5 Things I Actually Do to Practice Improvising

Cornell freshman alto sax, ex-Newark Academy (Essentially Ellington 2024). This is the second piece in a small series on jazz pedagogy. The first one is here and covers WHICH tunes to learn after your first Bb blues. This one covers HOW to actually practice improvising on them.

Intro

The first trap most jazz students fall into is thinking of improvisation as scales over chord charts. Big no-no. Not to say scales are wrong; learning pentatonics is important for auditions and high-level playing, but only thinking in scales in the beginning gets you stuck.

I've come a long way from learning my first Bb blues and playing a really bad solo on a big band arrangement of In Walked Bud during a COVID concert. What I learned, mostly from a band director who didn't teach scales-first, is that the practice room is for building two things: vocabulary (lines you can play in any key) and ears (hearing what's happening). Everything else is a tool serving those two.

Here are the 5 things I actually do.

This article is the practice-room half. The next one will be about what happens when you take this to a jam session: soloing vs improvising, building on what others play, when to quote a tune, why less is more. Coming in a few weeks.

1. Build 5-10 Lines and Play Them in All 12 Keys

This is the most important thing on the list and the easiest to start.

Take a line or phrase that fits over a chord structure you'll see a lot (dominant, major, minor, ii-V-I). It can be one you made up or one you pulled from a recording you love. Transpose it into all 12 keys. Plug it into a standard you're learning and see where it shows up in the changes.

Once you have 5-10 lines that work in all keys, you can fundamentally improvise over any tune. That sounds reductive, but it's not. Charlie Parker had signature lines he used in almost every song he soloed on. The Omni Book has all the answers. Get a few lines under your belt before you worry about anything else.

2. Transcribe One Full Solo by Ear (No YouTube)

Where do the lines come from? Transcription.

For your first one, transcribe a whole solo (or at least many measures) by ear. Don't worry about how the notes relate to the chords yet. Just write it down, play it in time, and play it like the player you're transcribing. Most people just skip the writing-down process, but then it's not transcribing anymore. Look at the literal meaning of the word. I know it's tedious, but eventually you will have transcribed so much that your mind could not possibly remember everything, which is why written solos and lines come in handy.

Do NOT look up a YouTube transcription. Learn it by ear. Listening is the most important skill for any language, and it's usually the first to develop.

I got a ton of my own 12-key lines from Dexter Gordon's solo on Lady Bird. Most of mine come from transcriptions. After you've done one full solo, the move is to pull out 1-2 bar phrases you'd actually use and 12-key those.

This is slower than learning scales. It's also why scale practice alone doesn't produce improvisers.

3. Sing the Line Before You Play It

The exercise: pick a tune at a manageable tempo (a blues at 120-140 works), put on a backing track, and sing your line one bar before you play it on the horn. Even better: just improvise by singing for a few choruses.

This forces you to actually hear what you want to play. Otherwise you're just running fingers. If you can't sing it, you don't really hear it.

This works best on slow tunes and ballads. On anything over 240 bpm you don't have time to think, you're running on what you've practiced. Don't beat yourself up if you can't tell a story on Things to Come/Bebop.

4. Sing the Changes Through a Tune

Same idea, different target. Instead of singing the line, sing the chord roots and qualities through a tune.

Start with the bass note of each chord. Then add the third or seventh to feel the quality (major, minor, dominant). Eventually, sing the whole changes to outline the chord as you would hear a walking bass line plus the chord above.

This builds the ear connection between what you SEE on the chart and what you HEAR happening. Once you can sing the changes, you're hearing them, and once you're hearing them, you can improvise melodically over them instead of pattern-matching scales.

5. Listen Actively (Hum the Solos You Love)

The boring, but really easy (and fun!) part nobody talks about: just listen. I hum my favorite solos all the time. Walking to class, on the bus, whatever.

Active listening means you're actually trying to hear what's happening (the lines, the changes, the form) instead of using jazz as background music. If you can hum a solo from memory, you've internalized it. That solo is now part of your vocabulary, even if you can't write it down yet. Sometimes, fragments of a solo I listened to thousands of times will pop into my head when playing on a completely different song.

Charlie Parker. Cannonball. Sonny Stitt. Erena Terakubo or Baptiste Herbin if you want current players. Pick anyone you love and hum their solos until you know them.

What This Looks Like Together

Lines + transcription + singing + ear + listening. That's the practice room.

Scales fit in there too, but as a tool inside that approach, not the main event. If you only have an hour to practice, spend most of it on lines and transcription, some on singing and ear training, the rest on whatever else you need.

This whole approach was easier for me because my band director didn't teach scales-first. If your director did, you're in the trap I described earlier, and the way out is to start building lines and transcribing alongside whatever else you're doing.

What's Next

The practice-room half ends here. The next article is about what changes when you take this to a jam session: the difference between soloing and improvising, embellishing the melody of the tune you're playing, when to quote another tune (e.g. I have quoted Lester Leaps In on a Bb blues before), how to build on what someone else just played, and why less is more.

Coming in a few weeks.

Credits

This article came out of comments on the last one. Specifically:

• u/doubtthat11 for the "improvisation as melody embellishment" framing
• u/eebaes for the analytical-vs-ear-player distinction
• u/StapesSSBM for the band director failure mode

A Note on the Tool

I built reharmonize.app while figuring out this stuff. Free tune similarity search for jazz students: you put in a tune you know, and it finds tunes with related changes, sorted by what you actually search for (bird blues, modal jazz, rhythm changes, ii-V density, etc.). If you're transcribing a solo and want to find other tunes with similar harmonic territory to deploy that vocabulary, that's what it's for.

reharmonize.app