Improvisation
Transforming TikTok into an online course
Pocket Jazz is coming. I am finishing up transforming the nearly 70 TikTok videos I produced earlier this year into an online
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.
Michael Lake
Jazz/latin trombone, author, multimedia artist, marketer
Getting out of the improvisation box harmonically
This is the final part of a six-part series on why and how to expand beyond the narrow ranges of dynamics, notes, articulations, rhythms, and
Get out of the improvisation box of articulation range Part 3 of 6
This is part three in the series I am referring to as getting out of the box. There are so many aspects of playing that
Getting out of the box of dynamic range Part 2 of 6
In part two of this six-part series of getting yourself out of the box in your improvisation, I want to discuss dynamic range. When I
