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The Mental Process of Learning Improvisation

Joe Riposo | May 2017



    I am frequently asked whether jazz improvisation can be taught. Students, teachers, and educators attending my clinics and workshops are surprised at my response. Because I am a jazz player, teacher, educator, and administrator people expect me to say yes, jazz improvisation can be taught. Although jazz improvisation is an art form that deals with theory like all subjects learned in schools and colleges, leading people to think that jazz improvisation can be taught, my answer is no. Jazz improvisation cannot be taught. However, jazz improvisation can be learned.
    There is a difference between teaching and learning. Learning is not always a direct result of teaching; there are times when learning takes place in spite of teaching. When jazz musicians improvise, they play something new and unknown, not something practiced and learned. Something known and practiced is not improvisation. How to teach students to play what they do not know is an interesting concept to explore. This requires looking into how one learns to play music and improvise jazz.

Three Levels of Learning

    Jazz teachers should study hemisphericity, which is how the brain processes information and how to beam information to the various parts of the brain to produce desired results. Learning takes place through participating in an experience, and a teacher is a facilitator of knowledge. The aim, then, is to expose students to experiences that allow learning to take place. This happens on three basic levels.

Developing Knowledge of a Subject
    At the risk of being too simplistic, teachers should not overlook providing students with all the facts needed to learn to playing jazz. This includes such topics as scales, chord formation, and harmonic importance in developing a melodic line. The part of the brain where all these facts are stored does not do anything with this information, but it is important to have these musical facts available to be used when needed.

Developing an Understanding of Knowledge
    Give students opportunities to conceptualize the facts they have stored. I call this converting isolated, unrelated facts into usable, meaningful knowledge. As an example, have students play a C major scale, starting on C, over a C major chord. Then have them play the notes of a C scale, starting on D, over a Dm7 chord. Finally, they should play the notes of a C scale, starting on G, over a G7 chord. This will get students to conceptualize that all three chords share the same row of notes. At this point, explain that the three chords make up a key center. Students should then realize that these chords are all related. For wind players who can only play one note at a time, this is an important concept to understand.

Application of Knowledge
    People do not practice to learn, they practice to perfect what has been learned; this is the difference between knowing and doing. During this level of learning the teacher should structure an experience from which students can apply what have been learned. To emphasize the concept of all three chords being related and sharing the same key center, have students play up and down on the notes of a C Major scale while the three chords (Dm7, G7, and C major 7) are played. This gives students the opportunity to hear the sounds as they relate to the three different qualities of chords.

The Results

    The experiences we give students must include all three basic levels of learning. Learning jazz improvisation is a participatory experience. By involving students in this they will develop a sound bank in their brain, which will allow students to access what sounds are needed to improvise a jazz line that they hear in the mind.

Teaching Versus Learning
    Teaching is providing facts for students, which we sometimes call rote teaching. A student may recite these facts but may not be able to use them or they may use them to develop a mechanical approach of applying these facts.
    Learning can be described as being able to relate facts to prior learning and applying them in a meaningful way in making musical decisions. In the above example, students demonstrate learning by playing through the chords (Dm7, G7, and C Major 7) and not up and down on each separate chord. This gives the melodic line direction and forward motion and makes it sound more mature.

Playing an Instrument Versus Playing Music

    In teaching a student to play an instrument we should never lose sight of the fact that our ultimate goal should be for students to learn to use the instrument to play music. Teaching a student to play an instrument can often be a mechanical process, and teachers some times overemphasize the need to play faster, articulate cleanly, or develop an even scale line at the expense of using these skills to make music. It would be better to develop these skills to produce an uptempo, clean musical phrase.
    Some students can read music and make a physical response (fingering the instrument) to play what is seen. If a student plays a written musical line based on the theory and facts stored in the brain he is not playing what is heard in his mind and will hear the line after it comes out of his instrument. It is my notion that a student needs to learn to hear a musical line in his mind and respond by playing what is heard. A player who can hear music first in his mind and trigger the physical response of playing an instrument to make what he hears in his mind audible will be able to produce a meaningful jazz phrase.
    To make a comparison, when conversing with a friend what is said is what is heard in the mind just before it is pronounced. One does not mechanically put all the nouns, verbs, and adjectives together to manufacture a sentence to convey thought. Where the comparison falls short is that in our language a word has a fixed meaning, but in music a note does not; a note only takes on meaning when it is associated with other notes. This is why it is important to expose students to the three levels of learning.

Producing a Mental Response

    The mental process is important. The right side of the brain is connected to the left side of the brain by a strand of fibers called the corpus callosum. This thick bundle of nerves allows information to be transmitted between the brain’s hemispheres. Using information stored on the left side of the brain creatively, a right-brain activity, is called completing a mental cognitive shift.

