Chapter: Harmonic Considerations

This is a preview of the educational program A Jazz Improvisation Almanac which is under development for the Outside Shore Music Online School. Feel free to browse this preview and learn what you can from it. For a more completed product, though, check out the original freely browsable jazz textbook, A Jazz Improvisation Primer.

Once you have some understanding and appreciation for the fundamental principles of improvisation, as described in the previous chapter, you can begin to think about specific musical ideas or phrases that will help you achieve your goals. In any musical setting that involves chord progressions, one of the first things to consider in constructing a phrase is how that phrase will relate to the prevailing harmony, as this has an immediate impact on the tension created by the phrase.

This chapter discusses some of factors that go into choosing a scale on which to base a phrase, as well as issues that relate to using notes not actually in the scale on which you are ostensibly basing your phrase. As you will see, mere knowledge of which scales "go" with which chords is not all there is to it.

For the most part, this chapter assumes you are playing music based on a predermined chord progression, but the last section deals with music that does not use such conventions.

Copyright 2000 Outside Shore Music
Authored by Marc Sabatella

Chapter: Harmonic Considerations