Unit: Improvisation

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.

Improvisation in music is the act of deciding what to play on a moment to moment basis. An improvisation is a product of the musician as well as the music being performed. Each decision made during the course of improvisation is based partly on past experiences and partly on the current situation.

In a sense, this is no different from ordinary conversation. You decide what to say immediately before saying it. What you say is based partly on your experiences and partly on the flow of the conversation. Your past experiences include your knowledge of language as well as conversations you have heard and taken part in. The current situation includes the subject of the conversation as well as your interaction with the other participants.

In music, your experiences include knowledge of theory as well as music you have heard and played before. Your improvisation will also be influenced by the particular composition being performed and how it is being interpreted by the other musicians you are plaing with.

The main difference between improvisation in conversation and in music is that most people have considerably more experience with conversation, and from an early age they have developed an intuitive feel for how to interact with others in this manner. Ideally, an improvisor would like to have this same naturalness of expression with music. In order to achieve this, there can be no substitute for years of real experience playing music. This program can help by introducing you to relevant experiences and suggesting ways in which these experiences can be applied.

The previous chapters on the elements and styles of jazz and on music theory provide some of the knowledge from which you will draw. However, they do not address the problem of how to use this information in improvisation. That is the purpose of the following chapters.

Copyright 2000 Outside Shore Music
Authored by Marc Sabatella

Unit: Improvisation