You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Effectively Use Melody in Improv

Episode Date: September 23, 2019

Today, Peter and Adam answer a SpeakPipe on how to improvise based on the melody of a tune. Wanna send a SpeakPipe of your own? Sign up for You'll Hear It Premium to access our SpeakPipe hotline! Go to https://www.openstudiojazz.com/yhi for more info.For more helpful jazz advice, watch this Glenn Zaleski video on Voicing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWrSFOiEpT0Like those You'll Hear It shirts Peter shows off on the podcast? Want some YHI swag of your own? Take a visit to our store! Just go to https://teespring.com/stores/open-studioLet us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel and leave a comment for this episode.Interested in more jazz advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram at:https://www.facebook.com/heyopenstudiohttps://twitter.com/heyopenstudiohttps://www.instagram.com/heyopenstudio See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Peter? Yeah. Melody or harmony? Non-fidgety. That's all I'm thinking about. Madam Menace. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hearer Podcast.

Daily Jazz Advice, coming at you. Now, what are you talking about, non-fidgety, man? Well, I was going to propose that we have a no-fidget contest today. I'm already winning. Look at that. Look at that. You're doing all this. What are you doing?

What are you talking about? No, this came out. We were talking. We rarely take the time to watch the You'll Hear a podcast. Well, I don't know about it in your household. No, we watch it with the family every single week. Oh, you do? You tie the kids down to the sofa.

Watch daddy while mommy pukes. No, I mean, I was noticing, and please let us know in the comments below if you've noticed this as well. Maybe it's just a self-conscious thing, you know, when people like see themselves on TV, ooh, I look fat and everyone else is like, I didn't notice because you always look fat. But, I mean, it just seems like there's a lot of movement going on. Now, for those of you listening, which is the vast majority, I might say, I might add. We're growing on the YouTube's, which is fun, and I think, you know, we've got some cool camera angles. The pod cave is falling apart.

It's actually falling apart. They're working on it tomorrow, I think. But the mustiness and the dilapidation level of the podcast is actually not apparent in the video for some reason. And I don't know if that's Andrew's editing or what. I don't know. This looks like a pro-level setup because of the great microphones. But, I mean, this is a piece of crap. This thing is falling down.

Yeah, when you're in here, though, this looks like a shableness. made under an overpass by the river. I mean, this thing is going to collapse on us at some point. At some point. And we will die in the pod cave. But until that day, we are here to give some daily jazz advice. Two unknown jazz musicians died yesterday in a horrible podcasting accident. Is that what's going to be on our poppers tune?

No, the headline for the next day. Oh, on whoever takes over this podcast. That's right. That's funny, man. But, yeah, we're going to make some improvements to the pod cave, even though no one can see. We can see. We can see. And it does drive us a little bit.

This is a good sounding podcast. I'm always getting compliments on that. Folks listening on the, which we've done a lot of, you know, or I should say Andrew and others have done a lot of work to get it to that point. So that's a lot of fun.

Do you, let me ask you question. Yeah. Do you, when you're like writing music or practicing, do you pace around a bit when you're thinking? Because I'm a pacer. This is why I think I'm, we're both fidgeting. Yeah.

Like when I'm thinking, I like to move a little bit. Yeah, sometimes. But usually writing, I'm like, I have to like, like force myself to get up off the piano at least once an hour because I will go

several hours which like physically is just not good I was doing it the other day and I was like my wrist was cramping up and it wasn't from I mean it was playing going back and forth I was going old school with a little pencil on paper and but yeah so then I need to get up and pace around I don't actually don't do it automatically enough I mean I'll walk in circles around my living room

all night long if I have to right but there you go yeah that's why I'm spinning in my chair right now yeah so what are we talking about today today we got a speak pipe this is from Alex, Mr. Spaceman, one of our favorites. One of our ULHare Premium members. He has a question about Melody. Let's take a listen.

Hey, Adam. Hey, Peter. Mr. Spaceman again. Sticking with it. Listen, I'm not going to bother you with anything about parenting or any of that ilk. But I was wondering if you could expand your conversation on Melody. You've been talking about melody a lot on your most recent videos, and I was wondering if you could talk about how to use the melody in an improvisation and a solo.

And it would be really cool. I don't know if YouTube would allow this, but maybe you could keep it podcast only. But it would be really cool if you could analyze a solo and lift all the fragments that reference the melody. Maybe not the notes directly, but maybe it's the melody. The melody's shape. The melody's rhythm.

