Most Helpful Exercises For Jazz

[J D Sauser]

I’ll keep it short, I’m fixing to fly to Cartagena Colombia for Easter tomorrow. Lot’s of Salsa for 10 days!
They have three culbs down there which are like an Opry… with about 6 or more bands each nite. I sm likely be coming home dragged outta there on a strecher!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ntjjX6Mlng

definitely a fitting place for a first kiss...
NOWADAYS, there's a bit more action going on: https://youtu.be/z05NgxzKe0k

Here's the Havana Cafe I like to hang out at... several bands each night, like a little Opry. Post "Republican" building from the late 1920's: https://youtu.be/fqjkjvYw4sE



Anyhow, I always carry at least my S12 SuperSLIDE with the BOSS WazaAIR headphone amp along.


Talking of an "Exercise" which makes MUSICAL sense, here's one by Jazz Guitarist Chris Whiteman (https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisWhitemanGuitar/videos), I did yesterday over the afternoon hours too hot to walk the walled city:

- Part 1: https://youtu.be/We2irhaCoew
- Part 2: https://youtu.be/uZb7F-o-U-g
- Part 3: https://youtu.be/aFEDu81S1is

I would formulate it a LITTLE differently, in that the "phrase" originates from Fats Waller's Honeysuckle Rose theme over ii-/V7 and was carried over to Donna Lee over the ii- only and V7/I Maj vocabulary added. I think it's important to "see" it as not only a "Donna Lee'ism", so we know to use it more ways.

I have long come to the conclusion that while "transcribing" (well, since we don't WRITE but trans-whatever from ear to an instrument, it shouldn't be called "-scribe") solos IS important, it's only beneficial to learning to to IMPROVISE, when one doesn't insist so much on playing it EXACTLY as presented (that's "rendition" a whole different discipline, really CONTRARY to "Improvisation"!), and instead to early on "fool"/"PLAY" around with it in timing (inclusion of triplets and pauses, shifting, etc) and -while conserving the "message" changing chromaticisms and other approaches around to make it one's own or even better come up with a variety of versions to the point of being able to just "kind'a" play it without thinking much anymore.
What I really like his presentation is, that not only is he inviting and demonstrating doing that, but he takes it further and goes to morph it into a minor ii-b5, V(alt), i- phrase and then applies it to Autumn Leaves, turning it into an Exercise which not only winds up making real music, but also can be kept in the back pocket to throw into a great many tunes.

Enjoy!... J-D.

[Tim Toberer]

definitely a fitting place for a first kiss...
NOWADAYS, there's a bit more action going on: https://youtu.be/z05NgxzKe0k

Here's the Havana Cafe I like to hang out at... several bands each night, like a little Opry. Post "Republican" building from the late 1920's: https://youtu.be/fqjkjvYw4sE

Seems like you have you have quite the adventurous life JD! My idea of "fun" most of the time is dodging people I know and making up excuses to find more time to tinker in my workshop and practice.

That is a great lesson series! I made it through the first one and he hits on a number of valuable pointers. For me it is reassuring I am on a good path. Even if folks aren't interested in watching all the videos, the intro up to about 8 minutes is really the important part. He is laying out an approach to learning which I think seems to work for most people. Repitition, repetition for 3 months to create neural networks. This is a good treatment for ADHD

I can summarize it in that understanding the harmony is more important than being able to play every note perfectly and since we are translating this to steel guitar, it won't be exact anyway. Another huge thing that you hear a lot is relating it to language because it is a near perfect analogy. Just because you memorize some paragraphs, doesn't make you fluent in a language. I don't think it is necessary to be able to take everything through all 12 keys and I will probably never learn standard notation, but if you are masochistic, this is often recommended. Maybe more importantly at least for me, is knowing how to take it through 12 keys and have several ways to move through the cycle, which is another way I am using the last exercise I posted. Another important point is relating phrases to chord tones and positions, which on steel guitar is almost required since it is a chord based instrument/tuning. Also some advice I need to take to heart, don't put too much food on your plate. Take small bites and chew chew chew. Lastly, his exercise phrase is a good one because it is instantly recognizable and contains the "Bebop trill" on the Dominant chord b9 #9 b9 which instantly pulls the ear into altered harmony. Find a way to personalize the phrase, find different ways to resolve it, play with the rhythms and apply it to different songs.

