- Hi everyone, my name is Nathan from jazzguitarlessons.net. And we're back with you with you on masterclass number five, I believe.
- Number five, yes.
- And, joining me here today, usually Marc's the one to do this, but joining me here today is ...
- Marc from jazzguitarlessons.net. of course.
- You're a hero and a hero of the hour. And today I actually wanted to talk about a particular method and the reason why I'm actually starting this off, is because it's this method that I've developed for working on improv, specifically in terms of the phrase itself. I call it the anatomy of a phrase method. So it's an idea where we dissect a phrase down to its component parts and talk about specific things that we use in each component, specific examples of lines and such. But doing this helps us to understand how people phrase in jazz in general, and specifically jazz. We're not talking about rock phrases, we're not talking about anything else just jazz. So I'm actually gonna go through a bunch of ideas with this model, this one bar phrase model. Actually, we'll talk about that in a sec, but I'm going to get, I'm gonna run Marc through his paces on it and he has ... Sorry, say again?
- So the point is this, is like Nathan, I've seen the docs and I read through them and I've played through them, but I'm seeing this masterclass as Nathan teaching me the approach as if I was a fresh student trying to attempt, attempting to learn jazz phrasing, jazz phrases, and et cetera. I just want to take a moment to introduce, so we don't need to introduce ourselves with you, this is at the top of the every master class so far, but one thing I want to mention is please check out the other master classes that we have. We have four, that's number five, and recall the first few ones, we had music as a language. They're interesting in perspective, for Nathan and I chat for an hour on this topic. It was a very good one. And we talked about musical mindset, the mental game of playing music, and we've also talked about rhythms and metronome. And also the last one, number four, was on ways to practice better. You know, practice makes perfect, that type of thing. So this is a master class five and I'll let Nathan take it away and I'll just be be the pupil and play the examples and ask the questions.
- Sounds good. So let's launch right into it. Let's not waste any time. So the entire point of this phrase one bar phrase model, as I said, is to understand how jazz musicians on records and in performances are playing things. To hear those phrases as phrases, complete sentences, let's say in English, and also to apply that to your own playing and make your phrasing more, I guess self-consistent and more ... less ramble-y, let's say, more just like, "Here is my point, "moving on to the next point." Very concise, you know? So let's talk about the actual one bar phrase that I wanted to talk about that I mentioned earlier itself. So I'm just going to scroll down in my notes here. The idea here is that we are going to take each piece of a phrase and we're going to apply all this into a phrase that is one bar in length, approximately one bar. It's actually going to, you're gonna see that the bar is bigger than, the phrase is bigger than one bar. It's going to extend a little bit before the bar and a little bit after the bar. I hope I'm ... I think that works, left and right.
- It's a one bar phrase that's longer than one bar.
- Exactly. Not quite one bar. So the idea with this is we're gonna learn four different components, and there's a process for this that involves learning a piece of vocabulary for each of those four components, which helps you develop a muscle memory framework. You want to just drill those things down and then just have it in your arms, in your fingers. And then you want to put those pieces of vocabulary together into a single phrase played in one bar plus.
- One bar plus, pick up and trail.
- Exactly, and we'll talk more about those components in a sec. We're going to attempt variations on those pieces of vocabulary. And then we're gonna look at how you can expand that one bar phrase into two bar phrases and by repeating certain components over and over again, to make it, you know, longer phrases. And eventually you're going to, the idea is to take different pieces of vocabulary and use them as substitutes for those components. So every piece of vocabulary sort of considers where you are in the bar, what beat you're on or what offbeat you're on, and where you're going to, what beat or what, yeah, what beat to you're trying to land on, it's about targeting. So those are some improv 101 and 102 ideas. The second pillar of improvisation ideas, if you wanted to draw some parallels, very important stuff.
- Everything thirds, stuff like that, seven to third resolutions.
- Exactly.
- As a sideline, this is amazing, because it's the word anatomies, we're really dissecting by these, and it's, as opposed to, a neighbor sold a book that tells you this is a chord symbol and this is a scale that goes on top of it. And he's like, "Yeah, but, well, what am I playing?" So now you're, Nathan's method is actually building vocabulary from the get go.
- Yeah, and I really think also that that sort of sand boxing method where it's just like, "Here is the area in which you can play." Which is an idea in improv 101, defining the sandbox. That idea is really important I think too, but it's nice to have both the sort of play this directly. and also the, just play, have fun, try to do whatever you can with the sand that you, you know, build a sand castle or build a sand mermaid. I don't know. You know what I mean, right?
- Mermaid.
- So once again, actually I've had, I've taught this to a couple of students already, and they've mentioned that the way I've taught this has been a very like Mr. Miyagi-esque approach, you know, Karate Kid, wax on, wax off.
- I watched Cobra Kai recently as well.
- Yeah. Good series?
- It's fun. Yeah, I don't want to go into it like film critic type of thing, but it's cool.
- Fair enough.
- Yeah.
- So I think at this point, it's a good idea to go into the, each component and talk about it. So the first one I want to talk about is the intro.
- Okay.
- And, I'm gonna draw a lot of parallels, just like in our music as a language lecture or masterclass.
- The first one, actually, yeah.
- Yeah. The idea is that we're drawing parallels to the way that you might start a sentence too. So the intro would be like using a word such as, "However ..." To transition into your next point, into your next phrase, or, "Furthermore ... " Something like that, right? The idea with the intro is that you're going to introduce a phrase by leading toward a strong note on beat one, second pillar of improv stuff.
- Okay.
- So I'm going to pull up a file that is going to be an intro that actually, for those of you who have taken Marc's, uh, what's it called? Um, 25 Exercises to Better Jazz Phrase and Chords
- Oh, right. The pickup lines, right? You go into, I just want to give some context, so say I played a D note, we're doing a two, five window, D major. So, C major. So we start with a tune, and the D note is played with your pinky and you go, you lead into that, the tonic, the root note of the D Dorian scale. That's what you meant, Nathan, right?
