Jazz Improvisation Course

IM 1 - Introduction

Improvisation is instant composition, the instant creation of a new melody.

When the improvised melody is not related to another song it is called free improvisation.

In Jazz (like in Classical music in the past) the improvisation is usually related to a song. In most cases the improvisation follows the chord progression of that song.

( Oil painting by Wivica)

In the early days of jazz, improvisation was a skill purely guided by the ear. Although this approach is still used by some, most jazz players now use their knowledge of chords, chord progressions and chord-scale relationships as the basis of their improvisation. This is the approach of the many Tertiary Jazz Institutions around the world. It takes some time to absorb this knowledge (known as 'Jazz Theory') and new graduates sometimes still improvise in stilted, artificial patterns.

But look at the same graduate 2 or 3 years down the track and the once ugly duckling has become a beautiful swan. For in the end the deeper musical knowledge and skills acquired, greatly expand the musician's creative and imaginative horizons. The improvisation lessons in Jazclass will therefore also be based on the principle of understanding.

The beginning improviser must learn to master three skills :

1. What notes to play

2. How to play the notes selected, and

3. How to improvise without losing his/her place in the song.

In the following Chapters we will make a start with this.

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IM 2 - Shape, Colour and Palette

Every Jazz tune contains three musical levels :

• Melody

• Chord progression

• Scale progression

You can compare these three levels with a painting.
The melody represents the shapes in the painting.

The chords represent the colours filling and surrounding the shapes.

The scales are the resource from which the melody notes and the chord tones are selected - they represent the palette of the painter.

An improvisation can be guided by any of these three levels.

The improvisation could for example be just the embellishment of the melody :

Or the improvisation could be based on the chord tones of the underlying chords :

Or the improvisation could be based on the entire palette, the underlying scales (which of course include all melody notes and chord tones) :

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IM 3 - Historic Development of Jazz Improvisation

It is interesting that over the years Jazz improvisation as a whole gradually developed through these three levels.

In the early days of Jazz (around 1900) improvisations were very simple and largely embellishments of the song's melody. Gradually (with Louis Armstrong) improvisation started to focus on chord tones, until in the Bebop era improvisation tapped the deepest level of the song, the scale progression. (Experienced improvisers descend even to a deeper level (Level 4) when playing 'outside' the tonality of the song. This occurs for example in so called 'side slipping' where the improviser uses a scale a semitone or a whole tone away from the proper scale resource.)

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IM 4 - A Happy Day

For our first improvisation we will use Level 2 of a song : the Chord progression.

A Happy Day is a simple tune. The chord progression consists of major triad (3-note) chords and Dominant 7th chords. The melody is composed of chord tones only.
(Chord symbols are written above the staff. Numbers in brackets below the staff indicate the bar number.)

This song is written in the most popular Jazz song format, a 32 bar song in the 'A A B A format'.

1. The first eight bars (1 to 8) represent the 'A-section.
   
   
2. This A-section is repeated in bars 9 to 16.
   
   
3. Then follows an eight bar 'Bridge' or 'B-section' from bar 17 to 24.
   
   
4. The song is completed with a final repeat of the A-section in bars 25 to 32

Audio 1

Other songs with the 32 bar AABA format include :

Solitude - Satin Doll - Take the A Train - In a Sentimental Mood - Sophisticated Lady - Perdido (to name just a few written by Duke Ellington alone).

Also : Georgia - Over the Rainbow - I can't get Started - What is this Thing called Love - Love me or Leave Me - Lullaby of Birdland - Misty, and many many more.

A Happy Day features two of the most powerful devices used in music composition and improvisation.

1. Repetition
Good improvisation (or composition) is not about cramming a song full with one new idea after another. This is rather boring for the listener.

Instead take a simple idea and repeat it. This instantly creates interest, as it sets up a 'story'. Develop the idea with a small variation, then combine it perhaps with another idea. But not too many.

In the A A B A format three quarters of the song consists of the same thing (A) and only in the Bridge is new material introduced.

There is much more repetition (and of different types) going on at a smaller scale throughout the song. Can you spot these ? We will discuss them next lesson.

2. Varying rhythmic activity levels
Music is all about tension and release.
A succession of short notes creates rhythmic tension (high activity).
Long notes and long rests create rhythmic release (low activity).

Alternating activity levels immediately creates interest and meaning in a melody or improvisation.
Look at the first 4 bars of 'A Happy Day' for example.

