updating them to teach not just galant style but different styles all across the board. I envision a comprehensive and 100% practical course to teach the skills to composing and improvisation in different styles as directly and straight forward as possible. Thank you very much for this video and I hope you have a nice day :)
You are not the first commenter to bring up the partimenti tradition. Not being well versed in classical music history, it's not something I am familiar with, and I appreciate your contribution to the conversation!
@@chasesanborn In case you're interested I highly recommend the nikhil hogan show on youtube. He has lots of interviews with robert gjerdingen and they have a wonderfully accessible way of talking about it. :D
So right on about volume of notes. The jazzers biggest weakness. Along with every young guy's urge to be the fastest on the block. Or to quote the great Mr Berry "I got no kick against modern jazz unless they try to play it too darn fast!"
It's not the number of notes but what they communicate. Far be it from me to say that Bird or Trane should have played fewer, but most of us are not burdened with that level of genius, and a bit of self editing never hurt. :) Thanks for your comment!
I play trumpet and bought your books decades ago when i was working and was interested in playing jazz but the opportunities to play were extremely limited then dried up altogether before I could reach any standard. What I did do was buy every book in every bibliography I could lay my hands on (especially once the internet arrived and could get books from the US - including yours!)- but never worked through, getting hung up on when to move on to the next topic. Since I retired a good few years ago I have found other interests to occupy my time but have generally kept practicing to keep some sort of chops. I have often thought that actually performing, at least when I’m not at a standard I’m happy with, was never what I wanted but that I wanted to be able to replicate a solo I liked. My older brother had a couple of Parker records and that was the standard I thought my technique needed to be. It was only years later when I heard Miles on Kind of Blue that I thought I could achieve the technique required if nothing else. You have reminded me and also pointed me in the direction I should take which is to learn the solos I like by Louis Armstrong, Kenny Dorham, Blue Mitchell, Chet Baker etc. I accept I’ll never have the chops for Freddie Hubbard or Diz. I am glad I have all those books on my shelf but I will not try to read them from cover to cover but instead as references to see what they have to say on something which might occur to me during the process. I’ll consider this video as a sort of epilogue in my copies of Brass and Jazz Tactics.
Hopefully not a final epilogue! :) I shudder to imagine the mindset of a student who imagines Charlie Parker to be the minimum basic standard. Even if that's the ultimate goal, it is not the place to start, as you've realized. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
100% everything you said... again! I believe this issue crept up a year ago on your channel. And the "How we learn to speak" analogy fits perfectly. We learn music (or baseball or skateboarding or...) by starting simple and usually by example, failing (by getting hit in the face with a baseball or falling off the board or...), adjusting your tack, mastering that skill, then moving on to something slightly trickier. I believe your book does a GREAT job of this IF the student takes the time to start from the beginning and go a their own pace. Just flipping through the book, getting freaked out by, say, page 61, and deciding it's all "too much analysis" isn't going to work. Neither is listening ONLY to Bebop when you're just starting out. Aspire to be a great Bebop player, sure, but start with a style or skill that's more digestible now. Modal tunes come to mind for this. Younger players handle this better than university or adult players. The young are generally more accepting of the "I stink but I'll stink less tomorrow" concept than we older cats who already know how it "should sound" but don't often have the patience required to keep it simple (or is this just me? :^). The big difference between learning jazz versus baseball is that most of us don't generally hang out with a team of jazz players to imitate, get advice from, practice with, or even "compete" with on a daily basis. When learning to speak, we start with simple words or phrases every day while hearing more advanced modeling and constantly receiving corrections. "(No sweetie, it's ESpecially, not EXpecially.") Our abilities develop quite nicely within only a couple of years. So start with Jazz Tactics #1 rather than clicking on #48 and getting overwhelmed. Listen to the great players (A LOT!) for style, sound and inspiration, but don't expect to sound like them over a long holiday weekend. Keep doing what you're doing, Chase!
You hit the nail on the head. (Or ball on the bat. Quite a few of them in fact.) One of the hardest aspects of learning music as an adult is the impatience that comes from knowing what you want the end result to be. As a young trumpet player, you are happy just to make noise with your friends. The older trumpet player wants to sound like Freddie Hubbard (or whoever) as quickly as possible. And you have a good memory. Early on in the Jazz Tactics series I was called out by an articulate commenter on the fact that I was already getting too deep into the theory for someone just starting out. At that point I was just trying to get my university course online quickly during the pandemic. There is a lot of great content on TH-cam about improvising, but much of it assumes more knowledge or experience than many people have, i.e., there are lots of ways to expand your vocabulary once you have a grasp on the language. My intention is not to just dumb down the content, as there are also a lot of videos out there that work on the basics. More perhaps to focus on HOW to think about the process, rather than just telling you what to think about. Many thanks for your thoughtful comment!
I clicked on this video only because of Pedagogy and not because of Jazz. Jazz is out of my pay grade. But I was the failed You Tube student that thought he'd learn music by doing jazz exercises. So I have Method books and two teachers. They don't compete, they compliment. I also have a concert pianist friend (and patient) that calls me once or thrice a year when he has a free lesson time with a cancellation. I was working on John Thompson Volume 2, but stopped and went back (again times two or three) to Volume 1 and really working on the basics of musicality. I also have La Méthode Rose in French and British. I'm starting to learn 2 voice Bach chorales, and dabble in three voice as practice. And I'm transposing Burgmueller, at least the first 10 pieces. Jazz? That comes later. Sounds like you have a very interesting channel, and I;ll come back when I'm ready. Merci.
I'm sure there is a lot on the channel already that you'd find interesting or relevant, but I'm glad you found it and welcome you back any time! Thanks for adding your voice to the conversation which I'm glad to see is quite lively.
I often think of the way that Lester Young spontaneously created a beautiful counter-melody to the one that Billie Holiday sang in their famous recordings in the 1930's. Simple, elegant, beautiful--singing through an instrument.
Lester Young--the epitome of a melodic approach to improvising. Hard to imagine that he sounded so good without triad pairs and pentatonic shape shifting...:)
Been thinking about this (education) in other contexts and a cardinal point is simply investigating "what do you like/not like about this"? The deconstruction of that sets the course for how and when to incorporate new information without having a corpus to muddle through with no ley line. To your point, it makes listening first and foremost. The theory comes after.
I learned everything i know about jazz from listening to the grateful dead for 50 years. Jazz was a cakewalk after learning how to improvise like that.
It seems to me that the link between thinking-theory and intuitive-playing is in turning the conscious understanding into subconscious expression. And this is accomplished through repetition, repetition, and repetition. While practicing one bebop lick through all keys won’t get you very far, doing it 1000 times in each key just might implant it into what many people refer to as muscle memory. Then, during a performance, it may slip out “with no conscious thought about the words or the rules of grammar.” This is how classical musicians prepare for performance. It’s also the method for getting good at skiing, tennis, billiards, diving, video games, and driving a car. The real trick is in finding the joy that is inherent in becoming automatically more proficient through repetition. The fun can be found in the process, not the product - in the travel, not the destination.
I often tell students you can't use tonight what you have learned or practiced today. It has to reach the point that you no longer have to think about it, and as you suggest, muscle memory kicks in. Also, that bebop lick has to enter your ear in the rhythmic and harmonic context in which it was played in order for it to emerge at the appropriate time. Your final sentence is one that many students, especially adults, grapple with. They are determined to reach an unreachable point. Those who strive are destined to reach the grave dissatisfied. :) Thanks for your comment!
Phrazes and licks can be impatted unto the scholar, using guide tone restrictions to familiarize the scholar with jazz vocab.....that will make the scholar improve transcription effectiveness ...
Phrases and licks first learned from a transcribed solo, or as melodies of tunes from great composers enter the vocabulary in a way that they may be used more effectively and creatively.
I'm a drummer and piano player. With drummers, there is a tendency to learn licks in isolation and not seeing them as a system; you have to work out how you will get into it and out of it in different ways. It's always about playing music that flows, not about using the correct grammar. It's entirely possible to speak very eloquently without any knowledge of the rules of grammar.