- That's correct. And these are forward motion approach that, actually, Marc, you got this from somebody else, or this idea, or?
- Of course, yeah, it's a great book. I should find it on my bookshelf. Hal Galper, uh, Galper? Piano player, excels in LD Bop, Bepopper. The book is called Forward Motion. It's, you take it with a grain of salt, but it's basically saying, "Well, you should hear where your target is." You should hear it and play it, and play something before it, so that you sound like you're picking up instead of classical, "Start your scale on beat one." You know, like very rigid type of thing.
- Exactly.
- Okay, move on.
- So these forward motion approaches you're about to hear, you hear them, you can actually find them on learn.jazzguitarlessons.net, your concierge program in 25 Exercises to Better Jazz Phrasing. For Better Jazz Phrasing, sorry. As well as I think, Improv and Chromaticism.
- Yes, maybe in Improv 103, as well, we start to hint at that.
- I think so as well.
- Yeah.
- We also use some other pieces of vocabulary that are very useful for this sort of intro and targeting vocabulary, but we're gonna start with the forward motion approaches first.
- Okay.
- So if we take a look here, I'm just going to share my screen.
- Yeah. You want me to ... I'll be the Guinea pig, I want to play those.
- Sounds good. So you'll see here that they're there. We're actually going to take, we're gonna do a, this four bar cycle, a very common four bar cycle where we see a two, five and a one. And then the six chord, which A seven, which is used as a secondary dominant to lead back to the two chord again. Hopefully you can see my cursor on the screen?
- Yes, I see it, so perfect. I can play along and you can point your cursor if you want, if you're ready.
- Awesome. So, yeah. So this is a chord cycle, and in the first time we do the cycle we're just going to target the root of each chord. So, Marc ...
- Sorry, go ahead.
- Marc, If you could play the, if you could play the root of D minor seven first, this is our target. Good stuff. We're gonna lead into this. So Marc, if you could count yourself off and lead into it with a forward motion approach.
- Yeah, a one, a two, a one, two, three and four and one.
- Awesome, and do the same with the root to G seven.
- And four and one.
- And C major seven?
- And four and one.
- And then A seven.
- And four and one.
- So these are all fragments of a phrase. None of them are a full phrase in and of themselves, but they're fragments of just the beginnings of phrases, and we're going to do this as a drill. It's, you know, it's a sort of antiseptic environment where we can just target a specific piece of vocabulary, and then later on we're gonna pair that with other pieces of vocabulary. And finally, we're going to put it all together. So it's kind of like passing drills in soccer. You know, you go to a soccer practice, you don't play the entire game right away. You start off with a drill first, right?
- Okay, perfect. So would you like me to put a backing track on and you can just point a cursor? I play through this and ...
- Yeah, please, that'd be great.
- Okay.
- And I will scroll down as it continues onward.
- Perfect. Here we go.
- Roots first.
- A one, two, three.
- Next section. Next section.
- Oh, yeah. No, sorry, ending on a six. I didn't end that properly.
- Whoops. It's okay. So the idea here is that you drill these forward motion approaches so that you get really used to targeting specific scale degrees of the scale that we're in. We're in the key of C major here. These are two, five, one and six chords in the key of C major. And we're targeting different notes in each chord every single time. The forward motion approach, by the way, you can learn more about what it is exactly and how it works by, well, you can sort of read this blurb, but also you can check out those courses I mentioned, 25 Exercises for Better Jazz Phrasing and Improv and Chromaticism. So the use of this really leads strongly into the phrase. We land on a strong chord tone, in this case, the root in the next section, the third, or maybe if you wanted to target the fifth, or if you wanted to start off by targeting the seventh. Any of those are all options that you get to practice on this exercise sheet, for example. And in so doing we get, you get a really strong start. You're like, "This is the chord, "we have landed on the chord, "we know exactly what we're going for here." And now onto the next fragment, the next component. And I like to call it the development.
- Of course.
- The idea here is we're going to actually develop the sound of the chord a little bit more.
- Instead of once again doing the Aebersold approaches like, "Oh, D minor sevens, D Dorian." And then ...
- Yeah.
- Now we've started at least with a pickup. It makes sense, we know where we're going. We know the different important notes. Out of the seven we targeted four per chord, so that's already 16 notes to retain, and then we, sorry, so we developed from that.
- Exactly, I think the importance of this is that while the that sort of Aebersold sand boxing approach is giving you a bunch of raw materials, you know, "Here's notes, you can put them together any way you want." Here we're gonna give you some actual vocabulary. And for the development, the idea is what better way to develop a chord than to just play the chord tones? So an arpeggio very, very simple.
- Super simple.
- Now, on top of that, I actually want to mention that the importance of this comes from not only just playing those notes, the importance of this approach doesn't come just from the playing of the notes, but also from actually playing the rhythms correctly. So in this case, I wanted to actually give a very common and very important swing rhythm, which is the triplet. Most of our rhythms are based off of the triplet in some way or another. So swing, swing eighths, sort of based off a triplet, loosely based off a triplet. So with that in mind, we have this now ascending arpeggio piece of vocabulary used as the development. And I'll share my screen once again. And we have ... here.
- Our tune. Yes, yes, yes, yes, perfect.
- I'm actually gonna, sorry, just expand this a little bit more. Hopefully you can see that a little bit better?
- Yeah.
- And ... there we are. So this is going to develop the sound of the chord, as you can see in italics here. And the whole idea is from that target note that we landed upon, that root target that we landed on, or the third target in the next section, fifths or sevenths in the following sections, we can play the arpeggios from there. So Marc, could you play me a D minor seven arpeggio? Awesome, so Marc's playing that in eighth notes. Can you play it in a triplet, like counting yourself off?
