Play more inspired and satisfying jazz

You may be reading this because you would like to stand up and improvise your personal musical story more melodically and brimming of confidence. You’d simply be having fun expressing yourself. Does that sound a good goal for you: play more inspired and satisfying jazz?

Prerequisites to playing jazz well

To do that requires a few things. First, you have to be good on your instrument. How do you do that? You practice the right things. And you get clear on how you want to sound. Because you can be technically brilliant but have nothing authentic to say in your improvisation. I have some answers for you.

I’ve just published an update of my online course called Pocket Jazz. It is an organized collection of over 60 lessons on everything from how to connect your musical mind to your instrument all the way to the circle of fifths and why it should matter to your playing.

Pocket Jazz will share some of the simple secrets of how great jazz players express themselves so beautifully. It will give you insight into some history and into what musicians do to become great jazz players.

It has been bothering me this last year year that my collection of interviews with the likes of Dave Liebman, Steve Swallow, Ron Carter, Richie Beirach and others was not being seen by a big enough audience. But I did one smart thing a while back: I indexed every interview by topic.

Interview Snippets from the Greats

Over this past summer, I used that massive index to extract short (1-5 minute) segments of topics from the interviews. I’ve attached those short snippets to the various lessons that relate to the topic within the Pocket Jazz course. You now get tight concise video gems of insight and wisdom to go along with most every lesson.

These are a few of the topics within the course:

• The true bottom line for understanding how to improvise over jazz changes
• How to authentically play the blues
• How to improvise your swing feel. Is your playing stiff without groove?
• How to play more intuitively within a group
• Playing better jazz lines by playing Bach
• The way to warm up your ear for playing over changes
• How to have better time
• What is a ii-V-I and why what does that have to do with your improvisation?
• Ways to make this thing called improvisation much easier and less stressful.
• How to most quickly learn a tune

• Mark Egan’s tribute to his former bandmate Lyle Mays
• Joe Lovano talk about the courage of a jazz musician
• Adam Nussbaum tell his story about how Roy Haynes responded to Adam wishing him a happy 95th birthday
• Lenny White recollect his brief time with Muhammed Ali and talk about the importance of back heroes to young black men.
• David Amram express himself about the beauty of life like only David can do.

You might as well check it out…