One can know the rules of grammar without knowing one knows the rules of grammar. (I'd argue that anyone who speaks eloquently does, in fact.) Any five year old child is an example. It's not only drummers that learn licks in isolation. Like rudiments, melodic licks are useful as a means of developing technique, and also key fluency when they are transposed. But not as building blocks for a solo any more than memorizing words out of the dictionary will make one an eloquent speaker. You have to learn the language in context. Drummers face the challenge of becoming well-rounded musicians in spite of the fact that their instrument and role in the group does not specifically utilize melody and harmony, however understanding those components of music will have a major impact on the way they approach the drums. As a means of encouragement, I would tell the drummers in my improv class: "How cool would it be to be able to tell the pianist or guitarist they are playing the wrong chord?" :)
One of my piano teacher's played with many of the famous jazz players. One day I said: "Even if I had the chops of Oscar- I don't think I would play so many notes." referring to the movie "Amadeus" about Mozart. He replied, well I wouldn't worry about that.
I think it was Chet Baker who said "If I could play like Wynton, I wouldn't." (Posthumous apologies to Chet if I've got that incorrect, and certainly no diss to one of the greatest trumpet players who has ever lived, but I always like a good line. :)
This makes me think of my current attempts to learn Spanish in a serious way many years after taking it in school. There are as many different teaching methods as there are teachers. One of my favorites is a guy from Madrid who gives you full immersion. No English. I understand maybe 40% of what he says, but he’s hilarious. Another is a former law enforcement officer from Florida who mostly speaks in English and gives you useful building blocks. Full immersion is like listening to improvisation in isolation. In a sense it seems more logical, but it’s actually slower, I think. You need to know grammar and structures.
Good points about teaching styles, and it applies to learning styles as well. A good teacher is able to modify their methods depending on the student. If you can make your students laugh, even if a lot of what you say is incomprehensible, you'll get through to them. For many people trying to make initial inroads, I'm sure that jazz is like listening to someone speak in a language you don't understand. You may only get a piece of it here and there, but if you hang in, clarity will start to emerge.
I am struggling to learn jazz guitar and I definitely spend way too much time on theory and not enough time transcribing solos by ear. I cannot help but notice that classical musicians have a deep knowledge of scales and sight reading and theory but they probably could not play jazz on top of a two chord tune like impressions. They don't speak the language despite knowing the rules.
The art form for classical performers is more typically one of interpretation rather than creation, as it is for jazz improvisers. It's a different kind of language, and no less valid. While a good classical musician needs to be aware of the music beyond their own part, for a jazz musician at any level it is crucial because of the spur of the moment interaction. The purpose of learning theory is to help you make sense of what you are hearing and increase your ability to communicate, but it's all too easy to get caught up in it.
Until you can play one or two notes rhythmically in perfect sync with the tune, you don't know or understand the tune. First, do no harm (to the tune). Maybe I'll play along with a phrase just playing 1 or 2 notes until i can play those two notes in a positive and constructive way rhythmically, all the while internalizing the rhythm. Then add notes to play as i learn to understand and grasp the rhythmic soul of the phrase or tune.
'Do no harm to the tune' is a fantastic turn of that phrase. I've said something along the same lines with "Your job is not to sound good, just not to make the rhythm section sound worse." Also, your emphasis on rhythmic integrity is right on. If I were to wish for one area of my own playing to improve, it would be my time. Tone would be right up there as well. More notes would not be on the list.
@chasesanborn i just heard Al Hirt do a 3 minute rendition of Cole Porter's Night and wDay from an old Ed Sullivan performance. What he does rhythmically in those 3 minutes is astounding. It's full of rhythmic surprises.
I'm very happy but not at all surprised that this video showed up on my TH-cam feed. As a retired academic physician, former music major, amateur jazz pianist and current teacher and student of the Italian language, I have grappled with the fundamental issues that you discuss over my entire life: The daily practice of a particular endeavor (language, music, job skills) vs the intense passion for profound and detailed knowledge. While most people are content with a common knowledge of language and music, only a small minority of people are possessed and driven to deeply analyze and understand every possible intricacy. I have come to the conclusion that these are clearly two entirely different pursuits (I hear from my language students all the time "I don't want a grammatical explanation, just tell me how to say it..."), but there is a sweet spot in the Venn diagram overlap where the academic can use their expansive knowledge and skills seamlessly and effortlessly, and still communicate to the masses in a moving and meaningful way. The audience doesn't need to know (and typically doesn't want to know) WHAT is going on, only that it moves them.... (As an academic nerd, I must admit that it remains baffling that so few people are interested in diving deeply into any subject matter. Reading a single social media post makes you and expert....🙄)
@@chasesanborn th-cam.com/video/djRV2Fu1l2o/w-d-xo.html I think Pat Metheny says it best in this presentation. Reaching the highest level of understanding is extremely difficult and requires intense effort. The end result is that your creativity can then flow effortlessly. I am inspired by his introspection and humility.
Personally I never felt like bebop scales were a particularly useful concept. If you practice major scales, minor scales, and chromatic scales enough to be fluent, it's not hard to switch between them. The main thing is to develop your ear so that the SOUND of landing on a dissonance when you meant to land on a chord tone drives you nuts. Once that happens, you start feeling very uncomfortable every time you accidentally land on the wrong note. The human brain is really, really good at learning from that type of instantaneous feedback, so it doesn't take that long before you start making fewer of those mistakes, and in order to land where your ear wants to go, you almost automatically start playing typical bebop melodic patterns, including chromatic neighbors and passing tones. The big benefit is not only that it doesn't require overthinking, it also means that as your ear progresses, maybe you start to hear the potential of landing a phrase on a tension, and guess what? Your fingers already know how to get there! I'm guessing I'm a pretty atypical viewer in that I'm not currently studying jazz, but I studied it very seriously in high school and a bit in college alongside classical music. If I wanted to pick jazz back up, I would focus nearly 100% on instrumental technique. From my past studies I don't really need more jazz language - my ear already has that. My problem would be that I can't actually play (in tune!) 90% of what my ear wants to do. So I ended up watching this video more out of interest in your point of view rather than to advance my own learning. I agree with almost all of it! My personal opinion is that jazz tends to be taught backwards. All this complicated language that we hear on jazz records comes from layers of paraphrasing built on top of blues, but how many beginning jazz students start by transcribing Ray Charles or B.B. King or John Mayer? I know when I started, I was like a lot of kids in that I was listening to all this bebop, but when I sat down to play a solo, I had no clue what to do with a blues scale. I was trying to play like Charlie Parker, thinking that all the arpeggios and scales were the cake and the blues licks in his solos were the icing, when in reality it's the other way around. All that bebop language is just ways of getting to and from. The blues is what his solos are ABOUT. I think part of the challenge is that when music is taught as part of school curricula, there is a pressure to focus on music that is academically interesting, but the blues is not academic music. Plus, there's something about complicated music that appeals a lot to the mindset and the ear of talented teenage musicians. I certainly recall as a 16 year old listening to Michael Brecker constantly, and being endlessly frustrated at teachers that wanted to shut down anything I played that was harmonically or rhythmically adventurous. But I think for adult musicians, starting with the blues is a great approach. Adults have the patience for simplicity. And the thing about the blues is that once you get it in your ear, your ear is going to demand that you play with excellent time, intonation, and phrasing - all of which are utterly essential for jazz, but incredibly hard to learn if you start with bebop.
In one of my early videos, I made the point that university students sometimes (could be fair to say often) have learned to deal with complicated harmonic structures but are unable to play a convincing blues. One of my former students called me out on that saying that my course did not devote enough time to the blues, although that is where we started. Fair enough, but I can also imagine howls of protest if I spent half the year on blues. (C'mon, let's get to the GOOD stuff!) Another story I told in one of my videos involved a student who had absorbed a lot of language from John Coltrane. I had him play two solos for the class, and unbeknownst to them told him to use only the blues scale on the second solo. When I asked for a show of hands as to which sounded more like Trane, they all picked the blues scale solo. Bird, of course, came out of the Kansas City jump blues tradition, so his roots were authentic.
