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Day 1 - Introduction
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Day 2 - Jazz as a Language
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Day 3 - More Phrases
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Day 4 - Putting it All Together
Learn the First Part of the Melody & Phrase 1
Day 2 Slides-PDF
How High the Moon Arpeggios-PDF
Arpeggios over How High the Moon
Dog phrase over How High the Moon
Jazz As A Language
Over the years I’ve devised a way to help students learn how to connect jazz phrases and understand how similar jazz improvisation is to everyday language.
When we communicate with people during the day we pull from the repository of vocabulary we have learned over our lifetime to construct phrases and sentences that convey the meaning we are trying to express.
Jazz musicians use this same technique to construct solos during improvisation. They pull from melodies to previous songs they’ve played, scales, riffs and other devices they’ve learned along the way.
A simple way of demonstrating this is by assigning jazz phrases to vocabulary words and connecting them to form a sentence that is understood in both the instrumental and textual form.