A great way to turbocharge progress for jazz beginners
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- Опубликовано: 29 сен 2024
- Do you teach beginner improvisation to new jazz students? What's the best method? Learn how I use a key centre approach that's helped my beginners get good, fast.
It is a detailed guide to an effective approach for beginning jazz pedagogy.
Blog post to go with this video, about teaching (& learning) improvisation to beginners using a key centre approach: jazzworkshopau...
My music school, lessons, & blog:
Jazz Workshop Australia | JazzWorkshopAu...
@jazzworkshopaustralia916
#jazzeducation #teaching #jazz #musicteacher #improvisation
This video ruclips.net/video/M0GsHvIIPXc/видео.html on how to escape from the blues scale rut would be a good one to watch next.
Great content I want more jazz videos
Thanks very much. Good news: more jazz videos are coming.
Very nice content!
Glad you think so! Thanks so much.
I enjoyed a lot listening to your lessons, thanks!
your approach is very reasonable : "key centers, not chords". Beginners cannnot keep up with the chord progressions, and because of the challenge that chord progression puts on them, loose any sort of musicality when improvising. I have seen that so many times. I am giving a very similar recommendation to my jam beginner friends.
Thanks, and that's a great way of expressing it - "lose any sort of musicality". I bet all of us who teach have seen it.
This should be required watching for ALL jazz band directors who teach beginners. So many people get this wrong! I will say that I have had success with the minor blues scale but only when students learn specific licks and phrases rather than the scale itself.
Thanks very much for this feedback, very encouraging. Yes, minor blues scale can be fine, of course, but it is so easy for it to go 'wrong'.
@@tbonealex ha, yes!
Great video. The content was not overwhelming and it was presented in a lucid and straightforward way that was easy to understand. I particularly liked the use of appropriate examples and the recommendation of useful tunes for beginners to learn.
Thanks for your feedback, it means a lot. I'm glad you liked it.
Really appreciate the amount of effort this took! Great point about using major instead of minor, makes a lot of sense
Glad it was helpful!
Love it Saul! I really enjoyed this
Thanks!!
just like learning a new language : learn simple stuff, the foundation, and do it for a while until it get second nature and be enjoyable and audible to yourself first then other people.
Yes, absolutely. Also, early on the langaue is just an approximation of a fluent speaker, but fluency and creative freedom come over time.
@@TeachingJazz I agree and like the video.
This is really helpful.
Thank you, I'm glad you found it helpful. Thanks for letting me know.
I personally like to throw cymbals at my students
Ha. Legend has it that that can be just the wakeup call they need.
Very informative. Thanks, Saul.
My pleasure!
Thanks for posting. The information was very interesting for this 80 year old amateur nylon string player. Thanks for posting.
Thank you for watching. Glad you enjoyed it! More to come.
This is very valuable, thank you very much.
Greetings from austria.
You're very welcome, and thank you. Nice to meet you and greetings from Australia.
Great and logical advice.
Thanks!
Great teaching! I am impressed
Thank you very much!!
Great content, thank you Saul! I've been learning tenor sax for 4 years, I'm 38, and I find your approach very insightful. Looking forward to seeing your future videos.
Thanks so much, I really appreciate your feedback. Keep up the tenor playing. More videos are on the way.
Thanks! It`s really useful information. But what about phrasing? Don`t you think, that you can start to teach it from the beginning? And how to avoid chord changes to apply phrase?
Yes, phrasing also early on, I agree. I do that and will adress it in another video. It really is related to time & rhythm - it needs some awareness of time. Once students are comfortable with the very basics of improvising then I add things like phrasing as additional things to learn. Thanks for your question!
Thanks for a useful video. I've been reading your Jazz Workshop Australia where you mention the Am blues and suggest that we play a minor bebop scale over the chord progression. Which minor bebop blues should be played over the Am blues? Thanks
A minor blues, use A minor bebop scale. Whatever key a minor blues is in, use that minor bebop scale. Hope this clears it up.
Thanks for your reply . @@TeachingJazz
That's à really Nice video thank you
Thank you too
How would you feel about starting on modal tunes like so what? It seems easier to justify the dorian scale choice to a curious student (not least of all because you can hear it from the recording) than a (seemingly) arbitrary bebop scale over a bunch of chords they’re supposed to ignore for the time being.
Yes there's definitely a lot of merit in that and I do that sometimes too. Really it does the same kind of thing. The drawback, maybe, is that the utility of the modes, at the beginning is a bit more limited. They are applicable in quite specific contexts, so you are a bit more limited in the tunes you can work on with them. Whereas the major blues/minor scale appraoch opens up many more tunes at the start. The key is to free beginner improvisers from needing to focus on key changes or theory etc too soon so they can focus more easily on sound, rhythm, syle, phrasing and so on. Doesn't have to be the bebop minor scale - harmonic is ok, or even natural minor. It just sounds good and can be heard in recordings too. in the end, start with modes or this, they should end up in a similar place. Thanks for your good question!
Love it
Great to hear, thanks.
This is excellent, I’m just starting work on chord changes and have taken a long time to get here, I wish I’d been given this advice earlier!!
Glad it was helpful! I wish I'd ben given this advice sooner too. Stick with it, it is so worth it.
It's way out there on the other end of the spectrum, but are you aware of how Hal Galper talks about jazz education? He has some good rants about rhythm being largely missing and conversational second-line march beat being a key. Then a lot of stuff about the internal state of your mind during practice or playing.
Yes, I know of Hal Galper's views. He certainly is very critical of jazz education in many ways. It's hard to know what really is missing from which jazz education, though. There's a lot of it and its diverse, done in a variety of ways. There's definitely a strong focus on harmony in a lot of books and videos, but I think you need to see how it is applied in lessons to know how it is used by different teachers. While many, such as Hal Galper, are often very critical of jazz education, there has been no shortage of fine players who are "products" of it - including Galper himself, I believe.
@@TeachingJazz He talks about oral tradition in one video. How they were in a boarding house of some description and they'd all listen to the album, sing it until memorised, then go to their rooms to play it.
I have a very beginner question about this (bear in mind I'm a bassist who'd like to learn how to improvise better):
if the notes in the key centre's scale contain all the notes that we can find in the progression's chords, how is it necessary to play anything other than the key centre's scale?
What does it change, apart from maybe the position on the neck (again, on bass) ?
Is it more about emphasizing some intervals, more than the "general tonality" of the tune?
(hope the question is clear enough, music theory in english ain't my strong suit lol)
If you mean chord changes instead of the scale of the key centre then a couple of reasons. First, tradition and style. Since the late 1930s and certainly into the bebop era jazz improvisers became interested in playing 'vertically', spelling out each individual chord change and linking those changes together in creative and interesting or beautiful ways. It also creates a very powerful sense of forward motion, the constant tension/resolution kind of pulls the music forward. Second, it can make the solo seem more harmonically interesting. Sticking with just the notes of the home scale can end up lacking tension or dissonance, so can sound bland. If you are playing walking bass lines on the bass, you are probably already doing this kind of thing, just with quarter notes. Finally, not all jazz styles do follow chord changes vertically - such as modal jazz, where the melodic aspect is all about the sound of a scale against a chord or chords. Hope this helps a bit, and thanks for your question.
@@TeachingJazz yes thank you, that's exactly what wasn't clear for me!