Your comments about learning language do not necessarily apply to everyone and definitely not to someone who is learning the second language. Even though that I am fluently bilingual and speak, read and listen much more in my second language, I learned it very formally first by studying grammar, spelling, vocabulary and all the rules first. I passed all the proficiency exams and then started to speak. I studied for my PhD in an English speaking country and later moved to another one where I live. I still correct (in my mind) the grammar of people whom I speak with or listen to. I am very much rule oriented in anything I do in live. I have been mostly focusing on classical music when learning to play piano. Michael
None of my comments on anything apply to everyone, LOL. It's no surprise that one who has formally studied the language and earned a PhD may take issue with commonly heard grammar, probably more today than ever. I would point out that learning a language by some method other than immersion (listen and imitate) can ONLY apply to second or subsequent languages, since nobody learned their first language by the methods you describe. I will not argue that for you it may be the best way, but the best way for one will never be the best way for all. It’s an intriguing question whether someone who is self described as ‘rule oriented’ might be drawn to classical music, as you are. There are a lot of ‘rules’ associated with baseline ability as a classical musician: you are expected, at a minimum, to play the right notes at the right time with the correct articulation and precisely in tune. In jazz, the baseline expectation is personal expression, and that could involve breaking any of the above rules, although I’d argue that with only rare exceptions, breaking the rules should be preceded by a demonstrated ability to adhere to them.
@ Thank you for such a comprehensive reply. I appreciate it. If I may, I would like to clarify that my PhD was in computer science/electronics. I used the time in Great Britain to improve my spoken English. By the way, I live in Canada. There are indeed different learning methods and paths to fluency. My son was using a computer (reading from the screen and typing) before he spoke English fluently (he did not say a full sentence for a few months when he was almost four years old). Needless to say he is very successful as mathematician (Pure Math) and computer programmer (including AI). I am saying all this only to emphasize that our learning preferences and abilities are different. I apologize for bringing so many details of my family history (I brought it into this conversation only to illustrate that, as you said, we are all different). Michael
I have been playing a guitar and other stringed instruments for over five decades, and from time to time have worked with jazz and jazz theory. I enjoy reading and studying it, and working on some transcriptions. What I have found though, coming from other musics, is that the way jazz is being taught online and I imagine in the universities is almost in a way a mathematical formula system. There's nothing I think more boring than listening to a jazz player who essentially is working out math problems auditorily with his music. In other words he/she becomes so bogged down in the theory and trying to find this scale or that mode or this approach chord or that chord substitution, that any kind of semblance of emotion or fluidity disappears. The moreso now that the jazz teaching in the various universities and conservatories seems to be so homogeneous that it all seems to flow into one sound and has very little character often, from player to player player. In other words, it all ends up sounding the same.
Music theory can indeed seem like math, and it turns a lot of people off. It has its purpose, but technical prowess in any form is never the end goal. Music needs to connect on a visceral level, otherwise it is as you describe. That varies with the listener as well as the musician, i.e., one person's poison is another person's medicine. Thanks for contributing to the conversation!
Transcribing solos to begin learning the vocabulary of any music, especially jazz, is a recipe for DISASTER! Solos are parts where the original melody, or the established narrative, may drift away, into a who-knows-what type of extended narrative, and no useful information pertaining to the original narrative can be found in the solo anymore. An example of the same problem is that we could extract one aria from one opera, and paste it into the aria part of another opera. It could work for a moment, especially if sung in the same language and same voice type (soprano tenor, etc). But as soon as the part following the aria begins, we will see the experiment was a failure because the overall narrative is broken. If done in classical music, everyone would raise questions. But nobody questions this same problem with jazz solos? This is why Jazz, in particular, has become nebulous, because the players are using "copy/paste" solo parts from songs unrelated to the song being played. They are pasting them not only in their solo parts but EVERYWHERE else too! Songs stop being songs but metastasise into loaded nonsense. It's better to stick to analysing all parts AROUND the solos, where ALL band musicians communicate the SAME language, when the whole band plays together, and then often play simpler but cleverer ornamentations that keep the continuity of the piece and the narrative. THAT is where the language is learnt! Then, if experienced well enough in that area, then soloing - if at all required! - may have a better chance to be meaningful and related to THAT song.
Transcribing solos has been a part of learning to improvise jazz since the earliest days. Listen to Louis Armstrong quote his mentor King Oliver, or Red Garland quoting Miles' solo from a decade earlier. (Both can be found in the Jazz History series.) One might have a different opinion or approach, but I cannot agree that transcribing solos (let's include melodies as well) is a recipe for disaster. Thanks for sharing your viewpoint!
@@chasesanborn if I consciously listened thousands of times to the albums I like, it’s already transcribing without transcribing. No need to sit with a pencil and write them solos down, and even to play along them records. After that amount of listening, when you take up your instrument you naturally start playing jazz language. When you’ll play with people, you’ll react accordingly to what everyone’s doing at that moment without even thinking of it. In simple words, learn to play(technically)your instrument(overtones and so on), listen to tons of music(day and night for years) and then play. Parker said something similar
@@chasesanborn Long soloing is not sticking to the main curve of the entire song, but it goes on a tangent, to deliver something dramatic. That is the purpose of the solo: extended narrative, rarely part of main composition. Otherwise it would not require a separate time for itself. It comes from the classical tradition of cadenzas and arias. American Jazz did not invent anything new, but it did mess up in terms of use of material from the solos. If a player uses emotional and dramatic highlights from a solo, but across other songs even if they are of different mood and subject - and that is often the case in Jazz - then those songs become emotionally erratic and narratively nebulous. One of the reasons people started hating Jazz especially after Parker, and call it confusing, is because players new to the genre did not understand what they were doing when stealing material from Parker, and yet were doing it badly and continuously, without better advice. Another problem with jazz players is their inability to learn from other genres of music or draw parallels; they can't imagine what they do, or fail to do, in any other context - they can’t imagine if it makes sense or not. They only blindly follow rudimentary, laconic advices from their idols. But which must be taken differently: cautiously and much more sensibly. Insisting on dubious approaches, insisting they are always right especially when wrong, unable to play “a wrong note”, unable to accept any criticism, sped up descent of jazz into irrelevancy.
Thanks for this video. As one of those adult students, it’s also overwhelming given the sheer lack of time available to practice and study, and my untrained tin ears. Transcribing is nearly impossible if you cannot hear the notes accurately or relatively.
I’ve kind of decided that my goals should align with my capacity and capability. How simple can I get; what are the easiest tools I could use to still have a moderate amount of ENJOYABLE ability.
It will take me easily the rest of 2025 to learn pentatonic scales, blues notes, and chord tones while playing nice melodic lines through chords. With some sight reading skills, maybe I’ll be good enough to join a community band (big maybe), play in a jam session, or entertain friends and family. TH-camrs think we’re all high school or college players with gigging futures in mind or retirees with hours a day ( everyday) at our disposal.
Thanks for asking!
If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been doing this professionally for nearly half a century, and my goal is still to play nice melodic lines through a chord progression. I don’t mean this to sound disingenuous; I’ve got many years of experience on my side. But my point is that this is not a short term goal.
Oddly enough, after working with young aspiring professionals for decades, I now find myself part of an older demographic. (!) Most of my online students are adult amateurs or semi pros, some retired and some not, and this is where my focus is leading me on this channel. The response to this video suggests you are not alone in the boat.
Think of transcribing as something in which you invest a little time each day, like any other element of a practice routine. Rather than setting a goal to transcribe an entire solo, look for short, simple phrases that may give you a fighting chance, even working on one note at time. If you transcribe one measure a day for a year you’ll be way ahead of where you would have been if you hadn’t. And don’t worry about errors; you’re only doing this for yourself and it’s the process that matters, not the end result.
I’m glad I asked and I’m glad you responded!
From Facebook:
All the very early jazz players were doing it by ear and learning from other players. They weren't caught up in theory.
Times have changed, of course, and not many people are going to get by solely on their ear in the modern musical landscape. But it is true that jazz pedagogy grew from what began as a primarily aural art form, and it's as true as it ever was that the ears are the most important tool in the arsenal.
Starting on the wrong partial is a sure-fire way to get outside the changes... :)
@@chasesanborn 😁🤪😁
Thank you, I almost forgot that listening is more important than thinking in improvisation🙏
It's easy to do, given how much there is to think about!
From Facebook:
No amount of painting lessons will turn you into Michelangelo, but Michelangelo benefitted from painting lessons.
Well said. A teacher provides tools; it's up to the student to decide how (or whether) to use them.
