In this lesson, rather than covering a concept found in Jazz, I thought I’d be a little bit self-reflective and give you a short(ish) list of things I wish I knew when I first started getting into Jazz. I do this in the hope that some of this information will help inform your own playing and learning. But of course, if you’re not interested in this and would rather just start learning stuff, feel free to skip this lesson. This list is entirely subjective and in no way exhaustive, and is split between theoretical things I wish I knew, and practical things I wish I knew. So here we go.
Jazz Theory
- Ultimately, all music theory tries to do is describe different ways of mixing dissonant and consonant intervals using 12 notes, whereby dissonant intervals want to resolve to consonant intervals. That’s it. That’s all of music and all of music theory in a nutshell. All you have to do is play some dissonant intervals followed by some consonant intervals and you’ve got a song. So try and distil every theoretical concept you learn back into how it combines dissonant and consonant intervals. This is the concept of tension and resolution.
- Listen to lots of Jazz. This is so important. There are some things that you can only learn by listening to lots and lots of Jazz music – for example, it’s quite hard to teach appropriate rhythm, articulation and phrasing. You really just have to listen to a lot of it, internalise it, and replicate it until you’re comfortable with the musical language.
- Jazz doesn’t have to be complex – so keep it simple. Many people have a misconception that all Jazz is complex. A lot of it is, but it certainly doesn’t have to be.
- Keep you improvisations diatonic – don’t worry about modes or exotic scales and do NOT allocate a different scale to every single chord, at least while you’re a beginner. That is way too hard to process if you’re still learning. Try use as few scales as possible over a given song, to free up your RAM – keep it simple.
- Slow it down – when people first begin improvising they have a tendency to try and fit as many notes in as they can. Slow it down, keep it melodic and lyrical, just play a few notes with a few simple phrases – keep it simple!
- On a related note – use repetition. You don’t have to create a brilliant new melodic line over for every single phrase. Again, don’t overcomplicate things if you don’t have to. Play something – if it sounded good – play it again! Repetition can be a very powerful tool – so keep it simple!
- People talk about melody and harmony as separate entities. But really, your melody is just an extension of the harmony. If the chord you’re playing is a CMaj7 and the melody is the note D – then you’re really playing a CMaj9. Again, melody is just an extension of the harmony and therefore follows all the same rules as harmony.
- Theory is easier than practice and thus always runs ahead of practice – so practice a lot. Unless you’re a theoretician, there’s no use knowing what a secundal voicing is if you don’t know how to play it.
Jazz Practice
- Practice playing guide tones. You cannot practice playing guide tones enough. They are targeted in your improvisation, they can be used as simple shell voicings for chords in your left hand. Practice them with both hands, separately and together, until you are sick to death of them.
- The best way to learn is to play with others. Like learning a new language, to be fluent in it you have to converse in it – often and for long periods of time.
- Embrace mistakes. They are inevitable. They are part of the learning process and a part of Jazz. Indeed, it’s more important that you learn how to recover smoothly from a mistake than to be able to play perfectly. This is, again, because you will not play perfectly – you will make mistakes. Deal with it. But if you can recover from them well then most people won’t even notice that they happened. This can be done by turning your mistake into a chromatic run, or simply by repeating your mistake so that people think it was intentional and that you were just ‘creating tension.’
- Master the basics before trying more advanced stuff. Again, there’s no use trying to learn the locked hands technique if you can’t play a 7th chord. You’ll just do yourself a disservice.
- Learn to play the chords in both hands. Beginners sometimes assume that your left hand plays chords while your right hand plays the melody. This is generally true, but not really. You really need to know how to play the chords in both hands – both so that you can comp for people and so you can play arpeggios during your improvisation. And this is not to even mention two handed chord voicings.
And that’s it. Hope you found that little bit of indulgent self-reflection at least a little bit useful.
Things I Wish I Knew When I First Started Learning Jazz
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