Anything that references that backbone of the tune. Keeping it under a minute and 30. Curse to see what you do with this one. All right. Take care. Good night and good luck. Bye.

Oh, good night and good luck, buddy. A little insider words say. Thank you, Spaceman, as always, for the insightful and eloquent question. And how to use melody when improvising. Yeah, we've talked about this in talking about improvising, but I don't think we've focused on this specifically. Why? Because it's not important, right? No, actually, I mean, all the episodes we've done, it is amazing how many super important things we have. haven't talked about, which is exciting to me.

It's a little bit shameful, but it's also exciting to know that we have these areas to delve into. I think that if we were to look at sort of, you know, the top level of like how we even think about this, I think it's good

to approach melody as something that is really the most important building block of improvisation always. And you know, we We shy away from these absolutist kind of statements because that's really not our style, usually. But I'm not saying the only important.

And maybe you would disagree in terms of definitively the most important. But I think if we expand our kind of viewpoint on what melody can possibly be, it's not just clunking chords in the left hand and bebop lines in the right hand. That's just one use of melody. But I mean the fact that, you know, comping can be very melodic. bass lines can be melodic. Base root movements can be melodic. It has to be melodic.

Drums can be melodic. I mean, all my favorite drummers, Hurling Riley, Greg Hutchinson, Brian Blade, Elvin Jones, I mean, Tony Williams, I mean, I always am hearing so many melodies in the way that they play, the way they solo, the way they play with melody. So, you know, to talk about how,

I don't even want to like break it off too much to say how to effectively use melody. It's like, well, melody, rhythm, and harmony. We know these are basic building blocks. but melody, I think, has to take somewhat of a superior position when we look at improv conceptually. That's right. And I think a lot of chordal instruments, a lot of harmonic instruments like piano and guitar, we tend to not spend as much time as we probably should on the melody. Or you hear that with some players of, like you said, you know, plopping down your left hand

and just playing a bunch of bebop language. It's not necessarily the ideal way to improvise melodic content. If we go, speaking of bebop language, if we go to all of the greats, Charlie Parker could play a melody

so beautifully and with such shape that that's why his bebop line sounded so great. And so I would suggest step one of this is actually spend time working on

being able to play a melody that connects to the audience. Yeah. You know, like pick up, pick your favorite ballad. Try playing what's new on the piano and making that sound like you're a horn player. You know, I mean, that's a really important skill that I think a lot of intermediate level pianists and guitarists especially really could use some more time developing. We get so

hung up on, you know, this scale and this, you know, slick rhythm or whatever. But when you hear, you know, some of our, some of our, I was just listening to a ballad, forget the name of the It was Roy Hargrove, and it was an original. It was a beautiful ballad. He's got some good. Oh, man, I'm a space on it. Anyway, but I was just completely struck. You're gonna space man on it.

I'm gonna space man on it. I was completely struck by this great improviser how he literally just like straight down the middle with the melody in the most beautiful big tone on the fluegel horn. And like, I mean, it was so, so, so beautiful. And it's so easy for us to, you know, to say, well, it's harder for a piano to play beautiful. melody and tone and these things, be like when you bring up a beautiful flugelhorn, such a almost

a vocal quality, you know, a lyrical quality to the tone of that instrument. But, and the piano does have its difficulties in being able to get to that level. But first of all, it's possible. You take Keith Jarrett, you know, pops to mind as someone who can play beautifully lyrical. Top level of that, for sure. Yeah, yeah. And all is improvising sounds like beautiful melodies. I mean, very melodic, very melodic, very lyrical. But also, like, with a flugelhorn or something, When you hear Roy Hargrove play a beautiful melody, it's easy to be like, oh, my God, that instrument is such a beautiful. Okay, put that flugel horn in a crappy trumpet player's hand. Yes, I see how much you, like, as beautiful as it can soar it can also go down to a point where it's kind of hard on the piano to go down that far, maybe because of the tonal range possibilities and how difficult it is to excel, to soar, and to kind of flop down.

