Jazz theory, improvisation, instruments, listening guides
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 … Read more
Jazz chord progressions are the chord sequences that jazz standards are built from, and a small set of them covers most of the repertoire. The most common is … Read more
Bebop, often shortened to bop, is a style of jazz that took shape in New York in the early 1940s and became the basis of modern jazz after … Read more
Start with three records: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959), the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Time Out (1959) and Getz/Gilberto (1964) by Stan Getz and João Gilberto. All three … Read more
The seven essential jazz scales are the major scale, the Dorian and Mixolydian modes, the melodic minor scale, the blues scale, the bebop dominant scale and the whole-tone … Read more
The main types of jazz, roughly in the order they appeared, are New Orleans jazz (Dixieland), swing, bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, free jazz and fusion, … Read more
The main instruments used in jazz are the saxophone, trumpet and trombone, which play the melodies and most of the solos, and the piano, double bass, drums and … Read more
