What Professional Jazz Musicians Think About While Improvising

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[Blackhatsax]

Morning Geoff, as usual clear and to the point. You answer so many hidden questions and are indeed a valuable recourse for all sax players. Keep up the great work.

[samarkito]

I would say that jazz is an idiom and music is a language. But yeah, you're absolutely correct (and I hope I can get to that level of fluidity someday).

[Davidkaisermusic]

What do you ask for when getting your hair cut?

[AaronBennettGuitar]

I don't even play sax and you've become one of my favourite YouTubers, find everything you say really helpful and interesting! Any videos on how to improve composition, more specifically writing melodic lines over complex chord progressions? Thanks

[DaveRaspberry]

I'm a new learner. I often struggle with getting lost in the form. and be thinking too much about the form of the song. thoughts like "oh here comes the bridge. be careful don't get lost." "don't let the off beat drum fills get you lost" and so on. i know part of it is the experience and familiarity with the tune. But what's your advise for getting good at improvising at this stage?

[Musicaadorecchio]

this is not much of help, saying that you have nothing to think of when improvising. To be able to speech is a long process that begins when we are kids and expand when we grow up. Only when we are adults we do have this ability to organise a speech without too much thinking of it. The same in music. We need to have a good grasp of the language before being able to improvise fluently. This means we need to be already good musicians. For the rest of us, who struggle to becoming good at it, the-nothing-to-think-of is discouraging. We need a path to follow, some before-hand organisazion, intense studying before reaching the no-think level.

[Fairytale_school]

So I don't need to think about the chord name, what note I am playing??

[tylerm]

what if Im playing over cord progression, wouldint I have to think of the cords that im playing over?

[guidemeChrist]

It's really helpful to make analogies between musical improvisation and speaking a language, but whenever I hear someone say "music is a language" the linguistics-nerd in me screams agony

[corderorolando]

You'd have a real hard time tying to think about what kinds of options you have to improvise over the chord progression. In order to not think about all the options you have inside a V7 chord (and theyre a bunch), you'd have to internalize everything through rigorous practice. there's no other way to put it. So, keep on jazzin'.

[oliversmedley]

I'm a classical trombone player and I want to play jazz but I'm struggling so much to get into improvising, what can I do 😭 I'm listening lots but I still feel completely lost when it comes to playing over changes