I had started really spending time practicing scales and arpeggios and plane gotten them to where I could use that in my solos and could go vastitude just playing pentatonic licks, but the first time I tried to learn a Jazz Standard, I failed completely, and was pretty much, doing Everything wrong.
A the time I had no idea what a Jazz Standard was, and if I had known that they were mostly songs written for musicals in the 30s and 40s then I would probably have run yonder screaming
My introduction to this was moreover a bit odd, and this is really the story well-nigh me stuff clueless and fumbling virtually in the visionless while making every possible mistake., and hopefully helping you stave that.
At the time I was still studying mathematics at the university, and I was hanging out with a toned player friend of mine that I knew from upper school. I hadn’t seen him for a few years and we were jamming and improvising. Considering we were improvising he told me well-nigh Jazz and played me some fusion albums.
I was not really impressed with the fusion stuff, it sounded like instrumental pop music with chorus on the whole tome to me. The music I was listening to at the time was increasingly blues-based and really not produced like the 80s fusion was. At the same time, I was still really curious to learn and to try to play Jazz considering I wanted to wilt largest at improvising. That part fascinated me considering improvising was what I had the most fun doing when I was playing in waddle bands, which I did next to studying at the university, and I was quite lucky that I played in bands where I had a lot of space to improvise like that (especially given how bad I probably was at it). I had been checking out some Satriani and Steve Vai, but when I realized that they were not improvising their solos then I lost all interest in their music and went looking for other stuff. It took a long time until I started to fathom their playing, it is strange how pretty random things can influence our taste, I somehow moreover ignored that a lot of the waddle bands that I listened to did not really improvise either.
Luckily Johan, the toned player, had an Aebersold tome that I could infringe so that I could try to learn to play. If you don’t know what an Aebersold tome is, then it is a typesetting with sheet music for some songs and valuables tracks for all those songs which is unconfined to practice with if you know how to read and interpret a lead sheet.
At that time I had never listened to Jazz and the only Jazz song I had played was Mood Indigo where I had managed to teach myself a G7(b13) chord, 
but I had veritably no idea what to do with all the chords in that book, the most Jazzy song I had improvised on was probably T-bone Walker’s Stormy Monday which is still just a 12 bar-blues.
I started listening to the Aebersold cassette and the first song was Green Dolphin Street. Of course, I only had the valuables track so I listened to the groove in the toned intro (which was a bit confusing) and expressly the chords which sounded wondrous with a lot of colors and it was moving virtually in ways I wasn’t used to which I found really interesting. I immediately set out to try and learn to improvise over that song.
Listening To The Song
If you want to learn a song then one of the first things you want to do is to listen to the song, that seems obvious. When I am working on a song then I usually trammels out several versions and moreover try to icon out what the “famous” versions of that song is.
But I was in the situation that I had ONLY the valuables track album, and this was in 1994 without any Spotify, YouTube or iTunes then I had no idea how people played the song. Remember that I had no wits with listening to or playing Jazz, and the only source of music I had misogynist was the library where it was nonflexible to find specific songs if you did not know what tome it was on or who had recorded it, which is really a pity considering the Coltrane/Miles versions of this song would probably have been really tomfool to trammels out and would have made the whole thing a lot easier.
Learning the Melody
From the Aebersold book, I could spell my way through the melody, plane though Eb was not exactly a key I felt familiar with. I might have had an wholesomeness considering I had been playing with my guitar tuned lanugo a half step, just like Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn and I had had to sometimes play in fairly odd keys considering of that when I was playing with other people, but reading the melody of the song was certainly a rencontre and something that I could at most spell my way through. This meant that I did not spend a lot of time on it, since that was anyway not what I wanted to do, I wanted to improvise, I wanted to solo on it.
What I did not know was that, If you want to learn to improvise over a Jazz standard then one of the first things you want to learn is the melody. The two main reasons for this are:
#1 The Melody is what you use to hear the harmony
So you hear the melody note and from that note, you hear the rest of the chord that is virtually it,
that is much easier than hearing 4 beats of Cm7, just try…
#2 The Melody is what gives you the form
Instead of counting bars while you play you hear the melody as a guide through the form so you dont get lost.
Not having the melody internalized made that VERY difficult, mainly I then had to count to alimony track and the chord progression, which was anyway completely new to me. I had never heard of a II V I or a III VI II V anyway. I unquestionably think that I could have gotten a lot remoter if I had learned the melody first and if someone had told me to do that, but nobody did, so I tried to count and alimony track while I was improvising, which was a very poor strategy.
