Learning A Tune

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.

Many tunes played by jazz musicians are simple enough to sight read, at least for the head. Furthermore, an improvised solo is, by definition, not normally rehearsed. Some musicians are able to play great solos even while sight reading unfamiliar chord changes.

In most cases, however, it pays to spend time learning a composition before attempting to perform it. This is especially true for most beginning and intermediate students. In order to improvise well over a composition, the first step is to truly know that composition. If improvisation can be likened to telling a story, and the study of theory relates to comprehension of the language in which the story is told, then an understanding of the composition over which you are improvising corresponds to familiarity with the subject matter of the story. If you do not know what you are talking about, you will tend to sound incoherent. The same holds for improvisation.

But what does it mean to learn a tune? And why is it that some musicians can improvise well even when sight reading? I believe the answers to these questions are related. The musician who improvises well the first time he plays a new chord progression does so because he has, in some sense, learned the composition while sight reading the head!

It may seem odd that I have gone to such lengths to establish the importance of learning compositions. After all, it has probably not taken you long to discover on your own that it takes practice with a tune before you feel comfortable improvising on it. But mere rote repetition is not necessarily the only way to go about this.

First, I will discuss learning the head, because you probably already have some experience in learning heads and other written melody lines. Repetition is indeed an important approach for learning a part that you expect to perform more or less as written. However, as you have almost certainly discovered by now, there are usually a few passages that are difficult from a technical perspective, and rather than practice the whole head over and over, it pays to concentrate mostly on the problem phrases. This type of focused repetition is often called shedding, which is short for woodshedding - the idea being that musicians would supposedly go off to the woodshed to practice in isolation.

As an example of shedding, here is a written melody:

[EXAMPLE]

This is how one might go about practicing it:

[EXAMPLE]

As soon as you are starting to feel comfortable with the notes, you should try to commit the melody to memory. The first step is to actually hear the melody in your head. Memorization of music should be primarily an aural matter, not a visual one. So before you think about playing the melody from memory, ask yourself if you can sing it from memory. Do not worry about how good your voice is; hitting the exact pitches is not the point. You should at least be able to come close, and also recognize when you are off pitch.

Once you are familiar enough with the melody to be able to sing it without the music, then you can try to play it. At that point, there are a couple of devices that can help you find the exact notes. The first is muscle memory. After much repetition in practice, you may find yourself playing phrases correctly without even thinking about the notes.

There are a few problems with muscle memory, however. It tends to only take place on passages that required shedding in the first place. It assumes you are always playing the tune on the same instrument in the same key, and perhaps even at the same tempo. It does not allow you to easily write down the melody away from your instrument, should you desire to write it out for someone else for instance. Most significantly, it does not allow for variation in performance.

For these reasons, a more conscious form of memorization may be called for as well. While it may be tempting to try visualizing the sheet music or otherwise memorizing specific pitches, these approaches share many of the same disadvantages as muscle memory. For instance, you may try remembering that the first note of the bridge of Cherokee is D#, but this holds only when you are playing the tune in the key of Bb. If you are ever asked to play it in another key, or if you wish to quote the melody while improvising in another key, you will be lost.

One way to address this is to remember intervals rather than pitches. For example, the first note of the bridge of Cherokee is a perfect fourth above the tonic, if you consider the enharmonic spelling Eb instead of D#:

[EXAMPLE]

This can help with transitions and other problem spots, but it is difficult remember an entire melody in terms of intervals in this way, and it does not help you see how the melody relates to the harmony.

Therefore, when applying conscious memorization techniques to melodies, I recommend learning the melody in relation to the chord progression to the tune. If you are memorizing the melody, you are presumably going to want to memorize the chord progression as well, and knowing the chords underlying the tune can make it a lot easier to find the melody. For example, if you know that the first chord of the bridge to Cherokee is C#m7, then this narrows the set of likely melody notes to ones in the C# dorian scale. Furthermore, even if you choose the wrong melody note, it will probably at least sound good over the harmony, and then you may be able to find a way to resolve to the correct note.

