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Re: Beginning Jazz

Author: redwine
Date: 2008-01-23 19:28

Hello Travis,

Good luck! What you are doing sounds like an excellent foundation to achieving your goals.

I would suggest some lessons with a local jazz clarinetist. Where do you live? Maybe someone here on the board can recommend someone in your area.

I like what you're doing in the way of just playing the melody during a solo. Next, you should venture away from the melody ever so slightly. Replace a note here or there with another chord tone. Add some ornamentation. Then, make something up completely. Dixieland is a bit limiting, harmonically speaking, which is good and bad. The good thing about it is that there are only a few notes that you have to know within a chord that will sound good. The bad thing is that there are only a few notes within a chord that sound good, so when you play one that is not good, it really sticks out.

One of the hardest things for a beginning soloist to master is rhythm. My theory is that when one starts to improvise, their fundamentals get tossed aside, probably from sheer fear. A great exercise is to have your band (I think it's great that you have a band of live people to practice with--Aebersold records are great too, but live people are always better!) play an accompaniment blues, for instance. Pick a note (I'll recommend the 5th of the tonic chord, because that will sound acceptable in every chord of the blues progression). Play only that note and take a couple choruses of solos. Try to make the rhythm fit in perfectly and not sound "hokey". If you can do this, you are well on your way to being able to "wiggle your fingers" while doing this.

Another fundamental to master is good tone. My theory as to why clarinets fell out of favor in jazz, for the most part, is because a lot of clarinetists had bad tones that noone wanted to listen to. There are a lot of clarinetists that sound like saxophonists trying to play clarinet. Even if you are a saxophonist first, you should try to sound like a clarinetist when playing the clarinet. Other people are successful doing it differently, but I use the same set-up (reed, mouthpiece, clarinet) for classical and for jazz as well.

You're already listening to great clarinetists to emulate. Perhaps seriously listen to other instrumentalists as well for other ideas.

Have fun! We play music, we don't work music (oh, sure, there's a lot of work in music to get good, but even that should be fun).

Again, good luck and if I can be of any further assistance, I am most happy to.

Ben Redwine, DMA
owner, RJ Music Group
Assistant Professor, The Catholic University of America
Selmer Paris artist
www.rjmusicgroup.com
www.redwinejazz.com
www.reedwizard.com

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