Abstract
Based on Regier’s article, concert and marching band pedagogical strategies might not transfer to the jazz setting. Participating in jazz pedagogical workshops or graduate courses may develop director jazz pedagogy self-efficacy when possible. This “Extending the Discussion” article provides alternative suggestions for band directors to become more familiar with jazz improvisation and phrasing, thereby possibly improving self-efficacy in jazz pedagogy settings.
Regier’s article “A Measure of Self-Efficacy among Oklahoma Secondary Band Directors in Concert, Marching, and Jazz Ensemble Pedagogy” found that concert and marching band pedagogical strategies might not transfer to the jazz setting. This lack of transfer may be especially true when it relates to improvisation and developing a jazz language, as these skills are different from concert or marching band activities. Regier suggested that participation in jazz method courses, ensembles, or field experiences might positively influence band directors’ jazz self-efficacy. This suggestion might be possible for some, but that kind of participation or resource might not be available to all. To extend the discussion about ways to improve band director self-efficacy in the jazz setting, this article presents additional suggestions on how to acquire the skills needed for the jazz setting: knowing the jazz performance tradition, developing jazz phrasing, and improving improvisation skills.
Knowing the Jazz Performance Tradition
Listening to jazz recordings can inform the band director about the performance etiquette that has been in use for every substyle of jazz. Jazz is an improvised music and even though it is true that written arrangements and songs are available, the majority of the tradition is improvised, so recordings are truly the primary source to learn about it. It is also important to listen to recordings for articulation, rhythm, and phrasing. Individuality is a key aspect of jazz music, and jazz musicians often have a particular way to approach articulation, rhythm, and phrasing. After a careful analysis of the recordings, certain aspects might appear to be shared across several musicians, but every recording is going to exemplify a unique approach to these elements that can serve as a palate of style choices for a band director to use in modeling jazz to students.
Every recording exemplifies a way of approaching improvisation, and every solo is documentation of the compositional strategies that musicians have used in the past, and for that reason, listening, transcribing, and analyzing recordings can be especially useful for band directors to gain historical and style context for jazz. A valuable resource addressing the importance of recordings for jazz musicians is Thinking of Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Berliner, 1994).
One of the best resources to get started with jazz recordings is The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz (Williams, 1987), which gathers iconic recordings of classic jazz and includes a booklet with additional notes. In 2010, The Smithsonian added modern jazz and Latin jazz recordings to this collection of recordings and renamed it Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology (Burgess, Hasse, Sheehy, & Sonneborn, 2010). Another standard resource that can serve as a valuable reference is The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings (Cook & Morton, 2008). The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire (Gioia, 2012) is a good resource as the author explores the standard songs in the jazz repertoire and gives suggestions of recordings for each song. On the topic of how to listen to recordings, a few good resources are, Listening to Jazz (Coker, 1986), What to Listen for in Jazz (Kernfeld, 1995), and How to Listen to Jazz (Gioia, 2016).
Developing Jazz Phrasing
Some of the elements that play a major role in developing appropriate jazz phrasing are articulation, rhythm, and use of dynamics. In most cases, these elements are also improvised in jazz. The amount of repertoire that contains articulations or phrasing information written on the part is scarce for small groups. This is one reason why it is important to listen to recordings, transcribe, and analyze the way different musicians articulate and phrase music. There are common generalizations for how jazz articulation should be performed, or how to swing eighth notes in jazz, but there are also idiosyncratic style interpretations that are endemic to each performer. For instance, Charlie Parker’s articulation and swing feel are very different from John Coltrane’s.
For big band, modern composers and arrangers of jazz ensemble charts often include articulations and explanations of swing feel or rhythm patterns that they want drummers to play. Although this can be helpful, sometimes these rhythms are vague generalizations. In that case, recordings can provide a more authentic model for rhythms you could use with your ensemble. The more knowledgeable you are about jazz aural characteristics, the richer your skill will be when rehearsing a jazz ensemble.
A good exercise to get a basic jazz articulation is to perform a chromatic scale in eighth notes articulating all the upbeats. This articulation on the upbeats creates forward motion. The only thing to be careful of with this exercise is to make sure that the downbeats do not get shorter because that makes the swing feel sound jumpy. This exercise can be practiced in swing, triplet feel, or straight eighth notes. Another good exercise to practice articulation is to play a melody of a song multiple times and change the articulation, rhythm, and dynamics you use each time. This fosters stylistic creativity and allows the performer to experiment with different articulations. A variation would be to find recordings of that melody by different artists and play along with those recordings to match their articulation and phrasing.
Improving Improvisation Skill
The topic of improvisation is vast. This article will only give an overview of the basics, but for more in-depth information, the band director can reference resource books that address improvisation. Some helpful books are How to Improvise (Crook, 1991) or “How to Play Jazz and Improvise, Vol. 1” (Aebersold, 1992).
