Jazz Improvisation: A Guide to Styles, Techniques and Practice

Jazz improvisation is the spontaneous invention of melody and accompaniment during a performance, played over a chord progression and song form the band agrees on in advance. An improvised passage by one player is called a solo, one pass through the tune’s form is a chorus, and short alternating solos are called trading fours or eights. It is a learnable skill, built by listening, copying recorded solos and playing with other musicians.

What Jazz Musicians Call Improvising

There is no single technical term. Musicians talk about taking a solo or about “blowing,” old jazz slang for improvising. The words you will hear on a bandstand:

• Solo: one player’s improvised line over the tune’s chords.
• Chorus: one complete pass through the form. Three choruses on a 12-bar blues means 36 bars of improvising.
• Head: the composed melody, played at the start and again at the end.
• Comping: the improvised chords a pianist or guitarist plays behind the soloist.
• Trading fours or eights: “soloists taking turns at improvising, playing for eight (or four, etc.) bars at a time,” in the definition of Columbia University’s jazz glossary.
• Collective improvisation: several players improvising at the same time.
• Scat: a singer improvising on wordless syllables.

Is Jazz Always Improvised?

Not entirely. Most small-group performances follow a head-solos-head plan: the band plays the melody, the soloists improvise over its chords in turn, and the melody returns to close. The melody, and in a big band most of the arrangement, is written or memorized. The bassist improvises a walking line from the chord symbols, the drummer shapes the time and the pianist comps. What stays fixed is the tune’s form and its chord progression, the shared map that lets five people improvise at once without losing each other.

How a Solo Fits the Song Form

Solos follow a repeating cycle of chords, so the first practical skill is knowing where you are in it. Most tunes use one of a few forms.

The 12-bar blues is three four-bar phrases built on the I, IV and V chords; Charlie Parker’s “Now’s the Time” and Sonny Rollins’s “Blue 7” are both blues. The 32-bar AABA form has an eight-bar A section played twice, a contrasting bridge (B) and a final A, as in “Take the ‘A’ Train” and Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” whose chords, known as rhythm changes, underlie tunes such as “Anthropology” and “Oleo.” The 32-bar ABAC form, heard in “All of Me” and “How High the Moon,” returns to its opening phrase halfway through and then ends differently.

Modal tunes slow the harmony down. “So What” is an AABA form with 16 bars of D Dorian, eight of E-flat Dorian and eight more of D Dorian, and Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage” holds each of its suspended chords for four bars.

Styles of Jazz Improvisation: New Orleans to Free Jazz

Collective Improvisation in New Orleans

Early New Orleans bands improvised together. The trumpet or cornet carried the melody or a loose paraphrase of it while the clarinet and trombone improvised around it. Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings for Okeh (1925 to 1928) kept that ensemble style but gave more and more room to Armstrong’s trumpet alone, turning jazz toward the featured soloist.

The Swing-Era Soloist

In the big bands of the 1930s, arrangements took over and improvisation moved into solo spots between written passages. Coleman Hawkins’s “Body and Soul,” recorded for Bluebird on October 11, 1939, showed how far a soloist could go: Hawkins only hints at the melody, and his two choruses of improvisation make up almost the whole record. It became his biggest hit and entered the National Recording Registry in 2004. Lester Young, in Count Basie’s band, offered the alternative: a relaxed, lighter tone and long, floating lines.

Bebop: Running the Changes

In the 1940s Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and their circle built solos from the scales and arpeggios of each chord, at fast tempos over busier harmony, which players call running the changes. Parker later recalled that while working over “Cherokee” he found that “by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes,” he could play what he had been hearing. His “Ko-Ko,” recorded for Savoy on November 26, 1945, is built on the changes of “Cherokee” and shows bebop improvisation at full speed.

Modal Improvisation

For Kind of Blue (Columbia, 1959), Miles Davis gave his sextet sketches of scales and melody lines instead of full chord progressions, so the soloists improvised over one scale for many bars at a time. That approach, explained in our article on how modal jazz works, puts melody and space ahead of chord-by-chord playing. John Coltrane, on the same record, was also developing the rapid runs Ira Gitler called “sheets of sound” in his 1958 liner notes for Soultrane, and in May 1959 he recorded “Giant Steps,” whose chords cycle through three keys a major third apart: B, G and E-flat.

Free Improvisation

Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, recorded in December 1960 and released by Atlantic in 1961, dropped the fixed chord progression. Two quartets, one in each stereo channel, improvise for about 37 minutes with only brief composed fanfares between solos, so the players’ interaction creates the structure.

Core Jazz Improvisation Techniques

Guide Tones

The third and seventh of a chord define its quality. On Cmaj7 they are E and B; on C7 the seventh drops to B-flat. A guide-tone line connects those notes from chord to chord with the smallest possible moves, giving you a melodic skeleton that follows the harmony. Write one for a tune you know, play it over a backing track, then start decorating it.

Approach Notes and Enclosures

A chromatic approach note sits a half step above or below a target chord tone and resolves into it. An enclosure surrounds the target from both sides before landing, for example the scale step above followed by the half step below; the surrounding notes can be chromatic, diatonic or both. Enclosures were at their height in bebop, and Charlie Parker used them constantly. Practice them slowly on the tones of one chord before using them on a tune.

Motif Development

A motif is a short figure that a soloist states and then varies: moved to other pitches, turned upside down, stretched out or compressed in rhythm. The standard example is Sonny Rollins’s “Blue 7” from Saxophone Colossus (Prestige, 1957), a blues on which Rollins keeps reworking fragments of the theme. Gunther Schuller’s essay “Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Thematic Improvisation”, in the first issue of The Jazz Review (November 1958), analyzes the solo bar by bar.

