You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Thematically Improvise

Episode Date: September 20, 2021

Peter and Adam take a question on how to improvise melodies without just running scales.* Learn how to master the major scales - check out Adam's Major Scale Course* Have a question for us? Leave us a SpeakPipe at https://link.youllhearit.com/speakpipe* Support the pod by spreading the word with the link openstudiojazz.link/yhi* Learn more about Open Studio Pro: openstudiojazz.com/proInterested in more music advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase. And be sure to check out our All Access Pass - every course from Open Studio on every instrument.Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Twitter | Instagram

Hey, Adam. Yeah. What's the theme for today's episode? Today's episode is brought to you by themes. Oh, so the theme is themes. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, we'll see. Okay.

I'm Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to The You'll Hear It Podcast. Music advice and a little inspiration coming at you. Just a little inspiration. Not too much. We're brought to you by Open Studio. Go to open studio, jaz.com for all of your jazz lesson needs.

And this is super exciting because you have a new course. over at Open Studio Jazz. Did you know that? Woosh, indeed, I do. What's the name of it? It's called the Major Scale Chorus, which is a very creative title, Peter. No, it's the major scale course.

It's really just me and you, not you, Peter, but me and you, the listener, or you, the member, practicing major scales in a variety of different ways. I'm talking linear, thirds, triads, chords, pivots. This is something that you might see Barry Harris do, but we go a little bit even on that

with pentatonics and just working it through in all 12 keys. That's right, we practice with you. in all 12 keys. It's awesome. And it's a little bit based upon this wonderful quote from Barry Harris. If you don't know your major scales this way,

you don't really know them at all. Yeah. And, you know, with everything that we do around here at Open Studio, a lot of the times, we just like to take one little thing. We like to go very deep. Yes, a mile deep, something's saying. A mile deep, you know, on a very small subject.

A Nordic mild. Yeah. So I actually practice with you in all 12 keys. I tell you how fast to play them, what to play. We're talking about practice. Listen, we're talking about practice. As I said, yeah. Not a game.

Not a game. Nope. We're talking about practice. Zachary. That's right. So go over there to open studio jazz.com to check out that, the major scale course. Major scale course. Awesome.

So today we have a speak pipe. Yes. This is from Bruce. And Bruce has a very good question, I think. That's here. I guess that sort of theme. Come on, Bruce. Hi, Peter and Adam.

So glad you're back to three days a week. I love the podcast. and I can't wait to hear more. One big question. I'm trying to learn to improvise, and I see a lot of information on the Internet and YouTube about using this scale or that scale over certain chord changes,

but very little on thematic development and sort of motific development in terms of taking a sort of theme or a melody and just varying it and changing it as a way of improvising instead of just running scales. I'd love your seven takes on how to improvise a melody. Thanks. Thanks to the question, Bruce.

If you would like to leave us a question, go to you'll hear it.com to leave this question. There's a link right there to speak pipe where you can leave us a voice message. And yeah, so Peter, I would love to hear your thoughts on this. But, you know, I just want to clarify a couple things here, Bruce. So for me, learning about scales and chords and what scales to play over what chords, that really is about learning how to take themes and develop them. Like that's part of the process. Nothing is on its own.

Yes, we can take a theme. and we can notice the general shape or the relationships with the intervals. But also, if I'm in the key of B flat and there's a theme like, right, if I know all of the notes in the B flat scale, now I can practice moving that theme around. We'll get to that. But just so you know, Bruce, they're not mutually exclusive, like working with scales and chords and what scale to play over what chord change, it actually can go hand in hand with developing themes. Yes.

I thoroughly agree with all that. And I think if we look at maybe all those elements and a few more as tools and, you know, kind of vocabulary and methods and frameworks and mindsets to get to that greater goal of storytelling. Yeah. You know, and, you know, storytelling is something that I think it's kind of tricky at first when we talk about music because it seems so disconnected. It seems a little bit esoteric. like, oh, well, I can tell a story, but with music, I got to get into, like, play this chord over that or whatever. But the reality is, once you start adjusting your mindset to, like, committing to telling a story with every improvised solo, like, of that being a, a fun, you know, adventure that you're going to go on, this stuff kind of starts to get easy.

