Current Issue | Home | Back Issues | Other Mel Bay Sites | Purchase Mandolin Products
Jazz Mandology | Irish Tenor Banjo for Mandolin Players | What's In Your Case?
Interview with Durl Jones | Sequences | Over the Waterfall

Jazz Mandology

Chicken "Nuggets": Afraid to improvise?…Don't be!

by Ted Eschliman

But I can't improvise…
I've heard it way too many times, "I just wasn't cut out for improvisation," or "I don't know how to improvise!"

Well, I've got one word for you on how to do this:

"Steal!"

No, seriously…
This is the essence of creativity: borrowing! King Solomon said it (and no doubt he wasn't even the first), "There's nothing new under the sun," and music "creation" is no exception.

This is going to sound crazy coming from someone who thrives on music theory and analysis, but rules of music theory are not the answer to improvising, at least not the sole solution.

Think baseball…
Imagine it's the first time you've ever been handed a bat and you have no idea how the game is played... You step out onto the ball diamond and someone starts explaining all the rules of the game. You have three attempt to hit the ball, but they have to be pitched within a zone between the batter's knees and shoulders, and if not, you have four pitches outside this zone, or you take the base. If you hit the ball, you can't take the base if the ball is caught and if not you still have to beat the ball to the first baseman's mitt. Or he can touch you with the ball and you're out. Now, someone explains the tactics of stealing bases, and how many "outs" there are in the 9 innings, unless there's a tie, and keep in mind you've never played the game before…

Wait a minute, that's not how you were taught the rules! You just went out as a kid and started playing. Maybe you didn't know what you were doing, but the rules kind of came up AS you were playing. Not before.

Why can't jazz improvisation be like this? Go out and play, and if you violate the "rules," you just adjust as you go along. No, you don't throw them out, but you don't let them freeze the process of playing. You just "Do it!"

"Chicken" Nuggets.
Let's take an elementary approach and just take a simple musical theme or motif. One of my favorite jazz tunes is Charlie Parker's "Scrapple from the Apple." We're just going to take the opening measure and a half and create a little mischief from it. I'm going to call this a "Chicken Nugget," because it's a small, bite-sized piece that will allow you to fearlessly start creating bigger ideas, based on a manageable group of notes.

The first two measures might be familiar to you. It's very appealing melodically, a mini roller coaster of motion, and some tantalizing chromatic detours that ultimately resolve. This is just a basic but juicy idea we can imitate, dissect, and build around.

The second version is simply the same phrase transposed up a fourth. If the chord relationship were the same in a song as they are here, a simple 'ii V7' or dominant preparation/dominant function (oops! I said we weren't going to worry about rules, just yet…), you could copy note for note and move it up in its entirety.

Time for a little Blues.
Let's take a specific approach, and apply this to a 12 bar blues pattern in F. Since the first two measures are the chords F7 and Bb7, the notes will need a little tweaking, but we can still come up with a pattern that resembles our "nugget."

The first two measures of the above do this. They fit nicely, but we want to begin to dissect the "coolness" of this and initiate the creative process. The second set of two measures is still the beginning of our blues pattern, but we are going to only use the first Nugget measure and fit it to the (second measure) Bb7 chord.

Already, we have something that works but injects rhythmic and harmonic variety. Let the creative juices roll…

Break it down further: just take the first three notes for the next set. Remember, we haven't left the first two measures of our blues pattern, but we've added another fresh alternative to the F7 and Bb7 chords. We take the same approach by extracting the last two notes of the original Charlie Parker motif, and we have even more fun to work with.

Now those of you who have been improvising for years might look at this and say, this is pretty elementary stuff. "What am I supposed to get out of all this?"

Here is where the beauty of art and creativity come in. The balance between the expected and the unexpected is the essence of the tantalizing "whole" of art. The ear strongly desires the familiar for something to hang on to, but at the same time, wants a "journey," a detour.

Don't "blow" it…
It's not about just blowing notes. We've started the creative process by taking a seed of music, planted it in to the good soil of a chord progression, and now we're watering it and trimming it as it grows. We take the intellect of "rules" most certainly, but we propel our creativity by stretching the motif, modifying it to fit the rules, just a tweak at a time.

You can do this with others of your favorite "licks" or patterns. Make them your starting point and build, rather than taking academic scales, arpeggios, or chord patterns. You'll find the result far less clinical or sterile. Your music will come alive much faster.

Grand theft?
Is this "stealing?" Hardly, musicians have done this all along. The big secret is when you do this enough, you begin to develop your own ideas, your own signature nuggets.

I'm going to leave you with a simple blues tune. Notice the deviation from the simple motif, and as you improvise through the changes on your own, don't be afraid to start too elementary in your deviations. Whole notes and half notes are music, too. Let your ear guide you; if the note doesn't fit the chord, it's only a half step away from the right note, so resolve it.

Is improvising scary?

Nah…

For those of you beginning/intermediate players, I hope this is a helpful, un-intimidating approach. For you more advanced, you are probably already doing this, but understanding thematic consistency is still crucial in improvisation. Your ideas will be much more complex, your "borrowing" more sophisticated, of course. Whether conscious or not, this is a fertile approach to making some beautiful music.

Thanks for all the questions and comments. Keep me posted with your thoughts at ted@jazzmando.com, and check out my website, www.jazzmando.com. Also, there is a heap of information in the back issues button. If you're new around here be sure to go back and click 'em up, too!