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IM 5 - Practice

Practise A Happy Day in the following ways (using the Play-a-Long Midi file track) :

1. Play the melody until you can play it from memory. (Keyboard and guitar players also learn to play the chords from memory.)
   
   
2. Play sustained chord root tones until you can play them from memory.
   
   Audio 2
   
   
   
3. Play root tones only using a Rhythm Pattern (see IM 6 below).
   
   
   
   
4. Play all chord tones in crotchets (1 beat notes). Audio 3
   
   
   
5. Improvise over the song's chord progression using chord tones only.

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IM 6 - Using Rhythm Patterns

To overcome the problem of getting lost in the song, start with using 2 bar rhythm patterns. These also have 'in built' contrasting activity levels, which helps you to practise appropriate phrasing.

For example :

1. First play the pattern using one note only until you are thoroughly familiar with its rhythm.
   
2. Next play the pattern using chord root tones only. Go this way through the entire song a few times.
   
   Audio 4
   
   
3. Then fill in your own choice of chord tones for the improvisation.
   
   Audio 5
   

Here are five patterns to get you started. Make some of your own as well.

Audio 6


Play each off beat quaver that is followed by a rest staccato (short).

On the Audio Demo for 'A Happy Day' I play the melody for the first chorus followed by one chorus of improvisation using chord tones throughout. I used Rhythm Pattern 3 for all A sections and Rhythm Pattern 4 for the Bridge.

REMEMBER :
When you just start painting you don't expect to come up with a masterpiece straight away. It is the same with improvisation. You first have to absorb the principles and material involved. This takes time. So don't worry if your first efforts are not what you would like them to be. Keep working at it, gradually things will come together.

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IM 7 - Swapping 2s

Swapping 2s or 4s is often included as a special feature in performances by many small Jazz combos. It is especially popular with Trad Jazz groups, but can be just as effective in a modern Jazz ensemble. Rather than one performer improvising over an entire chorus (or more), two or more soloists take turns playing only 2 or 4 bars at a time. Each player reacts to what the previous player just has played. This is great fun and can produce a fresh and unpredictable outcome.

Each lesson in the Improvisation Email Course includes a play-a-long midi track for swapping 2s or 4s. These can be of great benefit to your development so make sure you use them.
Play in all the 4-bar (or 2-bar) gaps as indicated in each lesson.

Use the chords or scales discussed in each lesson.
In this lesson for example improvise using chord tones only. I have done the same here.

A Happy Day : Swapping 2s.

1. 1st chorus (32 bars) : I play the first 2 bars of each 4 bar phrase, you play the following 2 bars.

2. 2nd chorus (32 bars) : You play the first 2 bars of each 4 bar phrase, I play the following 2 bars.

   Improvise using chord tones only.

Use the swapping tracks in the following 5 ways :

1. LISTEN
   Play each gapped track several times, just listening to it. They contain many rhythmic ideas ('licks') you should absorb so that they gradually become part of your own vocabulary. The spaces between each phrase nicely highlight each idea in isolation.

2. WRITE
   Write out some of the ideas on paper as 2- or 4-bar rhythm patterns.
   The more you involve yourself actively with music elements like these the more you learn and absorb them.

3. SING
   Sing the rhythm pattern of each phrase segment in the gap immediately behind it. Like "deeeedadadadit -dedaaaah".

4. REPEAT
   Improvise on your instrument. Use your own note selection but try to repeat the rhythm pattern of each preceding phrase segment.

5. COMPLEMENT
   Improvise on your instrument. Use your own note selection and rhythm pattern and complement in your own way the phrase segment before (or behind) it.

http://esvc001419.wic024u.server-web.com/im1.htm

Apocalyptica Plays Metallica by Four Cellos

By Bob Cannon

APOCALYPTICA Apocalyptica Plays Metallica by Four Cellos (Mercury) Classical players usually embarrass themselves on rock projects, but this Helsinki cello quartet's take on eight Metallica anthems is a vicious delight that retains the raucous spirit of the originals. ''Master of Puppets'' maintains a frenzied crunch, and ''The Unforgiven'' has a percussive drive that's as much Stravinsky as Hetfield & Co. Way better -- and louder -- than any novelty record. B