- A three, four.
- Awesome. One triplet, two. You want to get that last note landing on beat two.
- Yeah.
- So we started off the bar on the roots. We end up on the seventh of the chord.
- One, three, five, seven, yes, okay.
- One, three, five, seven. We're gonna get somewhere else after that. If we did the same thing with the, starting on the third of a D minor seven, we would play ...
- Three, five, seven, one.
- There we go. And this is something that everybody I think should do. Marc is doing a thing where he's singing and naming the notes that he's playing. Especially the first few times that you play it.
- Yeah, three, five, seven, one. ♪ Three, five ... ♪
- Marc is talking about, Marc is calling out the rhythms. He's calling out the notes, he's getting intimate with the vocabulary itself. And that way, you know exactly from every angle what you're playing and how you're playing it. You can look at other arpeggios here, but I think it's actually pretty self explanatory. We want to play the chord tones, and we're gonna ascend through the chord tones.
- So, the same chord tones we landed on, now we start on. We start on with the triplet, and then that's like it's gonna be the extension of the ...
- Exactly, yeah, we're moving on from there. And being able to, being able to cycle through an arpeggio, an ascending arpeggio pattern from, they're starting from any chord tone in that arpeggio, it's a really important skill.
- That's a lot of, if you do that well, you've covered a lot of stuff.
- Yeah, exactly.
- It's just so fundamental, but it's still more than, once again, just learning the C major scale. So it's almost, it's like you really know where you're starting from.
- Exactly. I also think this hearkens back to something we talked about in Improv and Chromaticism, which is that fundamental maneuvers notion. Where this is something that you have to know, it's foundational. Sorry, say again, Marc?
- It's like a move, yeah, I remember we you shot that together. And we went, "Yeah, what's a move?" Like you need like a skating move in hockey or passing move in basketball. It's like, that's what we talked about. So how about I just play maybe the first four bars so people hear the triplet?
- Sounds good, I'll do the same thing. I'll share my screen and I don't have to scroll this time. So the first four bars we're targeting the root, we're hearing the triplet.
- One, two, three, four. Ending on six again, sorry about that.
- It just does that.
- The sound of the rhythm, right?
- Yep, so that gives you, that's actually, well, Marc wants to emphasize that again. I think it's really important that that triplet rhythm, just get it down. If you played this in eighth notes, this will change what's gonna come next, because what comes next is, how do we get from the last note of the arpeggio to the transition of the next beat, sorry, the next target? Which would probably be beat one of the next bar, which would be a new chord. So how do we get from the last note to the first strong target note of the next chord, starting on beat one of the next bar? And ...
- We save some time. We save some time in a way by using the triplets it's like we compressed them. We play three notes in the span of one beat.
- Exactly.
- Yeah.
- Instead of two notes in the span of one beat, and then two more notes after that. And that gives us more space to make this sort of transitional phase, which I like to call the change. I went through a bunch of names. I think I called it the conclusion, and like that doesn't work, because there is something that comes after, it's called the tail. We'll talk about that in a sec.
- So, you mean you were you were in the zone of a, yeah, it's a one bar phrase of more than one bar. Let's call it something else.
- Exactly. And we'll, I want to expand on that in a sec, because it's super important for jazz. Not necessarily for other genres, but for jazz this pass to the beat one mark, this tail that I want to talk about, really important to jazz. It's kind of characteristic of it. But the idea with this next section, the, I called it the conclusion at first, then I thought like maybe transition, like, no. Call it the change, because you know, chord changes, duh! What a jazz thing to say. Now ...
- The change? Or is it called the development, no? I'm in the wrong file.
- It is. So I've actually, you'll see, I think it's called conclusion on yours, number four.
- Oh, number four? Okay, sorry.
- Yeah. Now at this point, actually just real quick to sort of tie those first parts together, I am going to just show the PDF that I have that shows the, I guess the interceding moment, right? So here we put the forward motion approach and the arpeggio together. This is the last time that with the same backing track you'll be able to play multiple components together, because at this point you're starting to actually create a phrase that's too big to fit. You'll start overlapping components, right?
- Got it.
- So here you, actually, let's just play that first section together, we're going to put that forward motion approach targeting the root of each chord, followed by a triplet arpeggio ascending.
- Okay, so out of time. I'm reaching for my D root. And then from D I'm ascending, at D minor seven arpeggio.
- Perfect.
- And I'm doing the same for the G. And then, that's C major seven. That passing note approaches from a bebop scale. So we don't have to talk about that now, but that's, essentially it's the same one we end the first file. And then for the A. Okay, I'm good to go, backing track?
- Let's hear it.
- Okay, Here we go. One more. A one, two, three.
- Awesome.
- The eight. It ends on eight, it's bugging me.
- Yeah. You really want it to result to the D minor, right? Repeat the cycle. So this is actually a really great demonstration of these strong harmonics and rhythmic starts to a phrase. And something I want to stress, and I think Marc wants to stress often enough is that harmonic doesn't just mean, "Hey, it's the right chord tones." It's the right chord tones at the right time.
- Yeah.
- And that's really important. You've got to get that target note. Either it's a root or a third or a fifth or seventh. You got to get it on beat one. You have to align rhythmically with all these notes.
- Yeah. And then, of course, that's really, that's like start of pillar two. I would say it's like pillar 1.5. It's almost like pillar two, and then in pillar two, we're going to see not only how to be in the correct chord tone at the correct time, but also how to connect when the chord is changing, how to connect that thing, which is what I think you brought up in the next video training.
- Yes, exactly.
- Maybe I'm jumping too far.
- I think that's where we're going next after this. By the way, for those of you who aren't familiar with the pillars of improvisation, there is a blog post where Marc explains this, the three pillars of improvisation. And they loosely correlate with each of the courses in improv 101, 102 and 103 on learn.guitarlessons.net.
