Jazz Improvisation for the Tenor Saxophone

Video Transcript

Hi! This is Dave Birkin and on behalf of expertvillage.com I am going to going to talk a little bit about jazz and improvisation as it applies in the saxophone. We talked about, arpeggios and scales and those definitely come in use when you improvise, when you improvise, you are basically dealing with a harmonic structure and you are filling in a melody on your own, that is what your improvisation is. So in order to really be effective you have to know the melody to the song too, but when you improvise you are improvising your own melody that is kind of what that is and it is usually on the changes what they call the chord, the chord changes, the chord structure, the harmonic structure of the piece. So I was using Misty there for a minute, so I guess I can do that, you know, I guess… see that’s playing the melody straight and that is where you have got to start, you have got to start with the melody, but you have to know what the chords are, so that you can, you know, do a variation on it, may be has something to do with the melody, or may be nothing to do with the melody but always has to fit the chords, that is kind of what your challenge is, is to make your improvisation fit harmonically and rhythmically with what is going around you. And that improvisation right there encompassed a lot of different things, they were arpeggios, there were scales, and there were chromatic leading tones sort of approach notes like the way you would you could take a chord but then you could approach the notes of that chord, you do a chromatic approach to it, that is different than actually doing a scale, so those are other possibilities.

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