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,287439,00.html

Rattle and Ho-Hum

By Kevin Forest Moreau

Metallica has had a proud and distinguished career. When Kill 'Em All was released twenty years ago, none but the most starry-eyed headbanger would have dared to dream that one day the brash upstarts behind "Seek and Destroy" would one day be considered the elder statesmen of metal. Hell, who would have believed that heavy metal would ever be taken seriously enough to merit elder statesmen? Metallica wasn't the first band to find the music of the spheres in the relentless stampede of jackhammer guitars, nor the heaviest by far. But it was one of the few bands to bring metal into the mainstream. Critical acclaim (of the kind that counts, not the Circus/Hit Parader variety), Grammys, MTV airplay -- Metallica was the first long-haired hard rock outfit to barrel its way onto pop culture's main stage without apology or compromise (at least, for a while) and make the world come to it on its terms. You can't turn around in a record store or pause for too long on a commercial radio station today without confronting the band's undeniable legacy. Its achievements have been nothing short of remarkable. And thus there's no shame in accepting the inevitable: Metallica should call it a day.

Or at least consider a name change. Because there's nothing metallic about St. Anger, a lumbering behemoth of an album that doesn't so much trample everything in its path as it thrashes clumsily about, like a woolly mammoth with a flank full of arrows, crashing awkwardly through the brush on its way to the cold finality of eternal slumber. Oh, sure, there are some identifiable hard rock touchstones at hand: granola-crunchy guitars, throat-constricting drums and (most of all) pure primal-scream fury. But these elements bear as much of a resemblance to the Metallica of old as the creepy space alien occupying Neverland Ranch bears to the Michael Jackson of Off the Wall. The guitars stumble in a monotone of mid-level, processed rattle; the drums don't propel as much as struggle to disguise an all-too-turgid pace; and the rage is both unfocused and leavened with too much narcissistic navel-gazing.

How does St. Anger stumble? Let us count the ways. First, it discards what's always been the band's secret strength: the inescapable melodicism of its saw-toothed rhythmic assault. There's not so much as a single memorable melody to be found on St. Anger, save for those that embed themselves into the listener's consciousness by dint of their sheer atrociousness, as on the mewling, metal-scraping title track and the decidedly non-monstrous "Some Kind of Monster." Second, it further turns its back on the intricate, cerebral shifts and time signatures that elevated ...And Justice for All and the superlative high-water mark Master of Puppets into something approaching art. This has been a grating flaw in the band's output for the last dozen years, but in the absence of the more conventional song structures that took their place on Metallica, Load and Reload, it's all the more pronounced. There's not even so much as a single, solitary guitar solo; Kirk Hammett, the band's mercurial axe murderer, is given little to do but chop-strum in unison with vocalist James Hetfield. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is just not what Kirk Hammett was put on this earth to do.

Worst of all, perhaps, St. Anger doesn't even try to live up to its title. Instead of exalting absolute, primordial rage as a thing of divinity, embracing it as a necessary part of man's duality, Hetfield drowns in the miasmic, inchoate anger of the womb. Anger is no longer a natural emotion whose energy leads to a cathartic, howling release; it's a security blanket for a middle-aged soul discovering self-examination for the first time. Hetfield's well-documented rehab stint has neutralized his mojo, robbed him of his Samsonesque vitality. "Invisible Kid," "My World," "Frantic" and the imploding title track document a man-child grappling with his anger management issues, trading in the white-hot bash-and-pop assault of Janovian bellowing for the self-absorbed wail of Fred Durst.

And with that primacy has gone any shred of Hetfield's serrated lyricism: "My lifestyle determines my death style," he snarls in "Frantic," while on the closing "All Within My Hands," he all but screeches "Love is control/I'll die if I let go" before doing just that in the only way he knows how, chanting "Kill! Kill! Kill!" like the mantra of absolution it was two decades ago. "Dirty Window," in particular, is a maelstrom of journal-entry clichés: "Am I who I think I am?;" "I'm judge and I'm jury and I'm executioner too;" "I see my reflection in the window; this window clean inside, dirty on the out."

Metallica has endured its share of tests recently, from Hetfield's struggle with sobriety to the emotional departure of longtime bassist Jason Newsted, and especially drummer Lars Ulrich's outspoken opposition to the file-sharing site Napster, which led to the unprecedented PR disaster of a band of multimillionaires filing suit against its fans. Trying times indeed, and surely in all of that turmoil there's fodder for a wondrous explosion of creative and artistic catharsis. St. Anger, with arena-rock producer Bob Rock stepping in on bass as well as orchestrating the album's muddy sonic whirlpool, ain't that document. And judging from the album's alarmingly murky sprawl, it's hard to imagine such a document is forthcoming. Rarely has an album gnashed its canines so ferociously and yet proven so toothless.

http://www.shakingthrough.net/music/reviews/2003/metallica_st_anger_2003.html