- Until I discover a fourth pillar, oh, no!
- Fourth pillar. Fourth pillar, the secret stuff. What, say again?
- The mojo, the Pat Metheny Mojo.
- Yeah, yeah. Nonstop for 30 second notes. It's the hair.
- You gotta have ...
- I heard someone say that if you look at all modern jazz guitarists, none of them have, none of them, all of them are bald. All the modern, famous jazz guitarists are all bald.
- Except Pat.
- Pat Metheny, I think he worked a magic spell and that's how he, all of his, he's stealing. He's sucking out the hair and talent from everyone else.
- That's probably the best conspiracy theory I've heard in my whole life. A Pat Metheny conspiracy.
- Exactly, I love it.
- Up next, so to recap, okay, you can connect with the forward motion. You land on root third, fifth, seventh, of course are great chord tones, and you have this ascending triplet thing. So we're learning vocabulary in the rhythmic sense of jazz as well. And put those two together. It sounds like what I just played.
- Exactly.
- And where we're going.
- Well, now we got to get that change that I was talking about earlier, which is let's transition to the next chord. The next bar, well, we assume it's the next bar. So usually how it works, you know, one chord per bar in a lot of jazz. Sometimes there's two chords per bar, but these are all things that you can deal with in this phrase that we won't talk about for now. We're just gonna work with this idea of like, "Hey, two in the one bar." The five chord in the next bar, the one chord in the next bar, the six chord in the next bar goes after that. Whatever, easy stuff, right?
- Long change, right?
- Right, right, right, right.
- Yeah, basic stuff. So I'm gonna go like this. I can see this again. So right now we're talking about the, we're gonna combine the ascending arpeggio, because it's an awkward place to stop. The end of it is an awkward place to pick up from, but we want to tie these two things in together. Play this piece of vocabulary, the ascending arpeggio, followed by how do we get to some strong chord tone on the next bar? Kind of like we did with the first one.
- Right.
- The one that I've suggested for all of this is, you should try to path from the last note that you played to the third of the next chord. Because that makes for a very strong conclusion, a very strong transition. So Marc, can you just play this first line, please?
- Yes. Three, four. We do this again, I hesitated. One, three, four.
- Marc ended on B natural, which is the third of G seven. On beat one of that bar.
- Right.
- And you don't, this is actually the first part where we start saying, "Hey, now you gotta make a little bit of decision making on your own." There are multiple ways to path to the third of the next chord. So for the way I teach this to my students, this is where we give a little bit of improvisation room where we have to say, "Hey, you have to figure out this path on your own." Oftentimes this involves experimentation and just by yourself and be like, "Can I go?" Okay, I am on beat one. You do this sort of freeze time or pause time counting. You're counting what beat you're on. So you're keeping track of time as it passes, but you can pause and slow down. So it doesn't come all at once, you know? And so that's why in this sheet you see multiple examples of how to path to the third. Do you want to try these other two examples, number two and three?
- Cool, two is ... Oh, reading, you're making me read, Nathan.
- Sorry.
- I like that. Again. I like that. Because there's some part of the D minor pentatonic in there, so.
- Yeah.
- It's a similar path. Like it's a very similar path. It gets you to the same place, but there's a slightly different flavor to it. Probably a bluesy flavor in this one.
- Yeah, the skip is somewhere else, that's awesome. And then a third one is ... A lot more Paskal, it's almost.
- You'll notice that ... You'll notice that you come back down the arpeggio at least, you know, fifth, third. I'm sorry, seventh, fifth, third, and then you walk down. They all get you to the same place. There are multiple ways to answer this question, but it's up to you to discover those paths and figure out how each of them, what flavor each of them has, what, how each of them feel. And that's, I think a really big part of understanding how to get from point A to point B in jazz. It's a big, big thing, but also it's a big part of figuring out the, I guess the ... I want to say the mathematics of it, the arithmetic of it. I have, I got three notes left, but I'm four notes away. So maybe I need to skip once and then walk some more?
- Yes, yes. And then you let your musical instincts kick in and say maybe you're going to play some notes that are out of placement, and then you land. And maybe you land late, but then it's like, "No, no, it was a delay, it was on purpose." Or maybe you land early and then it's like, "Oh, no, I'm on the end of four, it's anticipated." So there's so much wiggle room. It can still be accurate in your chain's running
- Every single one of those options is valid musically, and they all have a different effect. And I want to impress that upon a lot of my students, but it's really hard for a lot of students. It depends on where you're at, what level you're at. Some of you might have already had a really good handle on the geography of the Fretboard, or on the geography of music, of musical notes. And so this might come a little bit more naturally to you. But others of you might be exploring this geography, you know, cutting through these pathways in the woods for the first time. And so this is where the experimentation comes in. You have to figure it out more or less for yourself at that point. I also mentioned, maybe you want to target a different beat, like a higher B natural note?
- Yeah.
- And, I also mentioned that, um, you have to also figure out how to do this, not just with the root targets for the first chord, but you also have to do this for the arpeggio starting on the third, and the arpeggio starting on the fifth and on the seventh, and then passing to the third of the next chord every single time.
- Targeting or getting the thirds, and then as you get good, target fifth and other ones.
- Yeah.
- It's a puzzle. Like, "Assemble this puzzle, and here are the ... "
- Exactly, I like to, sorry, I like to tell my students that like, "Hey, do like spend some time puzzle solving." It can be a lot of fun. It takes a little bit of, you know, that sort of cerebral aspect of like, "Hey, I'm trying to solve a puzzle." It's not necessarily musical, but once you do the puzzle solving a little bit you start developing that feeling for the sound. It's like, "Oh, yeah, I actually know how this, "the music sounds." And then you can put the puzzle solving aside, because you've already solved it. And you can just play these lines and play this kind of music. And later on what this is all going to come down to is, not necessarily that you're going to play all of these lines every single time. But at the very least it forms a good framework for you to ... You know, you maybe don't complete the phrase the way you usually do, or go for a different target, or switch out a piece of vocabulary. I'm using words that are all ... I'm using terms that are all like very cut and dry, I guess.
