Pocket Jazz
A play-along method for strengthening your improvisation
You’re here. You’re busy. And you’re ready to play better jazz.
Pocket Jazz was built exactly for you. Short, purposeful lessons—each three minutes or less—that fit right into your practicing. No fluff, no filler, just the essential insights you need to grow.
Most every lesson includes quick related wisdom from legendary jazz masters. These were taken from my long-form interviews with them. I’ve chosen a snippet of concise advice—five minutes or less—to inspire and guide your practice.
This is your chance to learn efficiently, practice meaningfully, and make real progress. Your attention is precious. Let’s put it exactly where it counts.
Go directly to The Jazz Language, The Musician’s Ear, Better Time and Rhythm, Music Theory, Improvisation Hacks, and Practicing Well.
Dive right in.
Deep Thinking
‘The Talk’ About Improvising Jazz
A personal message to my younger self about the struggles of learning to improvise. The advice I share here would’ve helped me then—and it’s just as relevant for anyone learning jazz today.
Finding Your Musical Voice
This lesson introduces the heart of the Pocket Jazz course: discovering your own unique musical voice—not copying licks or stringing together borrowed ideas. It encourages you to trust your ear and explore your personal sound.
Emotional Expression in Jazz
While preparing an intro for our book Teaching and Learning Jazz, Richie Beirach and I launched into a passionate discussion about a YouTube video that epitomized what’s wrong with much of today's jazz education. This fly-on-the-wall moment critiques overplaying and prepackaged jazz methods, reinforcing the need for musical substance over surface.
Left and Right Brain
A playful look at how your brain’s analytical side can block creativity—and how recognizing that conflict can help you play jazz with more flow and musicality.
4 Quadrants of Competence
This video breaks down the four stages of learning a skill—from not knowing what you don’t know to full mastery—and shows how those levels apply to developing as a jazz player.
Playing Jazz is Easy
This lesson offers three essential tips for playing jazz well—delivered as a response to oversimplified and misleading TikTok videos that misrepresent the true complexity of jazz.
The Jazz Language
The Jazz Vocabulary
Jazz has a vocabulary just like any language. This lesson helps you sound more like a real jazz player and less like someone just guessing at notes.
The Rhythm of Phrases
A strong jazz solo is more than a string of notes—it tells a story using the rhythm of phrases. This lesson explores phrase rhythm using a Herbie Hancock solo to illustrate the concept.
Jazz Interaction
This lesson highlights the importance of spontaneous group interaction in jazz, using Richie Beirach’s performance of Nardis to showcase musical conversation within the band.
Swing – part 1 of 2
This lesson challenges the simplified notion of swing as “triplet-feel” eighth notes, instead presenting swing as a personal, expressive style shaped by articulation and timing.
Swing – part 2 of 2
This second swing lesson explores the unique rhythmic feels of jazz greats like Herbie Hancock and Bill Evans, emphasizing that swing is deeply personal and rooted in each musician’s internal sense of time.
The Musician's Ear
Warm Up Your Ear
A powerful warm-up exercise that strengthens the ear–instrument connection. Use it daily to get both your muscles and your ears fully engaged.
Warm Up Your Ear With Phrases
Build on the single-note warm-up by singing and playing short phrases. The goal is still to match what you hear in your mind with what you play.
Bach for a Better Ear
This lesson uses a short Bach phrase to practice starting on different notes—strengthening the connection between ear, mind, and instrument through simple but rich melodic material.
Relative Pitch
This lesson focuses on building relative pitch—your ability to hear and reproduce intervals—not perfect pitch. You'll use phrases to train your ear by shifting their starting notes.
Hearing Harmony
Develop your ability to hear the harmony beneath your soloing so your phrases connect more musically with the chord progression.
Harmonic Anticipation
Learn to anticipate where the harmony is going—not just react to the current chord—so your lines flow more naturally through progressions. This lesson helps you connect phrases across changes and develop a more musical sense of forward motion.
Follow the Music
This lesson shifts your focus from playing patterns to creating music with your ear. Learn to follow the sound rather than your fingers.
Better Rhythm and Time
Notes Versus Time
This lesson proves that time matters more than note choice. You’ll hear a demonstration of how great rhythm can elevate even random notes, and why bad time ruins even the “right” ones.
Articulation
A note’s rhythm is shaped by articulation. This lesson compares two identical note sequences to show how phrasing—not just what you play, but how—can transform your time feel.
Practicing 2 and 4
This lesson challenges your internal time by isolating beats 2 and 4 with a metronome—a useful, if debated, training method for developing swing and groove.
Maniacal Metronome
This lesson introduces the Maniacal Metronome to help you feel time rather than chase it—an ear-based approach to rhythmic fluency.
Practicing Rhythm
This two-in-one lesson explores rhythm by removing obstacles like chords and technique—helping you focus purely on time and creativity.
Stylize For Time
This lesson encourages developing a personal, human sense of time rather than relying strictly on metronomic precision—highlighting how jazz legends express unique rhythmic feels that reflect individuality.