That's right. Yeah, I was going to say some suggestions for pianists to listen to for great melodic playing. I think Keith Jared is on the top of my list for this just because of the same. sound he can get and the control he has dynamically that he's bringing out the melody in such a beautiful way. I also think like number two for me would be monk, I think is probably one of the greatest melody players in the history of jazz. I totally agree. And I think a lot of people wouldn't think would think that's counterintuitive, but I totally agree with that. Because the clarity, I mean, you know, you mentioned something earlier about practicing playing a melody in a way that you

can connect with an audience, which is, of course, easier to do when you have experience of playing for different audiences and trying things out. But once you start to do that, you can't practice that. But to me, a lot of that is simplicity and clarity of the line. Nobody was better than Monk at that. And that, you know, stylistically, we might think of his style very different, which it is, his pianistic style than Keith Jarrett. But they really share that ability to clearly and confidently, you know, from a pianist

standpoint, express a melody and just play it and just let it. And I mean, we're always joking about Keith Jarrett, the master of the triad. But that's because he's playing, you know, obviously he can do a lot more than that, but he's confident to just play a triad and a beautiful melody and let his lyricism and the clarity of his melody really shine. No doubt. I think third down for me, and this might be kind of an obscure choice, but Bill Sharlap, I think, is one of the most melodic voicing players. And by voicing, I don't mean voicing. I mean the way he's able to voice his chords under the melodies is so, so gorgeous. Absolutely. I would, Alex, check out any of those pianists. I would throw one more in there, and we didn't plan this list, so this is fun. It's kind of off the cuff.

But George Shearing, who's not somebody I listened to a whole lot, but he kind of pops to mine from, obviously, from a cordal standpoint. And us always not just thinking about melody is a single line thing. And, of course, it kind of became the Shearing style that everybody apes. But really his ability, and a lot of it was from what you just mentioned, voicing, being able to voice out the particular notes. And, well, we saw that, you know, there's a great, maybe. We'll link to that below the Glenn Zaleski video about voicing, where he talks about what we thought he was going to talk about voice sings, but he's talking about voicing.

I think he really explains it nicely there. Glenn nails it. Actually, Glenn's a great melody player as well for that reason. So how do we get this in our improvising? I mean, Alex, have you tried improvising around the melody? Like, we're not going to do anything well unless we put it to our practice routine. So, you know, this should be part of your regular practice, is to practice improvising with the melody of the tune.

It's like it's kind of, you know, the level two of when you're learning a new tune and you're practicing it, like level two is not to go immediately into like as many scale running exercises as you can do over the changes. It's really to get to know the melody in such a sense that you can improvise around it and come back to it and play with it. And then start scale running and everything after that and getting to know the changes. But really that melody has to be super strong before you're going to be a strong improviser on the tune. Yeah. And I think that, you know, one of the simplest, most obvious and probably, most known ways to approach that is, you know, in your practice routine is melody and variations.

You know, where you're always keeping, you know, there's so many different levels that we can practice with it all the way up to like the melody's only in your head and you're playing something that sounds like it has nothing to do with it, but you're hearing it. You know, that's kind of level 99 or whatever. But just playing the melody and then phrasing the melody, but then playing the melody with slight variations is a very basic way. but we want to do things in a basic way to really get this as part of our playing.

So that's, I think, a great thing for any type of style, really, B-B-B-Ballet, I mean, really, anything that you're going to improvise. Totally true. Cool. Well, thank you, Alex, for the speak pipe. Yes, sir.

If someone wanted to leave us a voice message like Alex did. Oh, man, they could just do it as long as you'll hear premium members. You've got to be a premium member. Go to you'll hear atcom to check out all the benefits of premium membership. You know, who are newest, you'll hear a premium member

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No, he didn't pay for him. No, he didn't. I thought he was. I got excited there, right? He looked interested, though, man. You got to hype it up, man. Well, it's an easy way you could support the podcast. We love doing this every day, and it's a great way for it to keep going.

And then you also get a bunch of cool benefits. So go check that out. Yeah, and this month we have, what's the video for this month? Have we put it up yet? Or is it coming? Yeah, we just recorded some new premium episodes over the piano the other day. We have seven hip ways to get where you're going is up right now. That's this one.

Yeah, that was fun. Slip turnarounds and ways to reharm. I used that for some GPS directions last week. It worked well to get out to West County, too. That's crazy. Seven hip ways, yeah. Cool. Well, as always, we're sponsored by Open Studio Network.

Check that out. Our latest course, lead sheet breakdown is especially good for pianists. I was asking the other day, did you think it was applicable to anything beyond pianists? Yeah, I think so. Okay. I think so. I mean, because the basic voicings are so universal,

even for horn players or bass players, you're going to learn a little bit of basic piano when you do this. And this is part of our brand new series. It's Volume 1 of our brand new series Jazz Piano Basics. So check that out in all of our other offerings when you get a chance. Volume 2 is coming in October. Left-hand voicings. Ooh, that would be nice.

It'd be nice. Get your voicings on. That's right. All right. Well, until tomorrow. You'll hear it.