Jazz Improv: (part 1 of 5) Frequently asked questions!

[Music] jazz improvisation you've got questions about chord scales and getting lost in the changes let's talk about it [Music] hi and welcome to the saxophone academy i'm dr wally wallace and if you're interested in saxophone master classes please do subscribe and be sure to hit the like button to unlock the mysteries of the tritone substitution now today we're talking about jazz improvisation and this will be the first in a five video series on jazz improv now in this first lesson we're going to be talking a little bit and answering some of your most commonly asked questions you guys had a few earlier this week i reached out to the coffeehouse forum and also through my email list asking what questions do you guys have about jazz improv but have been too afraid to ask the response was overwhelming and i mean literally i got dozens and dozens and dozens of posts on the coffee house and literally hundreds of emails and private messages asking me questions about jazz improvisation that a lot of you are just kind of too afraid to ask so before we get into the playing workshops in the next several weeks i want to lay some groundwork and answer some of these questions and kind of reduce your mental clutter and about how you think about jazz improvisation but we have to start with a disclaimer what i'm saying works for me works for my brain works for my students but no one can tell you this is the right or wrong way to approach improvisation or specifically jazz improvisation i do not tolerate gatekeepers or anyone that will say you have to do it this way because the cats did it that way back in the day or my teacher taught me this there's a lot of different ways to approach improvisation in jazz no way is necessarily right or wrong including my own way this works for me it works for my students and if you're following my channel probably will connect with a lot of you as well but again there are other people who will disagree they're not wrong or just taking different roads to the top of the mountain so let's start with the most commonly asked question i got this week when we're improvising do we play scales or chords or chord tones or both what do we do now for me the bottom line is how we view our job as saxophonist when we're improvising i don't view our job as outlining chords there's some guys already doing that and they're doing a really good job they're called the rhythm section the saxophone is a melodic instrument so i view our job as building melodic content in key areas you're going to hear me say this again and again but when it comes to improvising on the saxophone melody is king if we think about the early roots of jazz of music and culture coming over from west africa meeting in new orleans with different ideas and cultures and music into that great melting pot it still started not to boil it down too simplistically but with melody melodic riffs and ideas treated in not only colon response but also heterophony where you have a melody played and then an altered improvised melody over the top of it that's kind of the roots of what we became known as jazz today it's a very good starting place when we're thinking about how we improvise on the saxophone so i'll say it again melody is king now does that mean we have to know scales and chords yes absolutely how many we'll talk about that in a second but at the end of the day melodies are of course built off scales and chord tones and the chord sequence and structure give the melody a context but at the end of the day we're building melodies we're going to use the building blocks but don't think about chords and scales think about melodic content it works really well for my brain and once you start thinking in those terms i think you're going to be building more exciting improvised solos the next question i'm asked many many many times how many scales modes and chords do we need to know well not to be snide or cute but it depends on your goals what are you trying to build imagine you're going to the hardware store and you decided i want to get into woodworking you go to the aisle where they have all the different power tools and such you could spend millions of dollars on tools and not be able to build the bird house or whatever else you want to build there's endless tool options but you have to pick the tools that can help you build what you want to build it may just be a hammer and a saw if you're building a birdhouse i don't know i don't really build things but you don't want to go overboard but viewing the entire section of home depot of power tools as necessary is going to make you overwhelmed we don't need everything you could play an hour-long fantastic gig at the local coffee house playing jazz standards with a handful of tools meaning only a certain few types of chords and scales in different key areas of course you can get a lot of mileage out of a few tools if we learn to master those tools so to boil it down even more simply i really focus on major and minor scales because the bulk of western music and jazz standards with some exceptions of course i love modal music i love wayne shorter some of that music isn't necessarily exactly major or minor it's modal but the bulk the vast bulk of western music and jazz standards are in major or minor keys so if we learn the major in minor scales and learn to alter them creating melodic content that's going to get you a lot of mileage and i find that a very nice way to start to think about it in a more refined way in our brains to not get overwhelmed and cluttered with a million different scales and modes now you may be thinking but dr wally we gotta know our modes think about the blues that first chord g7 that's a dominant chord we have to play mixolydian right well i don't know about you but if you've ever tried playing just a solo on the blues using the mixolydian mode [Music] it doesn't sound great because here's a secret the g or concert b flat blues is not in the key of g dominant it's in the key of g major the dominant chords color the sound and make it sound bluesy but it's g major is actually the key minor blues are in a minor key we're building a lot of content within key areas so now riddle me this here's a little bit of phrasing i stole from bud shank tell me what scale is this [Music] so if we add up all the notes within that little phrase right there it's all 12. it's actually technically a chromatic scale so am i saying use the chromatic scale over a g7 chord absolutely not i'm not saying think of any single scale i'm saying build melodic content within a key area so the g major scale is kind of the root the base of the soup and we're going to add chromatic passing tones surround tones as you may know them appoggiaturas escape tones lots of other little colorations along the way we don't need to break it up into 13 different types of scale fragments it's simply playing melodic content in the key area of g major we're going to talk about this a lot over the next couple weeks but start thinking of key areas not mixing and matching scales going by a million miles per hour and trying to match little scale fragments with different chords for most of us that's going to make our brains overheat and not be terribly a good idea when we're improvising over quartz next big common question how do i start improvising where do i get started do i just start playing random notes in the key areas no think about learning a language which is a very good analogy when you learn a language you start by memorizing a couple of phrases so if you never spoke english and you were going to come live with me in america i would teach you two things right off the bat number one where's the bathroom number two i want to buy a hot dog in america you can get by with those two phrases alone and live out a perfectly happy life next up how do we keep up with the chord changes and not get lost this was a very common question and i got a lot of emails about this and i have to be honest you're going to get lost so how do we get lost less often the second help with instead of thinking about a million different chords the chord changes as they're going by most of our brains can't really keep up that haven't been playing jazz for decades and decades and decades reducing those chord changes to key areas will help a lot we're going to talk about that in the coming weeks but beyond that there's a very simple thing you can do to help stay within the form it's called again the melody and beyond the melody we can learn the lyrics now i don't cuss on this channel but cheese and crackers guys you gotta learn the lyrics to the tunes so instead of thinking of 13 million different chords while you're trying to improvise what i'm thinking of is somewhere there's music how faint the tune somewhere there's heaven how high the moon i promise i won't sing anymore knowing the lyrics to a song helps you remember the melody which then helps you keep your place in the form so i'm not thinking of a million different chords when i'm improvising that melody and those lyrics are kind of running like in the background ram of my mental computer they really help you not only understand the song better but keep your place so when you learn a tune don't just start with the horn players listen to vocalists sing it and actually learn the lyrics it's going to help you keep your place a lot better and it's fun

Channel: Saxophone Academy

Views: 8,059

Rating: 4.9590645 out of 5

Keywords: better sax, beginner, lesson, tutorial, saxophone, improvisation, learn sax, how to improvise, tenor sax, alto sax, sax lesson, how to play saxophone, beginner sax lesson, jazz, dr. Wally, saxophone academy, scales, modes, chords

Id: b74yE-2t-JM

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021