Music Theory
A-A-B-A Form
This lesson introduces the A-A-B-A song form, emphasizing the importance of internalizing its structure to improvise smoothly across sections—especially when transitioning through the bridge.
Simple Jazz Piano Voicings for comping
This lesson encourages all non-piano playing musicians to develop basic keyboard skills as a tool for understanding harmony and comping. You'll learn simple bass and chord voicings and explore how even basic piano proficiency enhances your overall musicianship.
The Circle of Fifths
Instead of memorizing a chart, this lesson helps you hear the Circle of Fifths as it moves around key centers, deepening your intuitive grasp of Western harmony.
Composing Songs
Using Paul McCartney’s Yesterday, this lesson draws connections between great composition and jazz improvisation—showing how principles of musical storytelling apply across genres.
Transcribing
This lesson explores transcription as a powerful tool for internalizing jazz language. By writing out and analyzing what master players do, you gain deep insight into their musical choices and harmonic strategies.
Improvisation Hacks
Improvising More Melodically
This lesson offers practical demonstrations to help you play more melodically—an improvement most jazz players say they want. Simply increasing awareness of melodic attributes can elevate your improvisation
Licks in Solos
This lesson explains how practicing licks can improve technique and ear training—but warns against inserting them directly into solos. Use licks as a practice tool, not a performance crutch.
Paraphrasing the Melody
This lesson introduces paraphrasing—hinting at a tune’s melody while improvising—as a way to stay connected to the song and make solos more relatable for listeners.
Playing the Blues
This lesson offers practical tips and ear-training exercises for playing authentically over blues changes—going beyond the blues scale to internalize the feel and sound of the blues.
Improvising Over Static Harmony
This lesson gives tips for creating compelling solos over static harmony—when playing over one or two repeating chords—by focusing on maintaining musical interest without relying on changing progressions.
Composing Solos
This lesson encourages writing out solos as a way to internalize your musical ideas. It's not about faking improvisation but using composition as a practice method to develop your authentic, personal lines.
Ebb and Flow
This lesson highlights the importance of variety in jazz solos. It critiques predictable, unchanging lines and introduces the idea that compelling improvisation relies on surprise, contrast, and musical flow.
The Beauty of Constraint
This lesson reframes constraints as tools to focus and accelerate your jazz improvisation skills. By limiting your choices—such as using only specific rhythms or dynamics—you can gain deeper insight into areas that need improvement and practice more effectively.
Anchor Notes
This lesson introduces the concept of anchor notes. These are reliable notes that work over multiple chords to simplify your improvisation and create more cohesive, musical solos.
Practicing Well
Developing the Practice Habit
This lesson emphasizes the importance of consistency in practicing. It encourages turning helpful strategies into regular habits, noting that improvement only comes from applying the tips repeatedly and making them part of a personal practice routine.
Inspired Practicing
This lesson encourages you to vary your practice environment. Repeating the same exercises in the same space can lead to boredom and decreased motivation. Practicing in new locations with different acoustics can spark creativity and make the experience more enjoyable and effective.
Improving Your Skills
This lesson addresses how improvement in music isn’t always linear. Progress can be slow, inconsistent, or hard to perceive, making it difficult to stay motivated. The lesson provides insights into why you might not notice growth and offers suggestions to help you gain a clearer perspective on your development.
Learning a Tune
This lesson explores different ways to internalize a tune’s harmony to improve improvisation. Techniques include playing chords on piano or guitar, memorizing and arpeggiating them, and singing phrases over changes before playing them. The tune Eclypso by Tommy Flanagan is used to demonstrate how singing strengthens your musical connection.
Speed Learning a Tune
This lesson offers strategies for quickly analyzing unfamiliar chord changes when you're handed a part just moments before playing. It’s about making smart, fast decisions to prepare for a solo with little to no rehearsal time.
Practicing with Play-Alongs
This lesson explores how to use jazz play-alongs—like Aebersold, iReal Pro, and Band-in-a-Box—effectively. It explains their benefits and common pitfalls, offering tips for maximizing their usefulness while avoiding over-reliance on them.
Practicing Without Music
This lesson encourages musicians to occasionally practice without written music, focusing instead on using their ear. It outlines the benefits of ear-led practice and suggests ways to structure sessions that foster creativity and internal musical development without relying on the page.
Practicing Scales
This popular lesson explores a better approach to practicing scales over chords. It challenges the typical octave-up-and-down method and presents a more effective, musical way to think about scales in improvisation.
Practicing Rhythm
This rhythm-focused lesson teaches two things: first, how to improve your rhythmic feel by removing the friction of playing your instrument or chords while practicing rhythm; and second, how to apply this method of stripping away difficulty to other areas of your musical development.
Recording and Listening
This lesson encourages you to record yourself while practicing in order to hear your playing more objectively. It explores why our live perception is often biased and offers tips on how to record and listen back constructively—even if you’re nervous about what you’ll hear.