And I don't want to make it like, I don't want to make it sound like the first time you say you're going to do this. It's just the water parts and opens and the oceans and you just walk through. It's not that. So you do have to commit to this being kind of a medium to long-term project. But you can start making progress on it right away. And so that really just starts with sort of committing to say, you know what? Every time I get a chance to play an improvised solo, do an improvisation, I'm going to tell a story. Yeah.

Okay. I know this sounds a little silly. You might have to stand in front of a mirror. Nothing silly about it. A little self-contract. Nothing wrong with that. But that really is the beginning. And then you can kind of jump to the end, I think, and think about, okay, what is sort of like a great solo?

Don't even think about like what is the perfect solo. Like what is a solo that the story is so, you know, well defined and so it's just so present as you listen to it and compelling that you want to analyze that soul, not from the traditional way we learn solos. you know, where we're going through and learning phrase by phrase and like, what is the harmony and, you know, is this using a B-Bop scale or a diminishing scale? No, we're going much bigger picture. It's like, what is a great solo that you can take and just break down from a story standpoint, you know? And I'm thinking of things that that you love and that you're already into and then start really analyzing those and listening and shedding on those for ideas. But none of the kind of typical things that we do from learning a solo. So this, what I'd recommend is kind of taking something that's maybe on another instrument because that'll immediately take.

If you're a piano player, maybe take a trumpet solo or a saxophone or vocal solo or whatever, but really commit to learning from that solo and emulating it and extracting everything you can from how it best represents storytelling in improvisation. Yeah, that's great. That's great. So I wonder, Peter, if it wouldn't be easiest just to kind of demonstrate how does take a theme and tell your story with the theme. Yeah. So there are certain things that we can do to actually practice

thematic development. And one of the things is to identify the theme, first of all. Yeah. I actually saw, I think it was Antonio Sanchez talking about how he builds a themes in his drum solo, right? So how he tells the story with his drum solo. And he said the first chorus through drum solo, he's literally not thinking at all. He's just letting whatever happens happens. And he's noticing what happens. And then he will pick out something from that first chorus that just happened without him thinking.

So he's just playing, he's just letting reacting, he's letting things happen. And then he's got something, right? So something is happy. A little kernel of that. A little kernel, right? So he played something. And then he can now, now he's like, now you have to do the most difficult thing, which is think and plan as you're playing. And you take that and you start to weave that around.

So I wonder if maybe we could just play a little blues here for Bruce. And And I wonder if that, if we could think about in the story, storyboard kind of storytelling format, if that first chorus is almost like the introduction of the characters. Totally. You know what I mean? It's like you're meeting the different characters. There's going to be a protagonist that's probably going to evolve.

Maybe that's the kind of kernel of the thing that's going to be improvised along. But there's some kind of introductory phase. And we're not talking about the intro to the tune. We're really talking about the beginning of the solo. Beginning of the solo. What I love, though, about his idea of not thinking in this first. course and just letting whatever happens happens and reacting is that then you're setting up your characters with whatever it is here in the moment with whatever is happening in the room with the

other players with you right now yeah now you're setting it up so it's very relevant and that's where you can take an idea so maybe uh if you want to try this peter i'll accompany you a little eflat blues maybe okay cool and uh and and maybe you can try this technique of of not thinking i'm good i'm great at that yeah me too i was born to do that letting whatever happens happens you you can then pick something out of what happens and then start to develop that. And Bruce, listen to how Peter will take something and really explore it, like poke it around. Like he's a cat with a ball and he's batting it back and forth and he's looking at it from all sides. I might even become a squirrel where I get sidetracked.

Very easy. You know, you never know. We'll see. That's right. One, two. One, two, three. Yeah, so obviously we heard, yeah. That's what you pulled out of that first chorus.

