Improvisation
Memorization for jazz solos?
A sax player eager to improve his improvisation skills reached out to me yesterday. He’s frustrated. He’s unsure of how to continue
Collecting licks for your jazz solos
Your life won’t last forever
Have you done enough?
Are you simply baying at the moon?
Do not go gentle into that good night
What is wrong with the above?
What is the jazz vocabulary and how you can learn it?
I recently listened to a podcast from Brent Vaartstra of LearnJazzStandards.com. Brent does a nice job with his podcasts, and his latest should give us all some food for thought.
Quick and easy mastery of improvising jazz
Okay, let me come clean that the title of this post is completely misleading. But when you first saw it, admit that you had a tinge of excitement that it could be possible. Sorry about that, but I’m trying to make a point.
One fix to your jazz playing that will make you swing
My last couple of posts have been dedicated to time and rhythm.
So much of jazz education literature is obsessed almost exclusively to showing you the ‘right’ notes and scales to play
How is your sense of jazz time?
I’ve been listening to Youtube videos of jazz players. Not the stars, but players who most people would consider to be very capable.
Finding meaning for your jazz playing
I just read Viktor Frankl’s classic, Man’s Search For Meaning. It’s been on my reading list for a long time so my recent sojourn to the northern Arizona flower-covered mountains gave me the opportunity to finally read it.
Michael Lake
Jazz/latin trombone, author, multimedia artist, marketer
The new book by Richie Beirach and me
Throughout the past year, Richie and I have been writing a book on jazz education. It is called Teaching and Learning Jazz: From tradition to
How you can play so much better right now
There is a fascinating process that I constantly see played out. Instantly, it can elevate the ability of players. They are amazed and delighted that
The finishing fetish
Before a rehearsal tonight, I was speaking with a couple of friends/bandmates about some of my improvisation methods They’ve been following a few of my lessons and
