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Summary: Understand what terms like "improvisation" and "lick" mean to a jazz saxophone player; learn them from our expert jazz sax player in this free sax video music lesson.
Views: 3,536 | Tags: jazz, instrument, instruction, saxophone, sax, improv, improvisation, musical instruments
About the Expert
Mitch Kaplan Proficient on multiple instruments, Mitch Kaplan has performed and taught music for two decades. He is also a published author of music education books and on... read more
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Questions & AnswersFor Expert Village this is Mitch Kaplan. In this clip we will be talking about terms part two. Improvisation is basically making up your own melody off of the chord progression. Now if you would you can take the melody of a song and call that a written improvisation because that is exactly what it is. The melody of a song is basically notes taken from the chord and introduced, put together in a nice package and that is basically an improvisation. Although improvisation that we say improvising means to do it spontaneously and that is what when we hear, hey, can you improvise over there Joe and you say sure, because now you know what it means. A lick is basically taking a musical phrase, that’s a lick. Now it is a bunch of notes that work well over a chord. A phrase on the other hand is similar to a lick. A phrase is kind of like a sentence in jazz. It is where you would breathe, it is where you would sigh or exclaim. Here is a phrase, now I could use another phrase and put those two together. Those are two phrases put together where you would breathe in that section where in between the two sections, that is two segments being put together, two phrases.
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