And then you could see Bruce, I mean, was there a thinking process as you were spinning that around? Or were you just kind of letting whatever you were hearing happen? Well, definitely, you know, as per your idea and the story about Antonio Sanchez, I was trying to not think at all on the first course, which is actually, that's something that I do a lot, I think. I actually do a lot of not thinking when I'm soloed. It's the best way to go, actually. You cannot think it's best. I think in these situations where we're trying to present something, it's very hard not to think more than one normally would over this tune.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I really tried to, well, one thing I did was as soon as we started, I didn't start playing. I don't know if you noticed. I didn't have a big break, but I listened. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Number one, listen. Like, and so that's part of the like not thinking doesn't mean you're not listening. It actually means that you're putting more energy into listening.

And that's listening to what you're playing, listen to what's being played around you if you're playing with other people. Being present. Being present and like being open. So that's almost part of that kind of intro type of situation. So I just like, because I was sort of like, wow, E flat blues. And I was thinking maybe we should play it. Like right as you're counting it off, I was like, maybe we should play ahead. Because normally you don't just, but I was like, you know what?

Let's just see where this goes. Yeah. So what you played and how you played it, not just how you counted it off, but how you started the baseline was going to affect what I'm playing. So how can I just start playing? I don't know what the vibe is. So it's so funny that that's because what I played, I think at first was like, I think I went down. Uh-huh. Oh, we got a piano tuning.

That's okay. Yeah, yeah. So you can kind of be in here. You might hear a little piano tuning in the background because we are serious about our pianos. We are serious. So what I played here was E flat to G. And that ended up being somewhat of a reversal of your, right? This G to E flat thing, which is interesting.

So maybe that kind of put it in there a little bit. Yeah. Let's do one more. Let's maybe do an A flat blues. That's good. That's why you listen. Let's do an A flat blues. Yeah.

We got some piano tuning going on the background. You know, they might not be able to hear it with these fancy mics. They might not be able to. We'll see. If you would accompany me and I'll do, I'll try the same trick. here, A flat blues. Okay. Ready?

One, two, one, two, three, four. Again. Different story. Different story. But I heard, you know, this quick slap that you kind of did

on the baseline of the beginning, and I picked that out as a fifth, and I don't know. It was just a little kernel that just kept him was giving the ideas. That's actually a great point, Bruce, that a lot of times

we don't actually compose any themes. We can pull it from the other musicians we're playing with. That's right. Whatever the people that we're playing with are doing from a piano being tuned in the next room. But no, seriously, like taking whatever you can take.

You don't actually have to come up with anything. You can just then take it and spin it around a little bit. Yeah, and I think another typical way that we would kind of mind for themes, kernels of themes, is things that are played right before we improvise. So like here we're kind of pausing for a second to hear something. But if you're coming off of another solo, you're coming off of the, the head. Pay attention to what's happening because it's a lineage. It's a it's a it's a line that you're playing and you you don't have to ape what just happened but there's a lot of things

in in the still in the space that are floating around and it's what to be developed. It's why the melody can be so important and such a fruitful thing to take from because it is going throughout the entire song. Yes. And so it's always any of the great phelonious monk solos and you're going to hear incredible way to tell a story based upon off fragments or whole, you know, motifs from his melodies. Totally. Melodies on the tune. Totally.

Bruce, great question, man. Yeah. But also, you know, don't sleep on the basic theory stuff, the scales and the chords. Those are not there for you to just, you know, to run scales over the chords. That's not what it's about, it's about, you know, hearing something. And if you know your available notes or available notes, if you know what notes might sound good or might work over that part of the tune, then you got it.

That's right. There you go. Thank you for the question. Please keep the questions coming. We've got a couple more queued up for next time that we do this. So if your question, look, full disclosure here, not every question makes the cut. But most of them do. Yeah.

Because we've got some great listeners. So thank you guys. Go to you'll hear it.com. Leave us to speak pipe. We've got anything else, Adam? That'll do it, man. Well, until next time. You'll hear it.