You talk about jazz improv so beautifully. Subbed.
That's a lovely comment, thank you!
From Facebook:
It’s a language. If you want to speak Mandarin, you can learn it in a classroom but you’ll speak it much more fluently after spending some time in China. Many will make the mistake of thinking the study is enough.
Immersion is the best, maybe only way to really learn a language. Maybe the best thing would still be to live in New York and hang out in the clubs every night, but that's impractical for most, and in any case would be more productive with a bit (a lot) of preparation. Everyone who succeeds does a lot of it on their own; students should not expect to be taught, but to receive guidance and encouragement as they teach themselves.
My main issue with modern jazz pedagogy is that the model is essentially something like this: learn theory, apply theory to your instrument, apply theory over tunes in real time, repeat. If there is ear training, it's always oriented towards learning to hear isolated intervals/chord qualities outside of the context of a tune rather than learning to hear language that utilizes various theoretical devices in the context of a tune. In Jean Michel Pilc's book "It's about Music" he talks about teaching students who were getting their master's degrees in jazz performance who couldn't sing a dorian scale or scat over a basic blues even though they could shred through the scale or manage over a blues on their instrument. This seems to suggest that there is a whole group of players out there who are playing from a place where there is little to no connection to their internal voice. Instead, their internal voice is silenced with actively thinking about theory while playing. What I find to be most frustrating is that there is little to no content online about how to bridge the gap between understanding and applying theory to your instrument and playing from a more intuitive/ear driven place. Instead, you get advice like "don't think about theory when you play, just play by ear!" but it seems patently obvious to me that if all you practice is playing from a theory driven place then you will have an extremely difficult time "shutting it off" when you go to play live. I think a great topic to address in future videos would be how to go bridge the gap between the ear/intuition and the intellectual understanding of theory/the form of a tune etc.
The irony is that theory is the easiest thing to teach--it's facts and figures, basically--but it is the least effective path to developing a student's musical understanding and ability to connect with a listener. It's true that we learn it to forget it, but that's easier said than done. These are all things I have in mind as I ponder videos that offer some degree of clarity rather than contribute to the confusion. (I've already made plenty of videos that do that. :) Thanks for your comment!
From Facebook:
As a player and teacher, I’ve thought about this a lot. With my students, it’s common to help them isolate and develop similar phrases they’ve transcribed.
In the beginning especially, I recommend transcribing short phrases to reduce the anxiety about tackling an entire solo. Later on, individual phrases expand the language, especially when transposed. Longer length transcriptions offer additional insight into how to contour a solo. I find that's often a tough concept for students to grasp, especially how to end gracefully and transition to the next phase of the music, whether that's handing off to another soloist or back to the head.
Your analogy of expressing an idea in English but with overly complicated grammar and esoteric words is very helpful and gets me to think about what I’m doing in a different way. Thank you
I am also thinking about what I am doing in a different way, especially related to the content on this channel. Thanks for your comment!
Chase, I didn’t even know you had a channel. It awesome that I ran across this because I’m working on putting together a video on the same basic premise. What to do about information overload and how to make things easier when someone’s trying to wrap their head around it earlier on. Good one!
I've often been inspired to make a video by another content creator's take on a subject. Let us know when yours is out.
I just wanted to say thank you for all the info you have put on this channel. I was a classical trumpet player and i always regretted not taking the jazz route. I cant afford to go back to school and now i play mandolin, but your videos (especially the jazz history) have allowed me to feel like im back in college but playing jazz on mandolin lol
Studies show that mandolin players are, on the whole, more emotionally stable than trumpet players. :) Glad you're enjoying the channel, and thanks for saying so!
@@chasesanborn haha, I won't lie I have definitely been more emotionally stable since I switched, but I do miss never worrying about if I'm playing loud enough and also making that horse sound lol
The two best things about playing the trumpet.
Nice talk. I also recommend transcribing solos and bass lines to my bass students, and I make sure the assignments match the students' technical capabilities and audiation skill levels.
I encourage them to choose the solos they want to transcribe. If pressed, I'll suggest, but I think it's an important part of the process that they find solos they like and are within their ability to transcribe and perform. It also boosts the incentive to do the work.
There are more efficient ways to internalise sounds. Transcribe to get good at the skill of transcribing.
While it is true that one gets better at transcribing the more you do it, if that was the sole reason it would have little benefit for me. What's your more efficient alternative approach?
this is actually really helpful. when I watch theory content I usually just recognize it, then practice it, then force it into a song, but I think now I'll try to focus more on recognizing the sound certain ideas from theory make and what feeling they give rather than just knowing of them. thanks!!
I'm glad to hear that. Thanks for your comment!
As I clicked on this video my attitude was “here we go again another get good fast magic key to greatness.
But to my surprise you hit the nail on the head.
I’ve been playing over 50 years and still am looking for that magic key. I need to be reminded even after all these years that it’s a lifetime journey of enjoying the process.
Funny story: When I was a teenager I’d wait for my friend to come home from his lesson on Tuesdays and brother him to share. He’d tell me “screw off I paid money for this”. So I’d say let’s just jam then. I’d pull out all the great licks I’d learned from records that week. Eventually he gave up the goods if I’d trade.
I’ve subscribed and look forward to hearing more from you like when I’d pester my friend for his lesson notebook.
It is a fact of life on TH-cam that offering a quick fix produces quick clicks. In this case, I'm happy to defy your expectations, but will do my best to live up to them in the future!
As an older “student” I really relate to this. I am somewhat jealous of your university students who get the full experience: personal time with qualified teachers, interactions with like minded students/co-participants, and the more immediate feedback these experiences provide. TH-cam helps me scratch the itch, but at a slower, less effective rate than a dedicated 4 year program. However, I am able to take a lesson every week or two with a retired band director/teacher who teaches some improv along with my sax lessons, and a key part is the assignment of listening to good stuff and then learning to play it (this week it’s the Paul Desmond solo from the Chet Baker recording of Autumn Leaves). Assigning this to me and then playing it for him provides me that feedback loop. Good, thoughtful video you produced here: thank you! I’m subscribed.
It's hard if not impossible to replicate the full experience of music school outside of that environment, and learning as an 'older' student is different (slower, potentially more frustrating) than when we are young, but it sounds like your teacher has you on the right track. More thoughts on music school here: th-cam.com/video/d9VWRecCmc4/w-d-xo.html
From Facebook:
I agree with everything you said in the video; I have been wondering about these questions for a long time too. It seems to me that a serious, thinking teacher comes to your conclusions sooner or later.
It’s one thing to come to the conclusion; it’s another to figure out how to implement it. I learned the jazz language via hundreds of hours spent transcribing solos from LP records. As I made the point in the video, the best thing I could tell an aspiring student is that’s what they need to do too, ‘cause it’s the only way I know how to do it.
But they come to a teacher for something more than to be told ‘you need to figure it out on your own’, true as that may be. So we write books, make videos, design courses, all in the hopes of fulfilling the primary role of every teacher, to provoke a quest for knowledge and understanding.
PROFOUND PROFOUND PROFOUND AND HONEST....This eliminates a huge waste of time, tranceibe transcribe, transcribe....period...and transpose to other keys .....
I do not consider any of it a waste of time, but I agree on the value of transcription and transposition.
makes total sense to my ears. curious to what comes up in the future on the channel
Clearly, you're not alone. It's kind of fun to ponder a slightly different direction.
From Facebook:
I'm curious if you think that jazz pedagogy generally shortchanges discussing emotion since it's such a difficult topic to ascribe words to?
It's clear that music has to reach people on an emotional level if it's to reach them at all. Pedagogy applied to good effect would increase a person's ability to communicate what they are feeling, and hopefully a listener would feel something in response. But it’s not a critical factor-who hasn’t witnessed a technically flawed but heartfelt song sung by someone at an event? If your performance reflects genuine emotion, a listener will feel it. Worrying about whether you're doing it right or wrong can be an obstacle to that goal.
I don’t know if we need to ascribe words to it, but certainly students benefit from encouragement that we all feel things just as deeply as anyone else, and tapping into that will have a greater impact on their music than practicing the bebop scale…
Excellent video. Two points...