Modal Improvisation And Scales Sucks for Changes
What really drew me to Green Dolphin Street was probably that it had the A part with shifting maj7th chords that sounded both complex, surprising, and still pretty smooth or natural, and that was moreover what felt was the easiest to solo on, or rather possible to solo on.
That part of the song feels increasingly “modal” and is not really a typical jazz progression. The 2nd 8 bars with the two II V I progressions with an unsimilar dominant were impossible. I didn’t know what a II V I was, so I certainly had no vocabulary for that, and unsimilar dominants were moreover pretty far out of my reach plane if I knew what scale it was.
The way I had been taught to improvise at this point was to squint at the chord progression and then icon out what scale to use and play something with that scale.
The skill of really spelling out changes was not something I was really enlightened of, and combining that skill with a chord progression so that your solo would spritz through the changes was moreover not something I had heard of. Everything was per chord, and not well-nigh playing specific chord progressions. The other tideway I knew was to have one scale that fitted the unshortened song and just use that, but I could not find a scale that had an Ebmaj7, a Gbmaj7, a Fmaj7, and an Emaj7 chord in there….
I could barely icon out what to play on the chords and had no idea how to tie together those melodies then 200 bpm is pretty fast! Those parts of the song were mostly just crash and burn, and often I would get completely lost trying to count and just play something.
This is really why you want to learn some vocabulary and moreover work on soloing over specific progressions like II V I and turnarounds, which will then requite you much largest tools to handle blocks of chords within songs, it isnt just one scale per chord, and knowing the towers blocks of turnarounds and cadences helps you hear what is going on. That way you are moving towards improvising increasingly freely over the progression.
The Weird Paradox Of Difficult and Easy
The way I learned to improvise using chord scale relationships, is not that uncommon, and it is moreover sort of a logical next step if you deal with shorter progressions where you don’t have too many chords. Often that ways that the first songs you are given by a teacher are modal, so variegated chords next to each other with no really harmonic connection. Songs like Cantaloupe Island or So What are typical examples.
This way of learning improvisation is useful considering the songs are easier to play over, you don’t have to think well-nigh a million chords, scales, and arpeggios, but they do have a problem if you want to later play songs like Standards and Bebop Themes.
Jazz as a language was not ripened by playing over a static chord for a long period of time. It was ripened by improvising over Jazz standards which have faster-moving progressions, and a part of the language is how the solo incorporates those chords into the lines. You need to learn to think superiority and moreover to play a melody that spans several chords.
That is difficult if you are trained to think well-nigh everything one chord at a time and not have an overview of several chords in one phrase. In that way, the modal pieces don’t really help you get largest at playing faster moving progressions since the chords don’t move in the same way as they do with Standards and you are not working on what connects the two chords.
At the same time, it can be really useful for a whence improviser to work on a modal piece considering it helps develop a sense of period (so feeling the bar, and the 4-bar periods) and a lot of modal progressions have really surprising chord changes that are easier to hear so that you don’t get lost when you play considering you can hands hear what is going on.
This can be much increasingly complicated with a Jazz standard. So there are pros and cons to learning modal pieces in the whence that you might want to be enlightened of, but of undertow mainly if you aim to learn to moreover play Jazz standards.
My Aebersold valuables track was unmistakably way too fast for me to play over it, and in this first struggle at learning a Jazz standard then I did not sit lanugo and make my own slower and clearer valuables track which is what I did later, just recording me playing the chords, but there is a funny side effect to practicing slowly when it comes to Jazz.
Practicing Slowly – The Wrong way
Any song that you play slowly unbearable becomes modal. You can hands try, just play a II V I but make each chord 4 or 8 bars long, and then you will hear how the forward motion of the progression disappears. This is moreover how The 2nd Miles Davis quintet made songs like Stella by Starlight and My Funny Valentine into modal pieces: slowing them lanugo so that the function of the harmony disappears.
So when you want to practice slowly on a Jazz standard, then maybe it is not well-nigh taking the tempo too far lanugo that will work versus you considering you cant hear the spritz of the harmony which is as important if you want to develop your jazz skills. Instead, you can slow other things lanugo so that you internalize the harmony and learn to improvise over the chords. I have other videos on improvising with chord tones and in my course, I plane reduce that as a starting point surpassing gradually helping you develop your playing so that includes arpeggios, scales, chromatic phrases and octave displacement.
Another important speciality is to focus on the short chord progressions that are the towers blocks of a Jazz standard progression. That is what makes it both easier to remember the chords and moreover what will make it easier to improvise over them considering you have those shorter towers blocks in your ears and in your fingers.
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