- As you have all of this, you can express its creativity. It's like, what do you want to say? How do you want to say it? How long are you gonna play? Short lines, big lines? More inflections, go higher, go lower, but you know what the, you see, it's a road, you have your lines in the road, and you're still following the same road.
- Exactly. And, yeah, I find that it's very hard to express yourself creatively if you're already lost on the Fretboard. You're like, "Ooh, I don't know what to play next. "I don't even know what, where to start." So these are good starting points, all of them.
- Story of my life. What am I doing here? What is this place?
- It's that Radiohead song. ♪ What the hell am I doing here? ♪
- Did we even book a gig here? Like ...
- Wait, no one's kicking us out, so you know what? I think we're fine.
- Yeah, that's a jazz musician's fallacies. Like if nobody kicks you out, it means you have a gig.
- I love it.
- Try it with a girlfriend. If the girl does not kick you out, maybe you have a girlfriend.
- Maybe you guys are dating, maybe? Oh, no. Yeah. The trick with the gig thing is getting paid. How do you do that?
- I never ... No, that would be another masterclass.
- Oh.
- No, I've never saw this for myself, so.
- Exactly.
- Even when you agree that you will get paid, and you, sometimes you don't.
- You don't, you get paid less than you agreed on, ugh.
- It's a tough gig, yeah.
- It's not like you can send the jazz police after them after all.
- Not anymore.
- Not anymore.
- No, the jazz police retired in 1968, sorry, guys.
- Yeah, yeah, exactly. Miles Davis should have saved some for us. So, now, with all of that done, you could pretty much leave it there. You could probably like figure out the rest for yourself, you know? But there is one last component that extends this phrase past that first beat of the next bar landing point. So you extend it past the one bar mark. It's called the tail. I like to call it the tail, and it's particular, and I think it's really important to jazz phrasing. It's characteristic of jazz phrasing. Most of the time, if you listen to any jazz musician they usually don't have a strong ending to their phrases. If you do have a strong ending to your phrase it usually signals to the rest of the band that, "We're done here. "I'm moving onto the next to the next solo." Or even oftentimes it doesn't, you know, you listen to this great example of ... Who is it? Oh, it's a it's Miles Davis's and then John Coltrane's solos on Milestones.
- Yeah.
- And Miles Davis plays ... And then, I think that's one bar into what should have been the start of John Coltrane's solo. And then John plays ... He plays off of that idea. So you don't really want any sort of finality. You don't want that sort of period at the end of the sentence, you know? QED, quod erat demonstrandum. You know, you don't want to say like, "We've proofed this, we're done. "No one else gets a say." We want something for the next soloist to say.
- Yeah, right.
- And also you want something for you to freely, if you're not doing your own solo, you want something for your own.
- That's the comment that I wanted to make. So this one as private instructor, private teaching jazz guitar privately, one of the biggest things I work on with people that are, I would say intermediate improvisors is sometimes you don't know what, like when did that phrase start and when did it end? You know, it's like you need to start your phrase with a capital letter and end with a period. Like it has to be clear. So sometimes people sound like they're rambling, but they're playing all the right pieces of vocabulary. They're playing the right scales over the right chords. Mostly connecting, doing the chord tones thing that we've described playing triplets, et cetera. And you're like, "Well, you need, "we need to hear that there's a sense of inclusion." You go, "Oh, whoa, what?" Then you start to, you know, breathe, take your second phrase. As guitarists ... we never breathe.
- You never have to.
- Unless we go like this.
- I wish I could, I just want to take a screenshot of that.
- Jazzguitarlessons.net, improve your jazz guitar playing with a real teacher.
- Oh, my gosh, that'd be so great for marketing.
- Christmas card from Marc.
- Exactly. Uh, we should do that for April fool sometime. Oh, I shouldn't have said it. Now they'll be expecting it.
- Oh, well.
- So, where does this bring us? This brings us to the tail of the phrase. So the idea is, don't land on a strong beat and stop there. Rhythmically, that feels like a period at the end of the sentence. The rhythmic cadence of your speech has ended there. Also, don't end on a strong note, because that also feels like, "This is the chord, we are done." You want a little bit more of a tail at the end of it. And so the piece of vocabulary that I've given for this and in this model, is what I like to call the Tea for Two phrase. Yeah. And this is great, because if you listen to the jazz standard, Tea for Two, you will actually hear a minor version and a major version. You know, targeting a major chord and targeting a minor chord you can get this sort of, you can get this sort of two different shapes, you know? Exactly. Another one, another reference, I guess, that I ... Or another quote comes from Alone Together.
- Oh, right.
- And the idea behind this tail is to have the, usually it's the third of the chord followed by the root and then the ninth. So third root, ninth. That, me singing in D minor, seventh note. Exactly. And then, Marc, if you want to demonstrate, let's say the G seven. So fundamentally a major sounding chord, it's got a major third. Exactly. Rhythmically, the entire phrase stops after the end of, or I guess the last note you land on is on the end of two.
- Foot in the air. I would sing it just like that.
- Gives you a little bit more momentum, a little bit more drive. You're like, "This has got to come down eventually. "I got to start planning something else after that." Take a deep breath, play a new phrase after. So do you want to play this? My God, I love that so much. It's hilarious.
- With a backing track perhaps?
- Yeah, that's our full phrase for targeting.
- You want to hear it with the track?