[J D Sauser]

definitely a fitting place for a first kiss...
NOWADAYS, there's a bit more action going on: https://youtu.be/z05NgxzKe0k

Here's the Havana Cafe I like to hang out at... several bands each night, like a little Opry. Post "Republican" building from the late 1920's: https://youtu.be/fqjkjvYw4sE

Seems like you have you have quite the adventurous life JD! My idea of "fun" most of the time is dodging people I know and making up excuses to find more time to tinker in my workshop and practice.

I have indeed been blessed with a VERY interesting and often adventurous life, Tim.
A live which gave me one of the best educations and professional formation in Switzerland, a life free of wars, living all over Europe, South America, the US and now mostly the Caribbean. And no, I am not a sailor .
Still got a home and businesses in the US where I got blessed with some friendships I never thoght I’d be part off when I left Switzerland.
But nowadays I am mostly writing from the North Coast of the Dominican Republic.

Thanks!… JD.

[Detlef Webert]

Tim & JD,
it might be a good idea when coming up to a certain point and a conclusion, to wrap up all the mentioned ideas and summarize them as a guideline for the reader in the forum.

[J D Sauser]

Tim & JD,
it might be a good idea when coming up to a certain point and a conclusion, to wrap up all the mentioned ideas and summarize them as a guideline for the reader in the forum.

I am working on putting a couple of videos together. The first ones were desastrous. I need to find a kid who can edit it all.

Thanks Detlef!… JD.

[Dale Rottacker]

Tim & JD,
it might be a good idea when coming up to a certain point and a conclusion, to wrap up all the mentioned ideas and summarize them as a guideline for the reader in the forum.

I am working on putting a couple of videos together. The first ones were desastrous. I need to find a kid who can edit it all.

Thanks Detlef!… JD.

I'll be looking forward to that video JD ... If you can't find a kid, I'd be happy to try and help, though I'm a long ways from being a kid.

[Tim Toberer]

Tim & JD,
it might be a good idea when coming up to a certain point and a conclusion, to wrap up all the mentioned ideas and summarize them as a guideline for the reader in the forum.

I am working on putting a couple of videos together. The first ones were desastrous. I need to find a kid who can edit it all.

Thanks Detlef!… JD.

I would love to see what you come up with JD. This thread was meant to be a brainstorm and I think we accomplished that at least. I know there are some skilled jazzers out there and was hoping for a bit more input, but I think a lot of great players are not necessarily great at explaining how they got great. Many are just naturals it seems. It would be nice to distill this all down into something more coherent. I am no where near a great player yet, and I may never crack the code for infinite improv within the Jazz idiom. I have learned to play and arrange some jazz standards, by harmonizing the melodies. Learning these tunes is probably the best guide. It can be hard to get your foot in the door when coming from a Blues, Rock or Country background, but constant listening and persistence will get you there. It only took me about 30 years or so.

I tried to make a video also, showing how the diminished tuning works and it was also a disaster. It way too long and rambling. I will try again at some point. My wife suggested a video with no talking, a not so subtle hint I suppose Lol.

[J D Sauser]

Tim & JD,
it might be a good idea when coming up to a certain point and a conclusion, to wrap up all the mentioned ideas and summarize them as a guideline for the reader in the forum.

I am working on putting a couple of videos together. The first ones were desastrous. I need to find a kid who can edit it all.

Thanks Detlef!… JD.

I would love to see what you come up with JD. This thread was meant to be a brainstorm and I think we accomplished that at least. I know there are some skilled jazzers out there and was hoping for a bit more input, but I think a lot of great players are not necessarily great at explaining how they got great. Many are just naturals it seems. It would be nice to distill this all down into something more coherent. I am no where near a great player yet, and I may never crack the code for infinite improv within the Jazz idiom. I have learned to play and arrange some jazz standards, by harmonizing the melodies. Learning these tunes is probably the best guide. It can be hard to get your foot in the door when coming from a Blues, Rock or Country background, but constant listening and persistence will get you there. It only took me about 30 years or so.

I tried to make a video also, showing how the diminished tuning works and it was also a disaster. It way too long and rambling. I will try again at some point. My wife suggested a video with no talking, a not so subtle hint I suppose Lol.

Sitting in the plane leaving Cartagena, Col.

The first thing I want to do is what Maurice did with me: “lets organize that neck!”

Then comes “Where is IV?” From ANY position one may be on the neck.

Later I want to share a concept I used to understand “BH’s Family Of Four Chords” + Dim + Whole/Half + TriTone & BackDoor (and it’s TriTone!) as well as 3 out of 4 Alt tones, all in ONE concept.

The rest after that is left to each one’s creativity.

