Reliable Method to Boost Your Jazz Vocabulary

Getting new vocabulary into your playing can be a struggle. In Nathan’s case, he was transcribing lots of solos, practicing his ii-V-I lines, and I knew all the theory, but when it came time to actually improvise, he felt like his solos were a bunch of chord scales and chord tones. 

Lately, he’s been doing some clinics in schools around the country, and a lot of students come up to him with similar issues. Today, we’re going to share a practice method that we feel really solves this problem. After a while of this practice, you will be playing the vocabulary that your heroes are playing, but also truly improvising all the material that you see here. 

The content for today comes from our brand new resource we just launched here at Jazz Lesson Videos, entitled The Jazz Language Method Book. In it, we go over a step by step method to integrate important jazz vocabulary into your playing. You’ll find several dozen examples of jazz language in major, dominant, Phrygian dominant, and melodic minor, as well as full transcriptions from famous solos from Cannonball Adderley, Charlie Parker and Sonny Stitt. 

And if you want to see how Nathan tackles anything we talk about today, be sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video, “Reliable Method to Boost Your Jazz Vocabulary.”

Let’s get playing!

Contents

Establishing phrases

String them together

Master phrase in all 12 keys

Isolate difficult sections of a tune

Bank of lines for other scales

Establishing phrases

So the first step of this method is to establish seven different phrases for each of these four scales: major, dominant, phrygian dominant, and melodic minor. For today, let's do dominant scales—dominant vocabulary, particularly mixolydian, is the most versatile language in jazz. 

Mixolydian based dominant phrases can actually work on seven different kinds of chords, which are all displayed in section two of the Jazz Language Method Book. We’ll look more at how this works later, but for now, establish seven different dominant phrases. You want each of these phrases to just be one measure long, entirely filled up with 8 eighth notes. These fully eighth note lines will be easy to rhythmically embellish later. 

Here's an example of an eighth note dominant phrase being rhythmically embellished in various different ways.

Page 22 of the Jazz Language Method book goes into this a little deeper. You'll also want each of these phrases to start on a different diatonic scale degree. That way, you'll be left with a bank of seven phrases that start on all seven scale degrees. This will allow you to connect these in endless possibilities, which we'll show you a little bit later. You'll also want these to be diatonic to the mixolydian scale—passing tones and chromatic approach tones are fine, but if you have altered tensions, these will greatly restrict your ability to turn these into fun substitutions later. 

So with that being said, how do you actually establish seven different phrases? In the Jazz Language Method book, we've included three must-know jazz transcriptions from Bird, Cannonball, and Sonny Stitt, and we've extracted several dozen examples of vocabulary from them for you. Of course, you could also do this from any transcription that you like. You could even write out your own lines, but you might run the risk of writing things that are not rooted in jazz vocabulary, so we recommend starting here before venturing on to your own lines. 

Sometimes you might see phrases that you really like, but they’re not entirely eighth notes, such as measure 26 of Stitt’s solo on the tune “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” In these cases, you could creatively massage it down to eighth notes to establish a fully eighth note dominant line that starts on the second scale, degree. Once you've established your seven dominant lines that start from every scale degree, we definitely recommend writing them in the same key, one after the other, for maximum convenience. 

Here are the seven that we chose for the book, but of course, the possibilities are endless.

String them together

Once you've got your seven dominant lines, then it's time to really have some fun. One thing you can do is string them together in countless ways over one chord vamps, and you'll want to try to voice lead them into each other.

For example, our dominant phrase here that starts on the 2 and ends on an E flat. So the next line could start on the nearest note up, which is F, or the nearest note down, which is D flat. Let's go with D flat.

Now we'll play our line that starts here from the b7. And we do encounter a problem here, this second half is getting a bit low on our instrument. If our next phrase were to continue to descend, then we’re going to run completely out of range.

So let's do what we call “octave displacement.” We're going to take this A-flat and the notes after it and move it up an octave. 

Now, we'll connect it to the phrase that starts on 3 and connect that to the phrase that starts on 4. 

Nathan recommends starting this process by writing your lines out first. Here are two more examples of this found on page 30 of the Jazz Language Method book.

Once you've written a few out, feel free to memorize them and get them up to a blazing speed, so that you have some nice original lines that you can bust out and shred with later. But for the long term, definitely practice stringing these together at a slow tempo without writing anything down. After a few weeks, you should find a lot of new melodic content within your improvisation. 

Master phrase in all 12 keys

The third thing you can do is take just a single one of these phrases and master it in all 12 keys. For this example, we'll choose the second dominant line.

After that's feeling really solid, then go ahead and take any tune you’re working on and fit that phrase into every single spot it works. Section three of the resource dives deeply into all of the various ways that you can do this. Let's look at how this sounds using this phrase over the tune “Stablemates” by Benny Golson. 

This is not only going to strengthen your flexibility with this vocabulary, but it's also going to deepen your internalization of the tune that you're working on. 

Isolate difficult sections of a tune

Another way to practice your seven lines of vocabulary is to isolate and practice difficult sections of a tune. For example, measures 27 and 28 of “Autumn Leaves” can trip a lot of people up. You can isolate these chords and break them down. All these chords can be interpreted with dominant material. 

This Gm7 can be diatonically substituted for a C7, as they are a ii-V to each other. This Gb7 is already dominant. This Fm7 can be thought of as a ii7, so let's substitute it again for the V7, which would be Bb7. In this case, this E7 is already dominant, and Am7b5 is technically a rootless F9. So F dominant material will work great over it. And look at that! All of these chords can contain our dominant language. 

Start by practicing this at half speed, so that we'll be able to fit 8 sixteenth notes. Here's our dominant line that starts on the root, which connects perfectly to the Gb7’s 3. We'll play the third dominant phrase in Gb, this connects well to the 9 of Bb7. Let's play the dominant phrase that starts on the 2 and just keep going until we get a complete line. This line is found in section seven of the resource, where we discuss potential practice techniques like this one. Let's look at this over the chord progression.

After you've done a few rounds of exploration like this, you can actually reduce these down by just taking four note fragments of your phrases to create something a little more simple.

And again, after some exploration with writing this stuff down, and then also practicing it without writing it down, you should find yourself a lot more comfortable improvising within these trickier chord progressions. 

Bank of lines for other scales

Everything we've covered so far was just for mixolydian/dominant language. But don't forget, you can create a bank of seven lines for any other scale as well, which we have in sections three through six of the resource. Maj7 vocabulary is also going to work great on iii7 chords and on vi7 chords. Melodic minor lines are going to work over a ton of different chords, as shown in section two, so you can make soloing on any tune really simple with these concepts, or a little more complex with some fun experimentation. 

Let's use “Stella by Starlight” as an example. 

In the changes for this, we have Em7b5. We could think E locrian, or we could just play our C7 language. For the next chord, A7b9, let's make it altered, which means we need to use our B-flat melodic minor language. We can reduce this next large ii-V down to just an F7. The next long ii-V, we’re reduce to Bb7. Then on this Ebmaj7, we'll place Eb major material and then switch to Eb melodic minor material to channel the sound of this Ab7 lydian dominant. 

After establishing all the rest of the sounds we wanted to use, we provided this etude in section seven of the resource, as well as several other practicing suggestions. 

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That’s all for today, but if you want to dive even deeper on this concept, make sure to check out our resource, The Jazz Language Method Book, plus you can see how Nathan plays through these examples in our accompanying YouTube video, “Reliable Method to Boost Your Jazz Vocabulary.”

We’ll see you next time!