- Yeah, let's hear it with the backing track. Uh, I'm going to also, I'm going to point out that there, on this exercise sheet, there are four pages worth of this. And the reason for that is, because we're targeting the, we're gonna start by targeting each of the chord tones of D minor seven. So the root, the third, the fifth, the seventh. That's the first part, the intro, right? With the forward motion approach. And then we're going to arpeggiate from there. And then we're going to path to the third. That's our, that's our change. And then we're going to Tea for Two tail after that.
- Or put the D in front of the G in front of the C, so that's ... And for the A too, oh, wow.
- And for the A as well. So there's a lot here. So there's four repetitions of D minor seven, one for each chord tone. Start one for each chord tone starting point. There is four for G seven, same idea. Four for C major seven.
- Are you displacing? So the same phrase is displaced, but it's targeting different tones, but the components, ultimately the skeleton of it is exactly the same. It's the concept that we've talked about in the past half hour, right?
- Exactly. The structure is fundamentally the same, but we're looking at different chords and different starting points within those chords. But we're ending up at the same place in each chord. The conclusion, like I said, was path to the third of the next chord, no matter what notes you've started on. So you find all these different pathways from different starting points to get to the same ending point. You know, you start from here, you try to get here, you try to start from here, you try to get here. Start from here, you try to get there, you know? And that makes it relatively intuitive, I'd say. It's just a lot of work, you know?
- It's a lot of stuff at once.
- Yeah, yeah. You gotta put in the, you gotta put in the wax on, wax off time.
- That's exactly, I wish I had that when I first started to learn this stuff. That is like dabbing, uh, dabbling, just like in and out, try this, try start stab in the dark. So want to hear the first line, maybe?
- I'd love to, yeah.
- The backing track, here we go. A one, two, three. That's what I got. No six chord on this one, just two, five, and one.
- Exactly. Just for the sake of messing around with it, let's just jump to a different one. Let's hear a line on the, targeting the third of the six chord, A seven.
- Okay, I don't have a backing track ready, but I can play along, so, sure. Can you do this without hesitating this time?
- Go for it.
- One, two, three. ♪ Alone together ♪
- It would be nice to hear just like, you would need, what I played now, you would need to hear the backing track with like, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. One, two, three. I think I played the line wrong, but to hear it in the context of how many bars are passing, how many bars are forwarded, it really helps your ears put in context too.
- Definitely. And actually doing it like Marc did.
- Yeah, you just kept counting. And just when you have empty space, just be mindful of striking the chords that are there, or else, if you just read the tabs and just play the notes, you're not really learning anything. It's notes plus context. Of course, plus rhythm, plus nice phrasing, plus understanding what you're doing, plus, you know, getting single, eating Cup of Soup every day and just practicing jazz lines. Yeah, that's how you do it. We're just, we're giving you the recipes, guys. That's what you need to do.
- Yup, exactly. Really, the idea behind all this is, if you were wondering how jazz phrases worked, this is it. This is basically how it works. At least one prototype of it. And you can switch out any of these components for appropriate pieces of vocabulary. So instead of a forward motion approach, maybe you use an enclosure. Or maybe you just use a three note scale approach. ♪ Do-Re-Mi-Fa ♪
- Yeah.
- Right? You could do just about anything that leads you, that fulfills the purpose of each of those component phrases. And, a really great important thing to do about this, and I kind of want to just get away from the model now and talk about, 'cause I'm not teaching a course directly on how to do this, I want to talk about like what you can do to leverage this model, right? Not yet. Yeah, and I think the really important thing to start with is, take these ideas and keep them in your mind, and then go listen to Pat Martino. Or go listen to Pat Metheny, or any of the Pats. Sorry, West Montgomery, you know?
- Pat, John Patitucci, is that?
- John Patitucci.
- So bad. Conspiracy.
- Bass player. A darned good bass player, wow.
- I'd say that just about any, these are, just about any jazz player will play phrases that will, that more or less follows this idea. And it might not be one bar long. Actually, I should mention, if you wanted to make it two bars long, I would just suggest repeating the development and change portions. So arpeggio, well, using the vocabulary that we used so far, arpeggio plus path to third. Arpeggio plus path to third, arpeggio plus path, ad nauseum.
- Then you also get your arpeggio, your triplet thing. It might start to be a descending arpeggio, or you might have it on beat one and beat three, the two strong beats. That's a really easy way to go about extending it.
- Yeah, exactly. Those, what Marc just mentioned is actually part of the training program that I put students through, which is, "Okay, now that we've got a bunch of, "now that we have the whole phrase, "try doing a different version, "a variation on the arpeggio. "So instead of an ascending arpeggio, "try a descending arpeggio, one, seven, five, three."
- Even if it's the same arpeggio, it's gonna mess with your mind.
- Yeah, the shape changes. The order is weird.
- Yeah.
- And suddenly that makes you even more intimate with this piece of vocabulary, this arpeggio, the chord itself, right?
- And the guitar.
- And the guitar.
- And, yeah.
- The rhythm, especially, oh, yeah. And then there's other ones too. We like to talk about octave displacement. We talked about it in I think improv 103.
- Oh, yeah. It's one of my favorite things ever. Like, it's so difficult too. Like when sax players run out of notes, they just run out and like, "Oh, let me take this an octave up, "and just keep doing my phrase."
- Exactly.
- In parts it's like, "Oh, but it sounds so good." It's like Chester meets ...
- I was teaching this to one of our students, Steve. He actually, Steven was like, "Okay, so I've gotten this part down, but I want to do this. "I'm gonna try to do "this octave displacement thing this week." And I'm like, "Sure, go for it. "Now it's time to start on it, "you have the sheets for it, try it out." And he came back to me the next week, And he's like, "This is the secret sauce for what sounds like jazz."
- Yeah, for guys at home, don't try this at home. Like Steve, you know? What would be a good example? I'll just, I'll pick my favorite one. It's not even anatomy of a phrase. Let's go down from the third of D minor seven. So, F, E, uh, D, C, B. So we're on the third of G. So if you wanted to keep playing the C major scale you could go ... So this is how I always start to teach octave displacement. After you hit the third of G, keep playing the line down, but just jump the rest of the line up an octave. So you go ... And then I play a flat nine instead. You know?
