Learning Jazz

I’ve talked about voice leading with guide-tones and using chromatic surrounding/approach tones here on LJS before, and now I want to combine these two concepts and apply them to “There is No Greater Love.” The...

7th chords have been covered here before on LJS, so in this post, I want to expand our ideas about 7th chords and offer up a fun way to practice 7th chords in all...

There is nothing scarier than coming to a gig, and suddenly the band leader pulls out a chart, and the first thing you see is a bunch of different time signatures all over it. I remember...

Once we’ve mastered some of the basic types of jazz vocabulary, we’re always striving to find new and interesting ways of breaking up and varying our improvised melodies. One of the most effective ways to...

Bill Evans’s 1959 recording of “What is this Thing Called Love” from Portrait in Jazz was one of the first solos I transcribed as a jazz major in college. I learned improvisational strategies from this...

Stick Control is a book written by the great late George Lawrence Stone. It was published in 1935 and became one of the most acclaimed books in the drumming community. Stick Control is, for many,...

In this post, I'll be expanding on a previous lesson, entitled: 5 Exercises to Expand Your Rhythmic Precision and Time Feel. In that lesson, I discussed the importance of rhythmic precision, and how being able...

One of the biggest challenges of improvisation involves coming up with melodies that make sense over chord changes that are highly chromatic. Much of the standard jazz repertoire from the post-bebop era includes songs with...

A “constant structure” is a fixed set of relationships between pitches. It is related to the ideas of a “pitch cell” that can be transposed and/or sequenced. Constant structures are great for creating motivic units...

You and I are not that different. We both want to become better jazz improvisers. We both have a passion for jazz music and we daydream about taking killer solos the next time we...