Leaving Town Blues - Improvise
Lesson time: (4min 13sec)
Ollie Weston plays the head of 'Leaving Town Blues' then improvises a chorus over the 12-bar form, using the blues scale and a triplet-based swing feel.
Course preview
This lesson is part of the course Exploring Jazz Saxophone: Part 1 - Getting Started
Watch a preview of the full course below.
Lesson transcript:
Intro to Improvisation in 12 Bar Blues
In this lesson, I'm going to introduce improvisation in the context of a 12 bar blues.
Overview
- We've established that we play the head of a tune (the melody).
- There's a 12 bar cycle of chords.
After the head, there's space for improvised solos. This is the bit that people new to jazz feel most intimidated by:
"It's how to improvise and make an authentic sounding solo."
Demonstration Track
I've done a demonstration track with four choruses of a sort of quasi-improvised solo, just using the blues scale.
- The six note magic scale that we met a few lessons back is going to be my entire resource for this solo.
- I'm going to concentrate on:
- Making authentic sounding phrases
- Good triplet-based swing feel
- Demonstrating the sound of the blues in this solo.
1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4.
About the instructor
Since graduating from the Leeds College of Music (BA Hons) and the Guildhall School of Music (Post Graduate Diploma in Performance), Ollie has built a busy and varied career in music. As a saxophonist he has performed in live and studio settings with artists as diverse as Amy Winehouse, Tim Minchin, Bonobo, Frank Turner, the London Jazz Orchestra, the Hackney Colliery Band, the Ambient Jazz Ensemble and the Nelson Riddle Orchestra. He is also the co-leader of the jazz quartet 'Time Is Of The Essence', and composes and arranges material for this and other ensembles. Ollie is active in music education, currently as course leader for the jazz department at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (junior school), where he runs jazz ensembles, big band and theory classes. He has written a series of 'Exploring Jazz' books for Schott Music that are published worldwide and feature on exam syllabuses in the UK. Ollie has also run workshops for Oxford University, Pro Corda Strings and BABSWE, as well as the Guildhall School of Music summer schools. In his Exploring Jazz Saxophone courses, Ollie takes you from getting started right through to soloing confidently over songs and chord sequences, building the improvising skills that put a real jazz player's vocabulary at your fingertips. read more