- That's such an iconic line.
- Then you're like, "Oh, Chet Baker." You know, or whatever you, if you can think of something that you know, you can conceptualize of, such as a descending scale. You know when ... But then you say, "Once I reach that note." So essentially you jump up a seventh, if you are within a scale, that's what you do. You keep the descending the line, but doing it an octave ... Sorry, I stole your thunder there.
- No, no, no, that's good.
- I'm telling myself I wasn't going to do it.
- No, no, that's a great explanation of it, though. And I mean, to be real, you can do this also in the other direction. Generally speaking, you want to displace by an octave in the opposite direction your line is headed. So if your line is going down, then you bring it back up an octave. Or if your line is going up, you want to bring it back down an octave before you continue onward. And that's how you want to conceptualize it every single time. So you can do this with arpeggios too. And you know, this ends up being a thing like this where, you know, you're playing ... Oh, got my pick right here already. So if you play an ascending arpeggio, you'll want to displace downward. ♪ D, F, A, C, root, third, fifth, seventh, right? ♪ Well, if I just play the target note and then displace the rest of it by an octave downward. That's a very common line. Right? I added the change and then the tail back in afterwards. But that's one way to do it. You can also go the opposite direction if you have a descending arpeggio. ♪ Root, seventh, fifth, third. ♪ You can go, "Root, seventh, fifth, third." But up an octave.
- Same notes, this is amazing.
- Exactly. Same notes just in a different register suddenly. So, yeah, if you were to just look at letter names only, you would find no difference between those two lines.
- Exactly.
- But the register's changed.
- Awesome. So we've covered, you know, the start of covering something. We've covered arpeggio up. We've put this all together. We've covered, "Okay, now it's over two bars." We've covered some octave displacement stuff. Let's wrap this up. So you had started to talk how to leverage this, and then why you would you want to, I know we've taken a bunch of notes, so let's go through with the rest of the stuff, because I guess some of our watchers now are eager to download the files and start trying to do this on Stella by Starlight and on Blues maybe. So what are our concluding recommendations?
- Well, the first thing that I wanted to talk about was that the ... I want to talk about who's gonna benefit from this, actually. Students who are already familiar with a few pieces of vocabulary will do great with this, because you can just plug in the vocabulary that you know directly into each component of the phrase, each dissected part of the phrase, and just practice it like that. With the knowledge that you're trying to put it together into a single singular cohesive phrase. I also want to start complete beginners off with this method by teaching them. When I teach them personally, I do this, because I can hold their hand through learning each piece of vocabulary without it becoming a complicated issue or a big philosophical question, right?
- Or the previous knowledge blocking, where it's, "No, my previous teacher told me to do this." Or, yeah.
- Yeah. It's like just here. Just keep it simple, wax on wax off. Do it so that your body knows how to do it. And then when the music plays, you just, "Oh, it's just happening." So that's I think the most important thing for who's gonna benefit from using this sort of method. But, if you're not learning the method directly, if you're gonna to take one thing away from this masterclass, I want it to be that analytical side of the model. Just, or pseudo analytical. I don't want it to be too cerebral. I want it to be this sort of understanding of, "Here is how a phrase generally works." Now you can have, now you're equipped with the tools to listen to jazz and be like, "Oh, there's the start of it. "There's how they develop the sound. "And then they finish it off and tail." So that they can give themselves, it begs the question for another phrase, you know? Keep that in mind when you're listening to any sort of jazz, and you'll be able to, you'll hear it better I think. You'll hear jazz better.
- Hear it, feel it. You hear something, you're almost feel it in your fingers.
- Yeah, yeah. You're like, "Oh, I could almost play that."
- Yeah.
- Keep going up, keep going down, I can feel the contour of the phrase. Listen to them with this model in mind. And I think this is actually a pretty universal feeling of if you've ever come to a new genre that you've never heard before, or you're not familiar with, or it challenges you in some way, you often need a mental framework to, or develop a mental framework in order to understand it better. And meet it on its own terms. And so my idea here is this is telling you that this is sort of the general way we approach phrasing. It doesn't always work for other genres, but jazz specifically, it works for.
- Yeah, doesn't like, it's almost like jazz, it looks like anything that evolved from bebop is where it's coming from. Agree.
- Do you have any thoughts on how, who could benefit from it or why we want to approach it this way?
- Absolutely, I have thoughts over this whole approach, not just who might benefit. Look, anyone who wants to learn jazz phrasing. And it's funny, Nathan says, you know, it will work for it. So to me, I once had this argument with a friend over jazz, saying, "You know jazz is like one link." Like even Coltrane had two or three licks. He's like, "No, he had more than that. "He knew like hundreds of licks." And I'm like, "No, he didn't." It's always repeating the same stuff. If you listen to Coltrane for long enough you realize he's always playing the same things. Tweaking it, starting on different scale degree, adding a triplet, right? But even pick another player, pick Bill Evans, because I saw you listed Bill, you listed Wes Montgomery, Nathan, on our notes, Miles Davis, like players have their own cliche lines. And they all obey that certain, it's their own way of speaking the language, but Nathan's approach, which I've, it's the first time I really get accustomed to him. Like, "Oh, this is what it is. "This is how to apply it, how it works, okay." I've seen this countless of times from great jazz educators, such as ourselves. Thank you, Nathan. And, one point being, Hal Galper was one that we mentioned. There is the Berkeley Gong thing. There's David Baker who's telling you, "Well, learn Parker Hats." Right? There's Barry Harris that has another approach, but essentially everyone's saying the same thing. It is, "I'll get accustomed to the vocabulary." That's one way to dissect it. So the dissection of it is the key. So the notes and the modes and the scales and the fingers, whatever, less so, but the dissecting, if you approach it in this fashion, make this approach your own, or even come up with a new approach that you'll call something else. It reminds me, just that's my final thought is, someone say, "You need to get in shape." So people will swear by Pilates, right? And some people are like, "Pilates is cool, but I'm into yoga." People are like, "I like to lift weights." And people is like, "I can't lift weights. "I hurt my ankle and my wrist, but I do gymnastics. "I do my own pushups and whatever." So regardless, these guys are all getting fit, because they're all move their bodies in ways that work for them. So I think musically, it's the exact same story. It's like, it's just, "Did you want chili sauce, "or did you want Italian basil tomato sauce?" But it's, you're still eating the same meal, it's just that that spice is different. So I think this is to me a great way to dissect it. And also, I think Nathan's approach is superior to other approaches in the way that it's showing you how to dissect and maybe come up with your own way of dissecting things, because, you know, we could go way further than what you've written right now with that approach.