While my C6th PSG has 12 strings with 6P&8K, itll all be on a standard 10 BE, first without thinking pedals and levers (they fall into place naturally because of how the tuning is setup).

So, let me make it back to the Dominican Republic and get at it.

Yes, I think we acomplished opening an interesting can of worms, Ha!… JD.

[Mike Neer]

A good way to start getting more mileage out of your practicing is to get yourself a compendium of ii-V7-I lines—basic bebop language— and start plugging them into the Blues and Rhythm Changes. You could take a blues chorus and start playing a ii-V7-I line over bars 3 and 4 to get to the IV chord, where the ii is actually the vm7 and the V7 is the I7 resolving to the IV— so in Bb you’d play Fm7 - Bb7 - Eb. Then in bars 9-10 you can play a ii-V7-I to get back to the tonic chord of Bb, so Cm7 - F7 - Bb. That is the best way to start seeing real results and then you can get adventurous by finding other bars to use them.

Some good sources of ii-V-I lines are Steve Neff’s Best Major II-V7-I Patterns, The Bebop Bible by Les Wise, The Jazz Style of John Coltrane by David Baker (which has a lot of Coltrane’s ii-Vs), Patterns For Jazz, and loads of others. This is a great way to get yourself playing more fluidly and making the changes using jazz language rather than just random ideas.

[Tim Toberer]

A good way to start getting more mileage out of your practicing is to get yourself a compendium of ii-V7-I lines—basic bebop language— and start plugging them into the Blues and Rhythm Changes.

Some good sources of ii-V-I lines are Steve Neff’s Best Major II-V7-I Patterns, The Bebop Bible by Les Wise, The Jazz Style of John Coltrane by David Baker (which has a lot of Coltrane’s ii-Vs), Patterns For Jazz, and loads of others. This is a great way to get yourself playing more fluidly and making the changes using jazz language rather than just random ideas.

Thanks Mike. I am getting the basic framework down, moving up and down the neck using some of the exercises described earlier. I am getting to the point where having a grab bag of unresolved ii-V or ii-V-I is what I need to start developing vocabulary. Now that I have proven to myself I can transcribe, I think this is the best way to learn phrases, they just stick better. It is pretty addictive actually. It is still a good idea to get some books and resources etc.

I think a lot of people skip right to this part, but they don't understand how the harmony moves underneath and they get stuck really fast. This was always where I hit a brick wall in my earlier attempts to learn some standards. Everyone was saying learn these ii-V-I's that is the secret of Jazz, but to me it was like nonsense floating around. I finally got my fat foot in the door when I spent quite a while just leaning the basic chords and melodies of a bunch of my favorite standards. Now I am going back and trying to put some meat on the bones analyzing the chords and trying some basic reharmonization. Also for solos, I am really trying to learn to target chord tones. I think I am more of a chord tone player than a lick player, but I am trying to learn all the approaches. It is amazing how literally just playing the 3rd against the changes can ground a solo. Add scale tone approach notes to chord tones or chromatic neighbors and it really starts to sound like jazz.

[Fred Treece]

The Ted Greene website is loaded with ii-V-I runs. One thing I do with that kind of stuff is make note of where the basic 1-3-5 chord tones are in the riff. What’s left over are either “approach to target” scale notes, or notes that form an extension of the basic chord. By separating them, I can see how the different types of notes function in the musical statement.

Studying like that helped me hear the science of what jazz players are doing when they solo. There is so much more to musical expression, of course, and feeling it is just as important as understanding it. With jazz music, I am an infant for life at both.

[Tim Toberer]

The Ted Greene website is loaded with ii-V-I runs.

That is a really nice resource! I have a couple of his books, about 3 lifetimes worth of study Lol. His chord chart pages are enough to give someone a seizure!

I will probably let this thread die, but hopefully it has helped people find some of these resources and given people some inspiration to create some exercises and expand their playing a bit. Just putting this stuff into words sometimes helps me. If anyone else wants to share some exercises or insight into learning jazz on the pedal steel I am always interested.

I will share one last exercise that can expand your vocabulary exponentially! This a hack, but it is putting some Barry Harris type ideas in action. I just discovered through this blog about learning Jazz guitar. It is loaded with useful insights if you want to check it out https://jazzguitarjourney.weebly.com/bl ... /exercises

This exercise comes from Guitarwank Podcast. I will copy and paste the description.

The Exercise:

1) Play a simple phrase over the ii chord -- which is pretty much just a Dorian A minor -- the classic blues scale works.