1. Jazz pedagogy seems to revolve around harmony and melody. Although more people talk about rhythm these days compared to the past, most books and courses are focused around some iteration of chord scales. When I ask about rhythm, I usually hear the old adage "you've just gotta feel it." Then those same people will talk about which scale to play on a chord for hours on end. I think that jazz is built from the rhythm up. There's so much nuance that goes into time feel, phrasing, and rhythm. Dare I say, if you have a solid concept of time--you can play just about anything and sound like a pro. Conversely, if you know all the scales and substitutions but your time is crap... well, you know.
In other words: scales and harmony are the raw materials. Rhythm is how you organize, synthesize, and perform everything you know about music.
2. Learning how to listen is also about aural memory and orchestration. Musicians play cohesive solos by remembering what they played before, and accessing those notes and shapes later on in their improvisation. Bach was a great improvisor--his lines weave in and out of each other because he could hold onto those melodic ideas in his inner ear while he played. Same with Charlie Parker.
Orchestration is also key. I mentioned in an older video that you sound like Art Farmer. Even though I don't play trumpet, Art Farmer is my favorite trumpet player because everything he played fit the place and people he played with. Being able to step outside yourself and hear the mix, hear where you fit in with the blend of the band.
I'm still working on both of those points decades into my own practice. I'm just ready to see jazz pedagogy turn away from a scale and harmony focus--so that we can understand how scales and harmony work through the lens of rhythm and sound.
Sorry for the long comment, but you've probably seen my essays on your videos before ;) Keep on the keeping on, as another great trumpet player once said.
I put it this way: melody and harmony make your music sound good. Rhythm makes it feel good. As another great musician said: "It don't mean a thing..." No need to apologize for a lengthy comment--if a video sparks commentary I know I've touched a nerve. So far, this appears to be one of those. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Well I’m definitely in the target audience you mention! I love your Tactics book by the way.
Glad to know that, and thanks for saying so!
Amazing explanation of the problem im facing right now, even though I didnt even realise it... I think its time to start listening and transcribing... look forward to your next videos coming up!
Although I have heard people argue against transcribing, I think of it as an intensive form of listening. I've never heard an argument against listening. (And if I did, I wouldn't listen...:)
Guided self discovery is the best thing I've heard in years. I've played trombone for decades (bass trombone in an 18pc jazz orchestra--not professionally). I'm trying to find a good way to re-teach myself piano after 40+ years, as well as improve my horn skills. keep teaching!! I'll learn eventually 🙂
We're all still learning, or should be. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Thank you. One of the best videos on TH-cam.
Your assessment is generous to a fault, but the sentiment is much appreciated!
You attacked the core of the problem. Information overload affects improvisation by overthinking. We need just a lesson per week but on TH-cam you get 100. Your ear probably can’t integrate all this so fast, and worse if you don’t practice.
Totally agree - so easy to get stuck in watching rather than listening and doing
The plethora of information available at the click of a button is both a blessing and a curse.
@@chasesanborn with patreon you create your own rhythm and don’t get the pressure of external forces like the algorithm, this is why i am trying to get people there and i am member myself
You do have to find a way to sift through content to find what is relevant to you. I will say the algorithm is very good at exposing me to channels I wouldn't otherwise find--sometimes quite small ones. I also get a kick when it decides one of my videos should be shown to a new collective of people, as appears to be the case with this one.
Practical and useful considerations regarding our theoretical understanding and application of music. This drummer thanks you for helping me to understand the motivations of my fellow musicians. 😊
It's nice of you to tolerate their obsessions! :)
I appreciate what you are doing here. I am one of those older players who came back to music after a long layoff. I never went to college so my musical knowledge is mostly limited to what information I have gathered over the course of the last few years of reading books/methods, watching youtube and playing in ensembles. The thing that I have the hardest time with is what and how I should be practicing to get to a point I can hack though a solo and feel like I presented an idea rather than just a bunch of random nonsense. If you were to present some ideas of how to tackle that targeted at the high school/comeback trumpet player population just starting to work on this it would probably do well. Regardless, I have learned a lot from your channel and your books.
That is my current line of thinking. We live in a golden age for information, which creates as many problems as it solves. Thanks for adding your voice to the conversation!
I agree entirely. Even as a classical composer, I find your principles to be true. The process of composing music is an intuitive one, and all forms of intuition must be developed through repetitious exposure. Composers used to expand their musical vocabulary by learning and transposing oftentimes thousands of partimento or schemata, which are essentially small musical instances generally played through at the keyboard, and using them to develop a vast repository of musical gestures that can serve as a scaffolding to a composers creativity. The absence of such a model is the biggest problem I've encountered in my time as an undergraduate. As a composer, there is no point in learning all of these theoretical principles without the necessary exercises needed to relegate them to an intuitive level. You have just earned yourself a subscriber.
Not just any subscriber, but a thoughtful, articulate one! Thanks for sharing your thoughts, and welcome aboard!
Concise well-organized and well stated as always
In an era of abundant information, the least we can do is try to be concise and well-organized! Thanks for that.
It’s all good. It all excites me. I love learning everyday of everyone, step by step. How do you get to Carnegie Hall.
Turn left, and keep going until you hear applause...:)
🌟🌹✨☀️✨🌹🌟Great one, Maestro.
I'll take a reluctant bow, with thanks!
Very interesting. The tricky bit is the compositional side - respecting and not completely losing the original tune - variations! Otherwise the danger is the chord sequence dominating proceedings.
The tune is defined by the melody. The chords provide context and color. An improviser would be better served to know only the melody than only the chords. The former leaves room for your ear to figure out the latter.
@ it does indeed, thank you
@@chasesanborn incidentally, now that we are talking (🙂), touched tentatively on the question of swing. Something that that I believe is impossible to formalize. Interestingly, the guy who played (plays?) with Wynton Marsalis swings on tenor but grinds to a halt on the clarinet. My advice would be to keep listening to Louis Armstrong who solved this problem back at the 20s and when playing let the beat go. It will look after itself, but you are now free to place and emphasize notes wherever you want!
Rhythm determines whether music FEELS good while melody and harmony make it sound good. We call it time feel, after all. Louis forged the path on all three. Early jazz is a study in melody-based improv, before anyone ever heard the term chord scale, let alone tritone substitution.
@@chasesanborn the difference, of course is that Melody and chords can be notated where as the nuances of swing realistically cannot be
It’s so great that you admit you fall victim to it as well. I only just came around with similar feelings. So, me too! I’m around what you said regarding Coltrane. Apple Chord and Scales should be the foundation for hearing and adapting to gigs along with modal understanding to free oneself that much more. I’ve learned standard patterns from Bryan Lynch’s student materials packet - there’s a reason his students are winning all the international/national competitions. I think that’s why they started using him and his colleague at Juilliard. Oh and I recently purchased “Hip Licks” which I love as they’re written straight to the point. Of course I’ll still play transcriptions and spend plenty of time soloing well adding a Pop music cliché here or there at wedding gigs but in the end, it’s about having all that in your arsenal to come about organically in your soloing. To play any gig nowadays, I think l that’s what it means to play by ear.
The jazz 'me too' movement. :) Practicing licks or patterns can expand your vocabulary and technical ability, especially when they are transposed to other keys. They are more likely to become part of an organic vocabulary if they originate from something you learn by ear. That's a good way to extract additional value from transcribing solos. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
I heard some good advice from a teacher of mine- he said “Don’t ask ‘What should I play?’ Ask ‘What do I want to play?’”
I think this is a great piece of advice. It’s not super useful to practice the bebop scale if you don’t like what the bebop scale sounds like (it’s me, haha, I don’t really love bebop scales). It’s good to learn new things, but it’s good to have your desires, rather than an abstract idea you have of what good jazz players should play, be the leader in your discovery of improvisation and music. I didn’t love bebop scale sounds, but just recently I was listening to some guy play the shamisen (I think that’s what it’s called) and I was like, dang, that sounds amazing. Tried to figure it out with my piano, and then looked it up afterwards- it’s like this interesting take on the Locrian scale, without the 3rd and 6th degrees of that scale. Super cool sound!
I think too much perhaps is made of bebop scales as an entity, when really all we are talking about is a chromatic passing note. Food for thought and perhaps a video. Thanks for that!