- Thanks, yeah, I appreciate that. I'm glad, because that is the way I wanted people to see it is, I want it to be, like this component fulfills a function, and this is the function. Fill that with anything you want. Put anything you want in there. I'm gonna give you this, because it sucks when a teacher sort of just like, goes like, "Well, you can do this. "Screw off for a weekend and I'll see you next week." And you're like, "Well, how?" You know, when you're just starting out, it's really scary. Right?
- It's almost as if you've given a level of abstraction, you've generalized the approach so that, of course you listed these all, "Oh, land on the third." Yeah, of course it's the strongest place to start. You start with a goal, but then you could extrapolate and go, "What, I want to land on the sharp nine." You know, instead of, "And listen Michael Brecker." Like, yeah, that's what he does. And he probably worked on landing on a flat line a whole bunch, but for sure he knew how to land on the third and first, right?
- That's very important. I think. The notion that this is it, is not it. This is the beginning. This is a good framework to start from and you'll build more and more pieces onto that framework from which you can hang your improvising. And some of that ends up being, and it actually, the model leaves room for these sorts of alterations and more outside playing and things like that. At one point I ended up, one of the variations I ended up doing for the arpeggio is, "You know what? "Replace the root of the arpeggio with the ninth." And that's yeah. And you get, you hit your upper structure, three five, seven, nine. Forget the root, the bassist is playing it. And that sounds a certain way. It sounds very jazz-like. And then it says, "Hey, for dominant chords, "instead of playing the natural nine lap, "play the flat nine." Like Marc mentioned earlier with that octave displacement stuff. Combine the ninth, the upper structure extension with octave displacement on a down descending arpeggio. It's just like, it can just stack on top of itself, all these variations, right?
- So stackable, and for me, you just, you started to talk about the flat nines, whatever, to me, if I were to take this approach and race it, say for myself, you know, put me on a desert island and say, "Marc, that's what you got to do." I would so start using Pentatonix in my pickups, because I so love using super-imposed Pentatonix. It's my sound.
- It's totally your thing.
- It's just, you know, so very exciting. Very, very good.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Thank you.
- Thank you, thank you. By the way, I love that analogy with ... I always love sports analogies, not for the competition side of it, but for the practice and focus training aspect of it, what are we focusing on? How do we develop our skills? Super applicable for anything you do in jazz, in music and in general. And also, I love the sauces analogy, you know? Both types of sauces, you know, a chili sauce versus an Italian seasoning sauce. They fulfill the same function. They add moisture to the meal. They, you know, they add a lot of seasoning and flavor to the meal, but in very different ways. And that's up to you. How do you want to sauce your pasta, you know? Same idea.
- Christmas card with that one.
- Exactly.
- Jazzguitarlessons.net. I play the guitar. Okay, one more time. Okay then.
- Do you have anything else to say on this?
- I did not get a good night of sleep. People watching that know the website a bit, I recently became a dad 12 days ago. So it's ... it's hard. It's one of those days. Today's a hard, harder sleep day, yes.
- I also didn't sleep well, but not because of a baby.
- Nathan is making babies, that's what's happening.
- Careless Whisper.
- Ah, okay, so silliness out of the way.
- Completely off the rails.
- Well, um, do we want to wrap this up? What's our final thoughts aside from that?
- Very good approach. Do it by all means, at least try it, make it your own. Nathan has a proven track record with private students of implementing this at different levels as well. It's worth checking it out. And if not that, only to see what dissecting is about and how you can dissect your own stuff. That's my comment, personally.
- Thank you. I'd say, yeah, this doesn't have to be the only method you ever use, and it shouldn't be, I think, but that approach, those aspects of the approach I think are the most valuable for it, for anyone. And so, take this with a grain of salt, but try it out for yourself. Listen to jazz music and say, "Can I determine these components? "I think that's there, I think it's there." And you might, I mean, email me, email me, [email protected]. And you might find that, you know, maybe there's this other component, you know, have you considered this? And I'd love to hear that. I'd love to discuss that more with you. So email me at [email protected]. Email Marc.
- M-A-R-C. [email protected].
- Find us on the JTL members forum on the Facebook group, the exclusive Facebook group.
- The inner circle, we have these webinars that we run every other week or Q & As. If you want to bring your questions to the webinars even better, it adds values for others, for other students. You know, an email is private, but if you bring this to a group call it's like, "Hey, at this you can raise your hand, we'll let you talk." Or you can play parts and we can really interact. That's really fun.
- I love that part. I love that aspect of our student community. It's just so, it's so tight knit, it's so cooperative. I love it, it brings everyone up, it's amazing. So, yeah, definitely do that. Join in the inner circles, comment on JGL member's forum. Until next time, happy shedding. And thank you, Marc, for joining.
- Thanks guys.
- All right.
- Awesome.
- Thank you to everybody.
- Take care, bye.