    To learn how to use and feel this mental cognitive shift, have students play the appropriate arpeggio on each chord in a chord progression of Dm7-G7-Cmaj7. Now ask students to find and play all the common tones of each chord and play them while you play the progression on a piano. Next have the student play any scale notes of the Dm7 chord and aim the line toward the common tone with the G7. Repeat the process of playing any notes of the G7 scale and aiming for the common tone with the Cmaj7 chord. This is how a phrase is born. For this to happen, the student needed to access the appropriate notes stored in the left part of the brain and play by ear with them.
    Another good exercise is for the teacher to play a short, simple jazz line from printed music and ask the student to find the notes heard and then echo what was played. After the student matches what you played, show him how it looks in print. Do this often until the student can accomplish this task with ease. This makes students able to associate sounds with the fingerings rather than the visual with the fingering. All the veteran jazz players copied solos from recordings and developed their ability to play what they heard. Copying solos from recordings also helps a young jazz player develop the part of the brain that stores sounds to be used when needed. This exercise will also give students  the ability to see with their ear and hear with their eyes, which means when a phrase is heard, they will be able to see the notation, and when a phrase is seen, they will be able to hear it.
    In a traditional pedagogical approach to teaching music, a student is given a printed page of notes. Next, we label the visual (i.e. this chord is called C7). We then allow students to artificially measure the duration of a note by tapping their feet. This is follower by identifying the fingering that will produce the sound of the note or chord printed on the page. Scrutiny shows that a student who goes through this will learn to make a physical response to what is seen. This has little to do with making music.
    What is needed to learn music and improvise jazz is a mental response, not just the physiological response. I am not suggesting we do away with traditional teaching techniques that give students all the technical information needed, but we must add the mental process so students can turn technical concepts of music into useable connecting knowledge.

Creating Mature Jazz Lines
    Allowing a student to learn how to access all the technical material stored in the brain by this mental cognitive shift will make the information more useable in creating a mature jazz line. The student now can understand and play through chord progressions rather than simply moving up and down the scale on each individual chord. The approach outlined in the example below is what happens when students think of harmonic structure as unrelated sounds. Each chord is heard separately; this mind set would produce a jazz lick or scale on each chord.

    Conceptualization of the harmonic structure shows that chords are related. For example, Dm7, G7, and Cmaj7 are all related through the key of C major. The next step is to figure out which notes are the most important for conveying the harmony. Have a student play each note of a scale over that key’s tonic triad and then rate the sound of each note with the chord on a scale of 0-10. Students should discover that some notes sound better with the chord than others.

    To make good use this information when improvising, students should play the third and seventh of the chords to convey strong harmonic tonality of a chord. In the example below, the F conveys the minor quality of the Dm7 chord, and the C both conveys the chord’s quality and leads into the B, the third of the next chord. The pattern continues through the Cmaj7 chord.

    The seventh and third of the chord become the peak tones of the line. Other notes can be inserted to make the line more interesting but these notes will remain as the peak tones of the line, giving it harmonic focus and good line direction.

    To take the facts learned and create with them, ask students to sing a lick of just a few notes. Students will say they cannot sing. This should not be a concern because as students develop confidence, they will play the pitches heard in the mind and not the pitch sung. A lack of vocal training does not affect the ability to hear correct pitches in the mind.

    Now ask them to play the same lick on their instrument. This may be difficult at first, but when students develop confidence it will become easier. Each time the length of the lick sung should be extended.

    This exercise should be repeated often until students play the notes sung with a great degree of accuracy and become confident with a longer phrase.
    The second phase of this exercise is to have students sing a jazz phrase and, when playing it on the instrument, ask them to extend the phrase by adding a few more notes or measures. This will help make a connection between brain and instrument. The goal here is to develop students who can play a phrase heard in the mind without having to sing it first.

    Now have the student play the line and add  notes to the end.

    The same objective can be accomplished by having a student repeat what the teacher plays. Play a short lick and have a student mirror it back to you.

Transposing
    Another exercise that will help students become more comfortable manipulating what they know is to sing a phrase but play it back on the instrument in a different key. This can eventually be expanded to having students play tunes they know in all keys without a printed page. Have them learn to hear a tune in different keys and play them in the keys heard. Students should first sing the tune in the new key and then play it.
    These are only a few exercises that will help students learn to play what is heard in the mind and not try to theoretically formulate ideas.

Summary
    It is this mental process that allows a student to apply knowledge learned. Learning music is a participatory experience; we learn by doing. The brain is quick to discard what it does not like but will store what sounds good for future use; this is how a student finds and hears new and good sounds. The information stored will be used and connected to new additional information. Music is created in the brain, not on an instrument. The instrument allows one to amplify what is heard in the mind so it can be shared with fellow performers and audience members.