Fantastic video! I like how it's very apparent how much experience you have in your craft as a musician, what it means to learn and as a teacher. I have a couple thoughts the things you touched on. For example the analogy with the language. It strongly reminds me of the input hypothesis by stephen krashen. It postulates that there is only one and only one way to learn a language and it's by understanding messages in the foreign language. Your mind sort of "makes sense" of the underlying structures and develops abstract representations of said structures as long as it understands the gist of what is being said.
Teaching grammar is also often said to be more disruptive then helpful in this process which I find also very fitting in the analogy to learning music.
Another thought I had was when you made the analogy to classical students. There is an emerging field of how classical composers like Haydn, Händel, Mozart, Beethoven have been tought and it turns out that they were never explicitly taught about musical structure and rules as we are today. Their training was very much more hands on. Many scholars call it the partimenti tradition and it consits of practical exercises to learn the art of improvisation in the galant style. Essentially it's a way of aquiring the vocabulary for becoming fluent in the language of the galant style. For anyone interested, look up partimenti.org by Prof. Robert Gjerdingen.
It's a very unique approach to incredibly effective musical pedaogy and I think the techniques can still be used today to learn musical vocab. Nowadays we could benefit from updating them to teach not just galant style but different styles all across the board. I envision a comprehensive and 100% practical course to teach the skills to composing and improvisation in different styles as directly and straight forward as possible.
Thank you very much for this video and I hope you have a nice day :)
You are not the first commenter to bring up the partimenti tradition. Not being well versed in classical music history, it's not something I am familiar with, and I appreciate your contribution to the conversation!
@@chasesanborn In case you're interested I highly recommend the nikhil hogan show on youtube. He has lots of interviews with robert gjerdingen and they have a wonderfully accessible way of talking about it. :D
I am looking forward to your next videos.
I'll look forward to hearing your reaction!
So right on about volume of notes. The jazzers biggest weakness. Along with every young guy's urge to be the fastest on the block. Or to quote the great Mr Berry "I got no kick against modern jazz unless they try to play it too darn fast!"
It's not the number of notes but what they communicate. Far be it from me to say that Bird or Trane should have played fewer, but most of us are not burdened with that level of genius, and a bit of self editing never hurt. :) Thanks for your comment!
I play trumpet and bought your books decades ago when i was working and was interested in playing jazz but the opportunities to play were extremely limited then dried up altogether before I could reach any standard. What I did do was buy every book in every bibliography I could lay my hands on (especially once the internet arrived and could get books from the US - including yours!)- but never worked through, getting hung up on when to move on to the next topic. Since I retired a good few years ago I have found other interests to occupy my time but have generally kept practicing to keep some sort of chops. I have often thought that actually performing, at least when I’m not at a standard I’m happy with, was never what I wanted but that I wanted to be able to replicate a solo I liked. My older brother had a couple of Parker records and that was the standard I thought my technique needed to be. It was only years later when I heard Miles on Kind of Blue that I thought I could achieve the technique required if nothing else. You have reminded me and also pointed me in the direction I should take which is to learn the solos I like by Louis Armstrong, Kenny Dorham, Blue Mitchell, Chet Baker etc. I accept I’ll never have the chops for Freddie Hubbard or Diz. I am glad I have all those books on my shelf but I will not try to read them from cover to cover but instead as references to see what they have to say on something which might occur to me during the process. I’ll consider this video as a sort of epilogue in my copies of Brass and Jazz Tactics.
Hopefully not a final epilogue! :) I shudder to imagine the mindset of a student who imagines Charlie Parker to be the minimum basic standard. Even if that's the ultimate goal, it is not the place to start, as you've realized. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
100% everything you said... again! I believe this issue crept up a year ago on your channel. And the "How we learn to speak" analogy fits perfectly. We learn music (or baseball or skateboarding or...) by starting simple and usually by example, failing (by getting hit in the face with a baseball or falling off the board or...), adjusting your tack, mastering that skill, then moving on to something slightly trickier. I believe your book does a GREAT job of this IF the student takes the time to start from the beginning and go a their own pace. Just flipping through the book, getting freaked out by, say, page 61, and deciding it's all "too much analysis" isn't going to work. Neither is listening ONLY to Bebop when you're just starting out. Aspire to be a great Bebop player, sure, but start with a style or skill that's more digestible now. Modal tunes come to mind for this. Younger players handle this better than university or adult players. The young are generally more accepting of the "I stink but I'll stink less tomorrow" concept than we older cats who already know how it "should sound" but don't often have the patience required to keep it simple (or is this just me? :^). The big difference between learning jazz versus baseball is that most of us don't generally hang out with a team of jazz players to imitate, get advice from, practice with, or even "compete" with on a daily basis. When learning to speak, we start with simple words or phrases every day while hearing more advanced modeling and constantly receiving corrections. "(No sweetie, it's ESpecially, not EXpecially.") Our abilities develop quite nicely within only a couple of years. So start with Jazz Tactics #1 rather than clicking on #48 and getting overwhelmed. Listen to the great players (A LOT!) for style, sound and inspiration, but don't expect to sound like them over a long holiday weekend. Keep doing what you're doing, Chase!
You hit the nail on the head. (Or ball on the bat. Quite a few of them in fact.) One of the hardest aspects of learning music as an adult is the impatience that comes from knowing what you want the end result to be. As a young trumpet player, you are happy just to make noise with your friends. The older trumpet player wants to sound like Freddie Hubbard (or whoever) as quickly as possible.
And you have a good memory. Early on in the Jazz Tactics series I was called out by an articulate commenter on the fact that I was already getting too deep into the theory for someone just starting out. At that point I was just trying to get my university course online quickly during the pandemic.
There is a lot of great content on TH-cam about improvising, but much of it assumes more knowledge or experience than many people have, i.e., there are lots of ways to expand your vocabulary once you have a grasp on the language. My intention is not to just dumb down the content, as there are also a lot of videos out there that work on the basics. More perhaps to focus on HOW to think about the process, rather than just telling you what to think about.
Many thanks for your thoughtful comment!
I clicked on this video only because of Pedagogy and not because of Jazz. Jazz is out of my pay grade.
But I was the failed You Tube student that thought he'd learn music by doing jazz exercises. So I have Method books and two teachers. They don't compete, they compliment. I also have a concert pianist friend (and patient) that calls me once or thrice a year when he has a free lesson time with a cancellation. I was working on John Thompson Volume 2, but stopped and went back (again times two or three) to Volume 1 and really working on the basics of musicality. I also have La Méthode Rose in French and British. I'm starting to learn 2 voice Bach chorales, and dabble in three voice as practice. And I'm transposing Burgmueller, at least the first 10 pieces.
Jazz? That comes later. Sounds like you have a very interesting channel, and I;ll come back when I'm ready.
Merci.
I'm sure there is a lot on the channel already that you'd find interesting or relevant, but I'm glad you found it and welcome you back any time! Thanks for adding your voice to the conversation which I'm glad to see is quite lively.
Good info! Thank you for sharing!
Thanks for saying so!
I often think of the way that Lester Young spontaneously created a beautiful counter-melody to the one that Billie Holiday sang in their famous recordings in the 1930's. Simple, elegant, beautiful--singing through an instrument.
Lester Young--the epitome of a melodic approach to improvising. Hard to imagine that he sounded so good without triad pairs and pentatonic shape shifting...:)
Been thinking about this (education) in other contexts and a cardinal point is simply investigating "what do you like/not like about this"? The deconstruction of that sets the course for how and when to incorporate new information without having a corpus to muddle through with no ley line.
To your point, it makes listening first and foremost. The theory comes after.
Well said, thank you!
I learned everything i know about jazz from listening to the grateful dead for 50 years. Jazz was a cakewalk after learning how to improvise like that.
I must give that a try one day...
@ try DC Cat Playing in the Band complete Voyage Fall 1973 on youtube. You may be surprised.
It seems to me that the link between thinking-theory and intuitive-playing is in turning the conscious understanding into subconscious expression. And this is accomplished through repetition, repetition, and repetition. While practicing one bebop lick through all keys won’t get you very far, doing it 1000 times in each key just might implant it into what many people refer to as muscle memory. Then, during a performance, it may slip out “with no conscious thought about the words or the rules of grammar.” This is how classical musicians prepare for performance. It’s also the method for getting good at skiing, tennis, billiards, diving, video games, and driving a car. The real trick is in finding the joy that is inherent in becoming automatically more proficient through repetition. The fun can be found in the process, not the product - in the travel, not the destination.