It is important at the start for band directors to understand that improvising does not happen out of thin air; it requires practice and discipline. Having a basic knowledge of harmony, good ears, and a solid concept of rhythm helps develop improvisation skills. In jazz, musicians have always used songs as their vehicles of improvisation; that is, they improvise over the harmony of the song as if it were theme and variations. There are multiple approaches to improvisation but the most common are horizontal or harmonic improvisation, and vertical or melodic improvisation. Jazz musicians do not tend to adhere exclusively to one or the other, although some scholars like to catalog them as such, but instead musicians tend to use a mixture of both approaches.
Harmonic Improvisation
In harmonic improvisation, the performer uses ideas that outline the harmonic progression of the song. To improvise this way, a basic knowledge of harmony is necessary. In jazz, the symbols and notation that are used are different from traditional markings. For that reason, it is good for band directors to have a reference book for harmony. Two standard resources are The Jazz Theory Book (Levine, 1995) or The Jazz Language (Haerle, 1980). In general, the more harmony you know, the more advanced your improvisations can be.
From my personal experience teaching high school students how to improvise, there are some things that seem to work well. One is to simplify the harmonic progression. Some songs can be simplified to have only a handful of chords. Many band directors generalize a chord progression and give the students one or two scales to use. One possible challenge with this approach is that it does not promote harmonic clarity. The second method that can be successful is to practice arpeggios in different ways. Some band directors prefer to start with scales but, from my experience, it is easier to start with three notes instead of the full scale.
To practice this concept, the student can first start with triads (1, 3, 5) throughout the cycle of fourths in all keys, using one chord quality at a time. Then seventh chords (1, 3, 5, 7) can be used and eventually students can add passing notes individually until they can play with the full scale. Students can reorder the notes in the arpeggio, for example, instead of using 1, 3, 5, 7 of every arpeggio, they can start with 3, 1, 7, 5, or any of the 24 permutations available for seventh chords. These can be used as warm ups that can get students thinking about the notes of the arpeggio. The next step is to allow the students to use arpeggios to create music. They can play two or four measures of the same chord using only eighth notes. In this way, the student can choose the order of the notes in the arpeggios as long as they are playing the correct notes, and they can work on their articulation at the same time. Once they master this step, they can introduce silence between their eighth note lines and eventually this exercise will lead them to creating more organic improvisations that outline the harmony of the song.
Melodic Improvisation
In melodic improvisation, the performer uses melodic ideas to improvise over the harmony of a song. From my experience, there are three main approaches that can be used successfully with high school and college students. The first one, as previously mentioned, is to simplify the chord progression to use one or two scales. This makes it easier for the improviser to come up with melodic ideas because the note options have been limited, which is one of the key aspects of learning to improvise. The second and most traditional approach is to build a melodic vocabulary using traditional phrases or licks that come from recordings. This covers two functions. The first one is that it helps develop a sense of tradition because there are phrases that have been used by many different jazz musicians and are part of the vocabulary. The second function is to help the improviser have melodic material ready to use in any situation.
The way to increase vocabulary is by transcribing a small melodic phrase as well as the harmony that goes with it from a recording. Once the structure and context of the phrase are understood, the next step is to transpose it to the rest of the keys. The final step is to use that phrase in a context. The more inexperienced improvisers tend to play a phrase devoid of context, but as they mature, the phrase becomes a part of their contextual vocabulary. A good way to develop improvisation maturity is to create a “sandwich” of transcribed and improvised material. Students can start with their own improvised material leading to the transcribed music material and then end the phrase with their own improvised material.
The last approach to melodic improvisation is to use melodic development in the improvisation. Melodic development consists of using small melodic cells or motives and manipulating them to make the motive develop. There are many different ways that a motive can be developed. Some of them that can be investigated are (a) variation through transposition, (b) rhythmic variation, (c) insertion, (d) motivic expansion, (e) motivic fragmentation, and (f) motivic liquidation. The most basic example would be variation through transposition. A band director can ask the students to start their improvisation with a small melodic cell of three notes. After they play the motive they need to wait and repeat the motive somewhere else. Using perfect transposition makes it more difficult, so it is preferable to start with imperfect transposition; ask the students to, at minimum, adhere to the direction of the intervals. For example, if the first motive is A, C, E played in ascending motion, then the second motive could be C, E, G also in ascending motion. Two resources that might be helpful for the band director to learn more about motivic improvisation are How to Improvise (Crook, 1991) and also in my own research, Motivic and Voice-leading Coherence in the Improvisations of Saxophonist Chris Cheek (Fraile Lainez, 2017).
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.