You Need to be Practicing These Jazz Fundamentals! (feat. Nathan Graybeal)

Jazz Lesson Videos
Jul 6
3 min read

If you've ever wanted to learn jazz, you've probably run into the same problem a lot of musicians face. It's hard to know where to start. There are so many concepts involved: scales, chords, language, phrasing, time feel, transcription, improvisation. And when you start digging into lessons online or different books, it can feel like you're getting pieces of the puzzle without a clear path that connects everything together. A lot of players end up jumping between random ideas, practicing a scale here, learning a solo there, but without a structured system, it's tough to turn those concepts into real jazz playing.

Today we're going to focus on fundamentals every jazz musician needs, developing a strong time and feel, understanding how harmony actually works, building vocabulary so you can use it in real playing, and learning how to turn scales and chords into musically expressive lines.

To get even deeper into this, Nathan created his course with Jazz Lesson Videos, 30 Day Jazz Foundations, which is designed to give you a clear starting point to actually build better jazz improvisation skills. And we're going to cover a bunch of material from that course today.

And as always, if you want to hear how Nathan plays through anything we cover today, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video, You Need to be Practicing These Jazz Fundamentals! (feat. Nathan Graybeal).

Let’s get playing!

Enclosure exercise

Using enclosures to create lines

Extended chord arpeggios

Using arpeggios over ii-V-I progressions

Enclosure exercise

Let’s check out an enclosure exercise. Essentially, we're going to take every note of any scale. In this case, let's just do the major scale, but feel free to do this on any scale, and you're going to target each note. First, you're going to play one diatonic note above it. So if we targeted the root of Bb, we’re going to play one diatonic note above it, then play your target note, then go down a chromatic step, and then return back to the target.

So essentially, we play the target note twice, we're going to do the same thing for the next scale degree, and there's the exercise. Try doing this in all 12 keys.

Using enclosures to create lines

Let’s talk about using enclosures to create lines in jazz. So, if we were to take a chord progression, like a iii-vi-ii-V, you can take guide tones or any chord tones, really, and practice voice leading them.

Then you can sort of embellish them by adding enclosures to target those guide tones.

Extended chord arpeggios

For this exercise, we're going to play our maj7 chords, but all the way up to their 13th and back down.

We're going to do this in all 12 keys—7, 9, 11, and 13, then back down again.

Using arpeggios over ii-V-I progressions

Let's talk about how to use arpeggios when soloing over a ii-V-I. There are a few ways that you can do it. You can arpeggiate based off the root, so if you have a Dm7, you'd play Dm7 arpeggios. You can also arpeggiate the seventh chord from the 3 of any of the chords. So, if you have a Dm7, you can play Fmaj7 arpeggios. If you have a G7 you can play Bm7b5 arpeggios, and if you have a Cmaj7, you can play Em arpeggios, and these are really cool. They get rid of the root and replace it with the 9, and you can do all kinds of tricks with these arpeggios.

You can play them as straight eighth notes, or you can create an eighth rest and then play an eighth note, and then make the next three notes a triplet. This is what Charlie Parker did a lot—same arpeggio, but slightly different rhythm. So, let's go ahead and improvise together with all this in mind, trying to really stick to some cool arpeggios.