Dear Experienced Improvisers,

My resolution for 2003 is to NEVER GET LOST AGAIN while playing a solo.

My band does some challenging originals but I can get lost in a standard too, although in that case it's easier to keep playing until I figure out where I am.

Can anybody tell me how I can practice so that I stop getting lost, once and for all?

(My other resolution is to lose 10 pounds. I'll take advice on that, too.)

Grateful thanks in advance!

Eat less and exercise more.

As for getting lost, if you don't get lost every once in a while you aren't trying hard enough.

My only advice would be to really internalize the changes to everything you are playing by sitting down at the piano and SLOWLY play the chords over and over ..so changes soak into your brain AND help you discover the scale patterns that work best over them ..( If you have difficulty accomplishing this at this point, I'd add some keyboard jazz theory to your "to do" as well ..)

Once you REALLY understand the changes slowly , up to tempo and on your regular instrument should become easier ..

good luck!!

gp

Yeah. Getting lost is the best bit of playing. As Jeff said, if you don't get lost, you have to be playing within yourself in some sense - it's when you push that you make mistakes - and that's the only way to improve or find something new. As long as you know the structure of what you're doing well enough to find your way back, there's no harm whatsoever.

Internalize the changes for sure, but also internalize the melody. Having the melody subconciously running through your head while playing or while listening to someone else play helps you keep your place in the form. It also helps you to improvise ideas that are related to THE SONG you are playing rather than JUST running changes (not that there's anything wrong with divorcing one's improvisation from the melody).

Also, internalize the form of the tune. Is it a 32 bar song form? Which one? How does the harmony/melody help delineate that form. Learn to feel form in your gut. Become especially familiar with harmonic transitions between sections of the form.

When you *do* get lost (and it will happen if you surrender completely), relax, play less, and figure out how to make music out of your mistake by conciously making fun of it and using it.Take aspects of the mistake and work it into the flow of ideas. Repeat it at a different pitch level. Or just take a few minutes of silence to listen to others and get your bearings.

The reason I prefer live music to recorded is that I love to hear players make music spontaneously. One of my greatest thrills is to hear a cat play themselves into a corner and then get out of it intelligently.

I would say, in that case knowing the form of the piece is more important then the changes.
if you know the form (if you can "fill" 8 bars or 16 bars you can forget some changes but you won't lose where you are.
modal pieces are very good actually to excersize on form.
listen to kind of blue so what and concentrate and see if you can listen to the whole piece without losing the form.

i meant "feel" 8 or 16 bars, sorry.

I'm..somewhere around here...Where'd I go?

When I write music, or even when I play other people's music, I never write down chord changes for anybody in the band. What I try to get my band to do instead of reading and reacting to changes, is to play the song enough that we "feel" the melody and its directions, and then if anybody gets lost, we all get lost in the same direction and give the soloist an underpinning, a support. Frequently, there will be times when the band will not be listening and will not realize that the soloist is feeling lost...so, first thing above all: Listen! Listen! Listen!
This music we play called Jazz was codified into changes to simplify learning the shape of the melody and the chords that it implies, but in the course of time, it became the reason for playing rather than a map for scooting around.

One of the best-known of my sidemen, Roy Hargrove, never used changes. He would quickly learn the melody and react to that. He's probably one of the best examples I can cite as a model.

I just want to say thank you for these amazing replies... a lot to think about here!

<,As long as you know the structure of what you're doing well enough to find your way back, there's no harm whatsoever.
>>

Then again, if you're able to find your way back you're not really lost.

Mislaid?

In a masterclass once Joe Lovano explained how he learns tunes, which I've found very helpful. He said he would play the melody over and over until he had it memorized and would then embellish it a little. Then he would play the bass notes, with some simple embellishments, over and over until he heard them and had them memorized. After that he would combine the two- melody and bass notes and embellish the tune off of that.

I've found really knowing the melody and where it fits into the harmony is really important so I really like that exercise. It can be more difficult if the tune has many repeated sections like AABA, but then you just have to be aware of which A you're on.

"I've found really knowing the melody"

How could you play a song without "really" knowing the melody?

n<bh

You'd be suprised, many people do it(mostly students I'd think). I'm not talking about just playing the melody, I mean internalizing it, hearing it(while you may be improvising something else), understanding it's themes, it's development. *Many people approach improvising more as playing on a set of chord changes rather than an actual piece and considering all of it's elements.



*ok, I'm of course talking about more traditional music that deals with preset structures, so let's not get into some conceptual argument.

The melody in a jazz song is the most INTERESTING thing there is. This melody is also included in how you continue the tune while improvising.

Once you know the melody of a song, you don't have to know the changes, although it may help.

A scale is still a melody.

And you can hear a chord in a scale.

Experiment with different scales on different chords-
after-or-while internalizing the melody then
you will start hearing new melodys along-side
the tunes' melody.

Practice improv with random chords, but play a melody of
a favorite tune over random chords.
see what happens
Let loose and practice, live and enjoy!

steve_mccallum2001@yahoo.com

ps. anyone live in or around central florida?