Jazz Improvisation: What To Avoid In Your Practice

I'll let you in on a secret: there is no "right way" to practice improvising jazz

. It takes years of diligent study, knowledge about various musical styles, chord structure, functions of chords within a progression, the scales those chords outline, and a sense of personal feel in order to convey what your inner ear hears. In other words: improvisation is no easy task.

That said, there's no reason you can't have fun while working your way up to jazz mastery. If anything, fun practice is the most important part of practicing. yes, you need to work on scales and arpeggios and you need to practice listening to great soloists and aurally copying what they play, but throughout all of it you need to maintain a love for the instrument. Without that, no real improvisation will come.

So, while there may not be a "right way" to practice, there are a lot of wrong ways. Don't stick to a rigid schedule for the purpose of "getting through" material. Many musicians have become burned out by practicing the same scales and chords over and over again until the feeling is automatic, with no thought whatsoever as to why they were practicing that way. Then, when the time comes for the individual to improvise a solo, two things happen: 1) the solo always sounds the same, because the person has only practice his scales and arpeggios one way, and 2) the performer is so bored with these exercises that he can't convey the all-important energy and expression into his solo.

Thus I reiterate: the most important element of improvisation practice is to keep things fun. Pay attention to what you're playing, and have a reason for playing it that way. Droning up and down scales helps your technique, but not your improvisation. Instead of simply playing a scale, play around with the scale. Practice changing direction halfway through, or starting on the third or the seventh, or adding a note (e.g.: experimenting with 8 note bebop scales) or changing one tone to see what the effect is. For instance, what does it sound like to play a mixolydian scale with a flat 9th? So often we'll play a dominant chord with a lowered ninth, but when do we ever practice playing that scale? How can we expect it to flow naturally out of a solo if we've never practiced it?

The point is not to practice something until it's perfect. Instead, practice to gain familiarity. That means gaining familiarity with variations on a concept as well as the original concept itself. If you can do that in your practice, it will come out in your solos, and your improvisations will feel free.

by: Jay Furman

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