Of course, in this particular case, you may wish to remember specifically that the melody note is the ninth of the chord. After finding that specific note, you can then find the rest of that phrase by considering the underlying chords and fitting your aural memory of the melody to your conscious knowledge of the chord progression. For example, if you remember that the melody from that point steps down a couple of times, then leaps down, and you know the chord progression is:

[EXAMPLE]

Then you will probably be able to construct the actual melody exactly:

[EXAMPLE]

Note I used the word "construct", which is the same word I used previously in a discussion of improvising a melody. This is no mere coincidence. The process of playing a melody from memory can actually be quite similar to the process of improvising a new melody: first, you conceive the contour of the melody, then you try to fit it to the chord progression. The primary difference is that you have the opportunity to practice a composed melody, so that playing it from memory is more an act of reconstruction than of construction.

Now that I have introduced the idea of learning the chord progression, I will discuss a few ways to actually achieve that goal. My general approach is similar to how I recommend learning a melody: first become comfortable with playing it, then commit it to memory aurally, and finally memorize it consciously. However, the actual method of going about this is a little different for chord progressions.

The most straightforward way to start to become comfortable playing the chord progression is, again, playing it repeatedly. Practice actually improvising over the progression, and if you expect to be playing it in an accompanying role, practice providing accompaniment as well. For tonal tunes, it can help tremendously to understand how the individual chords function. See the chapter on Harmony in the unit on Music Theory for more on this. For example, if you can recognize a passage as a ii-V-I progression, this will not only help you improvise a coherent line over it, it will also make it easier to memorize than if you see the passage as three separate chords. Notice the ii-V-I progressions in the following example:

[EXAMPLE]

For the most part, whenever the chords are diatonic to the original key, improvisation is fairly straightforward:

[EXAMPLE]

Whenever a non-diatonic chord occurs, make a note of it, and try to see if you can see what it is doing there. If you can determine it is, for instance, a secondary dominant, or a tritone substitution, this will again help you both in improvising a line that fits the progression well and in memorizing the progression. For example, notice how the non--diatonic chords function in this example:

[EXAMPLE]

Here, the A7 is simply a secondary dominant leading to the Dm7, and the Db7 is simply a tritone substitution for the expected G7.

Another to watch out for are the key changes. For example, the bridge to Cherokee begins with a key change up a half step, from Bb to B:

[EXAMPLE]

Looking at a chord progression in terms of function helps you play over the progression better, and it makes it easier to memorize by reducing it to a logical set of related chunks rather than a long series of arbitrary chords. For example, consider the following progression:

[EXAMPLE]

Learning it as a series of chords means learning 32 different things. Now look at this progression in terms of function:

[EXAMPLE]

Here, there are only a dozen or so things to remember. Also, it is now much easier to transpose:

[EXAMPLE]

For modal compositions, you may not be able to do a functional analysis, but you can still break the tune down into phrases and see how the chords relate to each other:

[EXAMPLE]

Regardless of whether it is tonal or modal, once you have the progression analyzed, you will probably find that parts of it are easy to improvise over, because you have played other tunes that include the same progression. For instance, a ii-V-I progression in the key of F is so common that you should be able to improvise over it in your sleep. For that matter, a ii-V-I progression in any key should come automatically to you if you have practiced in all keys as recommended in the previous section. However, some passages may require shedding. I recommend isolating the problem passage and turning it into a vamp. If the chords go by too quickly, try lengthening them. For example, consider the following progression:

[EXAMPLE]

If you have trouble with the indicated measures, try turning them into a vamp with each chord lengthened:

[EXAMPLE]

Then you can try shortening the duration of each chord:

[EXAMPLE]

At first, learning a tune in the manner discussed in this section will take a long time, and the intellectual analysis aspect may be especially frustrating. Eventually, though, as you get better at using these techniques, you may reach the point where you have effectively learned a tune, together with the underlying chord progression, after just a few choruses.

Copyright 2000 Outside Shore Music
Authored by Marc Sabatella

Learning A Tune