Rhythmic Displacement and Call and Response

Take a phrase you already know and start it an eighth note or a full beat later. The notes stay the same, but their relation to the beat changes, which creates tension without new harmony. Call and response, which came into jazz from African and African American traditions such as work songs, works at every level: a soloist answers his or her own phrases, the rhythm section answers the soloist, and players trading fours answer each other.

Expressive Tone: Bends, Scoops, Smears and Growls

Improvising is also about how each note sounds. Horn players and singers bend a pitch down and back up, scoop up into a note from below, smear away from it with a rough slide, and let notes drop off (falls) or rise (doits) at the end. Shakes, a fast lip trill on brass, and vibrato put motion into a held note. Growling, vocalizing into the instrument while playing, adds a gritty edge: trumpeter Bubber Miley and trombonist Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton made it, with plunger mutes, part of Duke Ellington’s early “jungle” sound.

Scales for Jazz Improvisation

Scales tell you which notes fit a chord; your ear decides what to play. The table pairs common chord types with the scale most often taught for each, spelled from C. Our guide to the main jazz scales covers them in more depth.

The modes in the first three rows are a major scale started from different degrees: C Dorian has the same notes as B-flat major, C Mixolydian the same as F major. The minor pentatonic (1, flat 3, 4, 5, flat 7) is the most forgiving starting point, since it works over minor chords and, with a bluesy edge, over the dominant chords of a blues.

The bebop scales add one chromatic passing tone: between the flat seventh and the root in the dominant bebop scale, and between the fifth and sixth in the major bebop scale. With eight notes, the chord tones fall on the beats when you run the scale in eighth notes; the educator David Baker gave them their name. Diminished scales are symmetrical, so only three different ones exist, and those three cover all twelve keys.

Improvising on Piano, Guitar and Voice

Piano. A pianist usually comps in the left hand with shell voicings built on the root, third and seventh while the right hand plays single-note lines. Bill Evans’s trio on Waltz for Debby (Riverside, 1962), recorded live at the Village Vanguard in 1961, and Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage (Blue Note, 1965) are good listening; our list of the great jazz pianists has more.

Guitar. Guitarists move between single-note lines, phrased like a horn, and chord melody, where melody and harmony sound together. Wes Montgomery’s thumb-picked octaves on The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery (Riverside, 1960) and Joe Pass’s unaccompanied Virtuoso (Pablo, 1973), playing melody, chords and bass lines at once, show the two ends of that range.

Voice. Scat treats the voice as a horn. Louis Armstrong did not invent it, but his 1926 Okeh recording of “Heebie Jeebies” made it famous; Armstrong, Kid Ory and Johnny St. Cyr all said he dropped his lyric sheet during the session and scatted to cover. Ella Fitzgerald’s Ella in Berlin (Verve, 1960) has a long scat on “How High the Moon” and new lyrics improvised on “Mack the Knife” after she forgot the words, and it won her two Grammy Awards.

How to Learn Jazz Improvisation

1. Start with the blues and a few standards. Learn a 12-bar blues and a handful of easy jazz standards by ear, melody first, and improvise on them with the minor pentatonic and simple guide-tone lines.
2. Listen every day. Kind of Blue, Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else (Blue Note, 1958) with Miles Davis, and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (Impulse!, 1965) make a good first set; our ranking of the best jazz albums ever recorded has more.
3. Transcribe. Take four to eight bars of a solo, slow them down with software such as Transcribe! or Amazing Slow Downer, sing the phrase until every pitch and rhythm is right, play it, then move it to other keys. Nothing builds vocabulary as directly.
4. Add bebop language. Practice enclosures, approach notes and the bebop scales, and learn rhythm changes in several keys.
5. Play with people. Jamey Aebersold’s play-along series, begun in 1967, runs to more than 130 volumes (Volume 1, How to Play Jazz and Improvise, is the usual starting point), and the iReal Pro app plays a backing band from chord charts you can transpose. Neither replaces a jam session, where you learn to listen and respond in real time. Record yourself and listen back.
6. Take on harder material. Modal tunes, “Giant Steps,” which changes key roughly every two beats, and free playing come after the basics.

Books and Courses on Jazz Improvisation

Mark Levine’s The Jazz Theory Book (Sher Music, 1995) is a staple reference for scales, chords and reharmonization. David Baker’s Jazz Improvisation: A Comprehensive Method for All Musicians builds the basics step by step, and Jerry Coker’s Patterns for Jazz supplies patterns to drill in every key. Hal Crook’s How to Improvise (1991) is organized around what, how and when to play. Bert Ligon’s Connecting Chords with Linear Harmony (1996) draws its principles from lines in recorded solos. For video, Herbie Hancock Teaches Jazz on MasterClass has 25 lessons, and Gary Burton’s Jazz Improvisation course from Berklee College of Music can be audited for free on Coursera.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is jazz improvisation called?

An improvised passage by one musician is a solo, and each pass through the tune’s form during it is a chorus. Musicians also call improvising “blowing.” Alternating short solos of four or eight bars is trading fours or eights, several players improvising at once is collective improvisation, and a singer improvising on wordless syllables is scatting.

Is jazz music improvised?

Partly. A typical performance opens and closes with the composed melody, called the head, and the solos in between are improvised over the tune’s chord progression. The bass line, drums and comping are usually improvised too.

What is collective improvisation in jazz?

It means several musicians improvising at the same time instead of taking turns. It was the basic texture of early New Orleans jazz, with the trumpet or cornet leading and the clarinet and trombone improvising around it, and Ornette Coleman revived it in free jazz on his 1961 album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation.

How long does it take to learn jazz improvisation?

There is no fixed timeline. With regular practice, simple solos over a blues can come within months, while playing standards at tempo and finding a personal sound take years of transcribing, practicing and playing with other musicians.