study-music

Jazz solo

There’s instructive theory on how to start creating something that can be counted as a jazz solo (probably in a hard bop style) - where to start, tips and tricks, how to grow. It’s “craft”.

And then there’s analysis of what the famous jazz musicians with many years of experience really make their solos of. It’s “research”.

Because, surprisingly, after you learn some basic advice like “use pentatonics” or “use call-response” or “use licks”, once you look at real solo transcriptions, you’ll get lost, confused and intimidated as to “what’s really going on” and “how to make sense of it all”.

Also, look at Jazz solo visualizations and solo rawls

Craft

• 🎥 Stijn Wauters. Jazz Piano Practice Session - Major II V I & Turn Around Licks - Introduction into solo building strategies

• Charlie Parker Omnibook (wiki) - pattern explorer by Jazzomat, progressions analyzed by mDecks, Thomas Owens’s thesis, Henry Martin’s paper

• Wynton Marsalis Omnibook has an intro article describing his solo language, maybe other omnibooks also do that

• Doug McKenzie’s Jazz Piano videos and MIDI solos

• Analyses by Forrest Wernick, eg.:
  • https://www.jazzadvice.com/lessons/tune-up-3-legendary-solos/
  • https://www.jazzadvice.com/lessons/joe-henderson-plays-recorda-me/
• Impro-Visor - an educational tool for creating and playing a lead sheet, with a particular orientation toward representing jazz solos

• A modern context for Impro-visor and generated solos: Brian A. Miller, 2020

• Seven volumes of Jerry Bergonzi (starting with “Melodic Structures”) to gradually build up your solo language from tiniest parts exploiting all scales and note permutations. Trailers, website

• Joe Riposo. Target and Approach Tones: Shaping Bebop Lines - A small book focusing on the join notes in between changing chord scales.

• Mark Sabatella. A Jazz Improvisation Primer - An online course from a developer of MuseScore

• 🎥 Gary Burton. Jazz Improvisation

• Dariusz Terefenko. Jazz Theory - Has three chapters of solo analyses: “Confirmation”, “Moose the Mooche”, “Line up”

• Ю. Маркин. Школа джазовой импровизации

• В. Романенко. “Учись импровизировать”, “Импровизация в популярной песне” и другие

• David Kane. Playing Outside the Chord

• Books by Bert Ligon, eg. “Connecting Chords with Linear Harmony”

• John Mehegan, Jazz Improvisation in four volumes, proceeding historically

• David Liebman. How to Approach Standards Chromatically

Research

• The Jazzomat Research Project - A corpus of transcribed solos. The book: Inside the Jazzomat. Dig That Lick

• Frieler et al., 2016. Midlevel analysis of monophonic jazz solos: A new approach to the study of improvisation. With annotations: https://osf.io/wumcd/

• Rabon Michael Bewley. Tell Me a Story: A Multi-Model Analysis of Select Lester Young Solos

• Martin Norgaard. Descriptions of Improvisational Thinking by Artist-level Jazz Musicians - Seven jazz artists recorded an improvised solo. After completing their improvisations, participants described the thinking processes that led to the realization of their performances

More

1. David Baker (also Jazz Arrangement)
2. Patterns for Jazz (similar to Jerry Bergonzi?)
3. Jamey Aebersold (130 volumes?)
4. Jerry Coker
5. https://www.jeffcoffin.com/ctd
6. David Kahn Feurzeig. Making the Right Mistakes: James P. Johnson, Thelonious Monk, and the Trickster Aesthetic
7. McCoy Tyner https://taju.uniarts.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/6819/302684_Sami_Linna_McCoyTynerModalJazzandtheDominantChord_verkkoversio.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
8. Lester Young https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5097&=&context=doctoral&=
9. Stefan C. Love. “Possible Paths”: Schemata of Phrasing and Melody in Charlie Parker’s Blues
10. https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.20.26.3/mto.20.26.3.miller.html
11. https://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.19.25.3/mto.19.25.3.michaelsen.html