I often tell students you can't use tonight what you have learned or practiced today. It has to reach the point that you no longer have to think about it, and as you suggest, muscle memory kicks in. Also, that bebop lick has to enter your ear in the rhythmic and harmonic context in which it was played in order for it to emerge at the appropriate time. Your final sentence is one that many students, especially adults, grapple with. They are determined to reach an unreachable point. Those who strive are destined to reach the grave dissatisfied. :) Thanks for your comment!
Thx. Keep up the good work
Thanks for the encouragement!
Phrazes and licks can be impatted unto the scholar, using guide tone restrictions to familiarize the scholar with jazz vocab.....that will make the scholar improve transcription effectiveness ...
Phrases and licks first learned from a transcribed solo, or as melodies of tunes from great composers enter the vocabulary in a way that they may be used more effectively and creatively.
I'm a drummer and piano player.
With drummers, there is a tendency to learn licks in isolation and not seeing them as a system; you have to work out how you will get into it and out of it in different ways. It's always about playing music that flows, not about using the correct grammar. It's entirely possible to speak very eloquently without any knowledge of the rules of grammar.
One can know the rules of grammar without knowing one knows the rules of grammar. (I'd argue that anyone who speaks eloquently does, in fact.) Any five year old child is an example.
It's not only drummers that learn licks in isolation. Like rudiments, melodic licks are useful as a means of developing technique, and also key fluency when they are transposed. But not as building blocks for a solo any more than memorizing words out of the dictionary will make one an eloquent speaker. You have to learn the language in context.
Drummers face the challenge of becoming well-rounded musicians in spite of the fact that their instrument and role in the group does not specifically utilize melody and harmony, however understanding those components of music will have a major impact on the way they approach the drums.
As a means of encouragement, I would tell the drummers in my improv class: "How cool would it be to be able to tell the pianist or guitarist they are playing the wrong chord?" :)
Thanks¡
Bon appétit!
One of my piano teacher's played with many of the famous jazz players. One day I said: "Even if I had the chops of Oscar- I don't think I would play so many notes." referring to the movie "Amadeus" about Mozart. He replied, well I wouldn't worry about that.
I think it was Chet Baker who said "If I could play like Wynton, I wouldn't." (Posthumous apologies to Chet if I've got that incorrect, and certainly no diss to one of the greatest trumpet players who has ever lived, but I always like a good line. :)
Thank you!!!
You're welcome!
This makes me think of my current attempts to learn Spanish in a serious way many years after taking it in school.
There are as many different teaching methods as there are teachers. One of my favorites is a guy from Madrid who gives you full immersion. No English. I understand maybe 40% of what he says, but he’s hilarious.
Another is a former law enforcement officer from Florida who mostly speaks in English and gives you useful building blocks.
Full immersion is like listening to improvisation in isolation. In a sense it seems more logical, but it’s actually slower, I think. You need to know grammar and structures.
Good points about teaching styles, and it applies to learning styles as well. A good teacher is able to modify their methods depending on the student. If you can make your students laugh, even if a lot of what you say is incomprehensible, you'll get through to them. For many people trying to make initial inroads, I'm sure that jazz is like listening to someone speak in a language you don't understand. You may only get a piece of it here and there, but if you hang in, clarity will start to emerge.
I am struggling to learn jazz guitar and I definitely spend way too much time on theory and not enough time transcribing solos by ear. I cannot help but notice that classical musicians have a deep knowledge of scales and sight reading and theory but they probably could not play jazz on top of a two chord tune like impressions. They don't speak the language despite knowing the rules.
The art form for classical performers is more typically one of interpretation rather than creation, as it is for jazz improvisers. It's a different kind of language, and no less valid. While a good classical musician needs to be aware of the music beyond their own part, for a jazz musician at any level it is crucial because of the spur of the moment interaction. The purpose of learning theory is to help you make sense of what you are hearing and increase your ability to communicate, but it's all too easy to get caught up in it.
Very interesting
I'm glad you find it to be so!
Until you can play one or two notes rhythmically in perfect sync with the tune, you don't know or understand the tune. First, do no harm (to the tune). Maybe I'll play along with a phrase just playing 1 or 2 notes until i can play those two notes in a positive and constructive way rhythmically, all the while internalizing the rhythm. Then add notes to play as i learn to understand and grasp the rhythmic soul of the phrase or tune.
'Do no harm to the tune' is a fantastic turn of that phrase. I've said something along the same lines with "Your job is not to sound good, just not to make the rhythm section sound worse." Also, your emphasis on rhythmic integrity is right on. If I were to wish for one area of my own playing to improve, it would be my time. Tone would be right up there as well. More notes would not be on the list.
@chasesanborn i just heard Al Hirt do a 3 minute rendition of Cole Porter's Night and wDay from an old Ed Sullivan performance. What he does rhythmically in those 3 minutes is astounding. It's full of rhythmic surprises.
It's well worth a watch, especially if you've never seen Al Hirt. th-cam.com/video/oCqPXyo2Ydg/w-d-xo.html
I'm very happy but not at all surprised that this video showed up on my TH-cam feed. As a retired academic physician, former music major, amateur jazz pianist and current teacher and student of the Italian language, I have grappled with the fundamental issues that you discuss over my entire life: The daily practice of a particular endeavor (language, music, job skills) vs the intense passion for profound and detailed knowledge. While most people are content with a common knowledge of language and music, only a small minority of people are possessed and driven to deeply analyze and understand every possible intricacy. I have come to the conclusion that these are clearly two entirely different pursuits (I hear from my language students all the time "I don't want a grammatical explanation, just tell me how to say it..."), but there is a sweet spot in the Venn diagram overlap where the academic can use their expansive knowledge and skills seamlessly and effortlessly, and still communicate to the masses in a moving and meaningful way. The audience doesn't need to know (and typically doesn't want to know) WHAT is going on, only that it moves them....
(As an academic nerd, I must admit that it remains baffling that so few people are interested in diving deeply into any subject matter. Reading a single social media post makes you and expert....🙄)
Your comment is articulate and deeply insightful. I will pin it in the hopes that many will read it.
@@chasesanborn th-cam.com/video/djRV2Fu1l2o/w-d-xo.html
I think Pat Metheny says it best in this presentation. Reaching the highest level of understanding is extremely difficult and requires intense effort. The end result is that your creativity can then flow effortlessly. I am inspired by his introspection and humility.
Integrity Lives! Chase for President... Or at the very least, Secretary of the Department of Music!
Careful what you wish for me! :)
Right on Bro1
Thanks, Bro2 :)
Personally I never felt like bebop scales were a particularly useful concept. If you practice major scales, minor scales, and chromatic scales enough to be fluent, it's not hard to switch between them. The main thing is to develop your ear so that the SOUND of landing on a dissonance when you meant to land on a chord tone drives you nuts. Once that happens, you start feeling very uncomfortable every time you accidentally land on the wrong note. The human brain is really, really good at learning from that type of instantaneous feedback, so it doesn't take that long before you start making fewer of those mistakes, and in order to land where your ear wants to go, you almost automatically start playing typical bebop melodic patterns, including chromatic neighbors and passing tones. The big benefit is not only that it doesn't require overthinking, it also means that as your ear progresses, maybe you start to hear the potential of landing a phrase on a tension, and guess what? Your fingers already know how to get there!
I'm guessing I'm a pretty atypical viewer in that I'm not currently studying jazz, but I studied it very seriously in high school and a bit in college alongside classical music. If I wanted to pick jazz back up, I would focus nearly 100% on instrumental technique. From my past studies I don't really need more jazz language - my ear already has that. My problem would be that I can't actually play (in tune!) 90% of what my ear wants to do. So I ended up watching this video more out of interest in your point of view rather than to advance my own learning. I agree with almost all of it!
