“There is No Greater Love” Workout
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...
Exotic 7th Chord Workout for Advanced Jazz Musicians
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...
Spice Up Your Jazz Solos with Asymmetrical Melodies
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...
3 Lessons Bill Evans Taught Me On “What is this Thing Called Love”
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...
How to Improvise Over Unrelated Chords
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...
How to Improvise Using “Constant Structures”
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...
“Super Blues” Scales for Leveling-Up Your Jazz Blues Improv
The blues scale is a very useful scale, but I’ve found it doesn’t always adequately capture what jazz musicians actually play when improvising over a blues in a “bluesy” way.
I distinguish the “bluesy” moments...
How to Master the “Backdoor” Jazz Chord Progression
Jazz’s harmonic language features a lot of common chord progressions that appear often in different jazz standards. For example, jazz musicians frequently encounter II-V-I’s, dominant 7th chords through the cycle of fourths, and III-VI-II-V’s...
How to Practice Triads for Max Results
Along with basic intervals and seventh chords, triads are the fundamental building blocks of jazz harmony and melody. If you want to maximize your ability to hear, visualize, and play jazz harmony, you have...
3 Dominant 7th Chord Types All Jazz Musicians Encounter
Anyone who has played jazz or leafed through a jazz fakebook or “real book” probably has noticed that dominant seventh chords are some of the most common chords musicians encounter in jazz standards. But...