Jazz Improvisation
In most popular music the harmony stands still and you find a scale that covers it. In jazz the opposite happens: the harmony moves underneath you, sometimes two chords a bar, often through several keys. Playing the changes means making that movement audible in your line alone.
- 2 notes per chord
- guide tones
- the test is unaccompanied
At which level
- Advanced
- Any instrument
- Harmony required
In short
There is a simple test. Record a solo over Dm7, G7, Cmaj7 with no accompaniment and play it to someone. Can they hear where the chord changes? Can they hear when you arrive home? If yes, you are playing the changes. If no, you are playing a scale that happens to fit, which is a different and much smaller thing.
What makes this manageable is that you only need two notes per chord. The third and the seventh decide whether a chord sounds like a maj7, a dominant or a minor seventh; the root and fifth say nothing about that. So a guide tone line, moving from the third of one chord to the seventh of the next by the smallest possible step, is a complete map of the harmony in two voices.
How you practise it
Learn standards in the right order: the form first, then the melody, then the harmony, and only then any scales. Licks are vocabulary and they work, up to the point where they become the only thing you can say. Transcription is the fastest route in, and transcribing one chorus properly beats reading ten books about it.
Where you run into this
- A solo where the harmony is audible with the band muted
- A chorus built from two notes per chord that still sounds like music
- A player with a hundred licks and no sentences
Our own examples
A ii V I playable here, so you can build a guide tone line yourself: third of the ii, seventh of the V, third of the I, and hear how little you need for the changes to be obvious.