My personal opinion is that jazz tends to be taught backwards. All this complicated language that we hear on jazz records comes from layers of paraphrasing built on top of blues, but how many beginning jazz students start by transcribing Ray Charles or B.B. King or John Mayer? I know when I started, I was like a lot of kids in that I was listening to all this bebop, but when I sat down to play a solo, I had no clue what to do with a blues scale. I was trying to play like Charlie Parker, thinking that all the arpeggios and scales were the cake and the blues licks in his solos were the icing, when in reality it's the other way around. All that bebop language is just ways of getting to and from. The blues is what his solos are ABOUT.
I think part of the challenge is that when music is taught as part of school curricula, there is a pressure to focus on music that is academically interesting, but the blues is not academic music. Plus, there's something about complicated music that appeals a lot to the mindset and the ear of talented teenage musicians. I certainly recall as a 16 year old listening to Michael Brecker constantly, and being endlessly frustrated at teachers that wanted to shut down anything I played that was harmonically or rhythmically adventurous. But I think for adult musicians, starting with the blues is a great approach. Adults have the patience for simplicity. And the thing about the blues is that once you get it in your ear, your ear is going to demand that you play with excellent time, intonation, and phrasing - all of which are utterly essential for jazz, but incredibly hard to learn if you start with bebop.
In one of my early videos, I made the point that university students sometimes (could be fair to say often) have learned to deal with complicated harmonic structures but are unable to play a convincing blues. One of my former students called me out on that saying that my course did not devote enough time to the blues, although that is where we started. Fair enough, but I can also imagine howls of protest if I spent half the year on blues. (C'mon, let's get to the GOOD stuff!)
Another story I told in one of my videos involved a student who had absorbed a lot of language from John Coltrane. I had him play two solos for the class, and unbeknownst to them told him to use only the blues scale on the second solo. When I asked for a show of hands as to which sounded more like Trane, they all picked the blues scale solo. Bird, of course, came out of the Kansas City jump blues tradition, so his roots were authentic.
Great video
Thanks for saying so!
Learn about partimento and the pedagogy behind that.
Another commenter also brings that up and offers some background information on the tradition.
I am currently mentoring a young lady who is a beginner and this is very helpful.
Good! Have her watch and let me know what she thinks.
Your comments about learning language do not necessarily apply to everyone and definitely not to someone who is learning the second language. Even though that I am fluently bilingual and speak, read and listen much more in my second language, I learned it very formally first by studying grammar, spelling, vocabulary and all the rules first. I passed all the proficiency exams and then started to speak. I studied for my PhD in an English speaking country and later moved to another one where I live. I still correct (in my mind) the grammar of people whom I speak with or listen to. I am very much rule oriented in anything I do in live. I have been mostly focusing on classical music when learning to play piano.
Michael
None of my comments on anything apply to everyone, LOL. It's no surprise that one who has formally studied the language and earned a PhD may take issue with commonly heard grammar, probably more today than ever.
I would point out that learning a language by some method other than immersion (listen and imitate) can ONLY apply to second or subsequent languages, since nobody learned their first language by the methods you describe. I will not argue that for you it may be the best way, but the best way for one will never be the best way for all.
It’s an intriguing question whether someone who is self described as ‘rule oriented’ might be drawn to classical music, as you are. There are a lot of ‘rules’ associated with baseline ability as a classical musician: you are expected, at a minimum, to play the right notes at the right time with the correct articulation and precisely in tune.
In jazz, the baseline expectation is personal expression, and that could involve breaking any of the above rules, although I’d argue that with only rare exceptions, breaking the rules should be preceded by a demonstrated ability to adhere to them.
@ Thank you for such a comprehensive reply. I appreciate it. If I may, I would like to clarify that my PhD was in computer science/electronics. I used the time in Great Britain to improve my spoken English. By the way, I live in Canada.
There are indeed different learning methods and paths to fluency. My son was using a computer (reading from the screen and typing) before he spoke English fluently (he did not say a full sentence for a few months when he was almost four years old). Needless to say he is very successful as mathematician (Pure Math) and computer programmer (including AI).
I am saying all this only to emphasize that our learning preferences and abilities are different.
I apologize for bringing so many details of my family history (I brought it into this conversation only to illustrate that, as you said, we are all different).
Michael
I appreciate you sharing all that!
I have been playing a guitar and other stringed instruments for over five decades, and from time to time have worked with jazz and jazz theory. I enjoy reading and studying it, and working on some transcriptions. What I have found though, coming from other musics, is that the way jazz is being taught online and I imagine in the universities is almost in a way a mathematical formula system. There's nothing I think more boring than listening to a jazz player who essentially is working out math problems auditorily with his music. In other words he/she becomes so bogged down in the theory and trying to find this scale or that mode or this approach chord or that chord substitution, that any kind of semblance of emotion or fluidity disappears. The moreso now that the jazz teaching in the various universities and conservatories seems to be so homogeneous that it all seems to flow into one sound and has very little character often, from player to player player. In other words, it all ends up sounding the same.
Music theory can indeed seem like math, and it turns a lot of people off. It has its purpose, but technical prowess in any form is never the end goal. Music needs to connect on a visceral level, otherwise it is as you describe. That varies with the listener as well as the musician, i.e., one person's poison is another person's medicine. Thanks for contributing to the conversation!
Transcribing solos to begin learning the vocabulary of any music, especially jazz, is a recipe for DISASTER!
Solos are parts where the original melody, or the established narrative, may drift away, into a who-knows-what type of extended narrative, and no useful information pertaining to the original narrative can be found in the solo anymore. An example of the same problem is that we could extract one aria from one opera, and paste it into the aria part of another opera. It could work for a moment, especially if sung in the same language and same voice type (soprano tenor, etc). But as soon as the part following the aria begins, we will see the experiment was a failure because the overall narrative is broken. If done in classical music, everyone would raise questions. But nobody questions this same problem with jazz solos? This is why Jazz, in particular, has become nebulous, because the players are using "copy/paste" solo parts from songs unrelated to the song being played. They are pasting them not only in their solo parts but EVERYWHERE else too! Songs stop being songs but metastasise into loaded nonsense.
It's better to stick to analysing all parts AROUND the solos, where ALL band musicians communicate the SAME language, when the whole band plays together, and then often play simpler but cleverer ornamentations that keep the continuity of the piece and the narrative. THAT is where the language is learnt! Then, if experienced well enough in that area, then soloing - if at all required! - may have a better chance to be meaningful and related to THAT song.
Transcribing solos has been a part of learning to improvise jazz since the earliest days. Listen to Louis Armstrong quote his mentor King Oliver, or Red Garland quoting Miles' solo from a decade earlier. (Both can be found in the Jazz History series.) One might have a different opinion or approach, but I cannot agree that transcribing solos (let's include melodies as well) is a recipe for disaster. Thanks for sharing your viewpoint!
@@chasesanborn if I consciously listened thousands of times to the albums I like, it’s already transcribing without transcribing. No need to sit with a pencil and write them solos down, and even to play along them records. After that amount of listening, when you take up your instrument you naturally start playing jazz language. When you’ll play with people, you’ll react accordingly to what everyone’s doing at that moment without even thinking of it. In simple words, learn to play(technically)your instrument(overtones and so on), listen to tons of music(day and night for years) and then play. Parker said something similar
@@chasesanborn
Long soloing is not sticking to the main curve of the entire song, but it goes on a tangent, to deliver something dramatic. That is the purpose of the solo: extended narrative, rarely part of main composition. Otherwise it would not require a separate time for itself. It comes from the classical tradition of cadenzas and arias. American Jazz did not invent anything new, but it did mess up in terms of use of material from the solos.
If a player uses emotional and dramatic highlights from a solo, but across other songs even if they are of different mood and subject - and that is often the case in Jazz - then those songs become emotionally erratic and narratively nebulous.
One of the reasons people started hating Jazz especially after Parker, and call it confusing, is because players new to the genre did not understand what they were doing when stealing material from Parker, and yet were doing it badly and continuously, without better advice.
Another problem with jazz players is their inability to learn from other genres of music or draw parallels; they can't imagine what they do, or fail to do, in any other context - they can’t imagine if it makes sense or not. They only blindly follow rudimentary, laconic advices from their idols. But which must be taken differently: cautiously and much more sensibly.
Insisting on dubious approaches, insisting they are always right especially when wrong, unable to play “a wrong note”, unable to accept any criticism, sped up descent of jazz into irrelevancy.
Thank you!!!
You're welcome!