Teaching Jazz Improvisation
Improvisation, while a crucial aspect of jazz education, is such a difficult topic to teach as each musician and teacher approaches it in a different way! Today, I’m going to introduce how I personally choose to teach improvisation to my students. These topics are mostly applicable to high school music students or beginner improvisers!
First, I like to break improvisation down to three different steps: melodic improvisation, rhythmic improvisation and harmonic improvisation.
Melodic improvisation revolves around using a motif from the melody of a song for improvising. This style of improvisation is best explained when students are learning a jazz standard. As the melody follows the chord changes of the song and often outline each chord, having students stylistically use fragments of the melody to solo they can train their ear to hear how to navigate through sets of multiple chord changes. This step can even be broken down to its most basic form of students learning one small melodic phrase, and using it to improvise over a drone. This is a great way to introduce beginner players to improvising.
Next, I introduce rhythmic improvisation, which focuses on using various rhythms and articulations to improvise. This step is twofold as it allows students to develop various types of articulation and technical skills, and to begin experimenting with playing a wide range of rhythms. For articulation, I have my students practice articulating their solos completely on each beat, using bebop articulation and playing entirely slurred. For rhythms, I introduce them to all of the types of possible rhythms including quarter notes, eight notes, sixteenth notes and triplets. For more advanced students, you can introduce playing over the barline and using dotted rhythms.
Lastly, I introduce harmonic improvisation. This revolves around using the chord changes to make clear and concise improvisational movements throughout the progressions of a tune. This is always the most difficult method of new improvisers to grasp because of the strong theory component; they need to learn how to build chords and understand the scales that are associated with each chord. This is a handout I use when teaching chord-scale theory. This is a handout on how to use the half-whole diminished scale to solo over dominant chords. Using these handouts, I teach students how to create patterns with scales and arpeggios to make sure their improvisation doesn’t sound too static and that it clearly outlines each chord. Then, using the melodic and rhythmic skills they have previously developed, you can help the student to begin refining their improvising.
As students develop, you can continue to introduce them into more advanced topics.
3-7 and 5-9 voice leading in chord changes
Chord extensions and their associated scales
Learning phrases in all twelve keys
One last large part of improvising is transcribing. This is a tool more suited to intermediate players as they will have naturally developed aural skills throughout their previous learning. When working through transcribing with students, I like to teach them what Tara Davidson refers to as the “plug and chug” method, referring to learning a line and deliberately plugging it into your solos. As students begin to do this, the lines will begin to naturally show up in their playing. I also like to encourage my students to write out their transcriptions as it helps build their notation skills as well as allows them to analyze each solo more in-depth. I like to teach students to use one lick over multiple chord changes. For example, the same lick can work over the following chords: A major 7, Dmaj7(#11), Gma7(#11), Bmin7, etc. Lastly, I reiterate that it’s crucial to practice everything in all twelve keys.
While this is by no means an exact science, I’ve found that introducing improvisation to students in those four steps allows them to scaffold their knowledge and develop their improvisation over time. If you have any questions or suggestions, don’t hesitate to drop a comment or send me a message!