2) Now repeat this phrase down a half-step.

3) Finally, resovle the phrase by ear.

Step one is the ii chord, step two is the five chord, step three is the one. The brilliance of this exercise is it forces you to make music more than learning scales and substitutions and theory. Practicing this helps you develop motifs, gets the altered sound in your ears, and helps you intuit where the leading tones resolve to G major.

There is a theoretical fudge to this exercise in that you are playing a minor on the five instead of a dominant. But don't get your hackles up over this as a beginner. Duke Ellington said, "If it sounds good, it is good." So try to make it sound good. One of the gems of this exercise is you are forced to listen to yourself in the context of the progression. You are listening to what you are playing because you have to repeat your own phrase. You are not 'coloring by numbers,' but getting involved with what you are creating.


Bonus Exercise:

1) Play a simple phrase over the ii chord (again just a blues pentatonic or dorian phrase in Aminor will work).

2) Repeat the phrase a minor third up (that's three frets or semi-tones).

3) Resolve to G major by ear.

To recap -- you are playing something melodic, committing it to memory and repeating it three frets up, then finding a note to answer in the G major scale.

Here you are essentially playing the iv minor (C-) in step two. Some people call iv- the 'important' chord. The iv minor always wants to resolve to the one. Now you have a whole harmonic substitution added to your vocabulary. Try substituting the iv- in place of your five while comping.


Double Bonus Exercise:

Now let's actually play a REAL tritone substitution to get the most tension-resolution out of our line -- let's really stretch the rubber-band. Traditionally we say the tritone is Amin, Ab7, Gmaj. But what is Ab7 -- just Ebmin with a differnt root! The tritone is actually 2 minor thirds up from the one chord.

1) Play a minor phrase over the ii chord.

2) Repeat the phrase 2 minor thirds up (Eb for resolving to Gmaj).

3) Resolve to the root major by ear.

With these three exercises, you've just increased your ii-V-I vocabulary about 400%!

In the Guitarwank podcast, Bruce refers to a youtube video where Josh Smith attempts to explain the same material that Bruce taught him. I believe that video is here. Even if you are a seasoned jazzbo -- try these exercises out. You'll be glad you did.

[Robert Miller]

Just to augment Tim's recommended exercise, and flesh out a map, the subdominant>dominant>tonic (ii V I) relationship is essentially symmetrically expandable in minor thirds. The V (dominant) can be replaced by not only the bII (two m3 away from the V, in either direction, but also the major III (one m3 down, or 3 m3 [M6] up) and the bVII (one m3 up or 3 m3 down).

The subdominant and tonic can be substituted along the same lines. Works in major and minor and you can mix and match till your heart's content. The farther away you get, though, the spicier. It's not quite plug and play and you'll have to play around with chord quality and voicing to find the sweet spot for your ears.

Tonic - I/i, bIII/biii, bV/bv, vi/VI

Dominant - V, bII, bVII, III. (These can also be minor but they lose some push and seem to require a little more nuance and voicing care)

Subdominant - II/ii, IV/IV, bVI/bvi, vii/VII.

If that gets you to thinking the world is run by diminished patterns, wait until you see the things augmented chords pull.

Also notice, if you work this way, you've officially adopted the entire chromatic scale as your vocabulary.

I'm sure there is lots of theory behind why this works (Parallel minors, modal yada yada), but I think you're better off sitting behind your guitar making the noise until your ears dig it than hashing too hard on the explanation. If anyone asks, just reverently say "Pat Martino" or "Monk" and raise your eyebrows.

Forgot to add, if you substitute the tonic, you're effectively modulating, from a traditional perspective. However, it's a great tool to modulate and if you're game, you can slide in and out of a given tonality, using I, bIII, bV/+IV, and vi, all as "Tonic." One this one, you'll have to whisper "Bartok," before the eyebrow raise...

[Fred Treece]

I’m sure Ted Greene, like any other genius, would register pretty highly on the OCD scale nowadays, and his parents probably would have been encouraged to medicate him as a youth.

Another thing I got from studying his books was to never think of V7 as anything else, no matter how many chords you can build with altered tones. I found it interesting that he seemed to deliberately juxtapose #v melodic minor-flavored licks (not Dorian) over dom7 chords in his vast catalogue of II-V-I studies to prove the point. Maybe this represents a philosophical difference between the Ted Greene vs Barry Harris schools?

Okay, now close it up

[Robert Miller]

"Obsessed is a word that the lazy use to describe the dedicated." - Anonymous