Jazz Progress

Well I’ve managed somehow to find some time to work some more on my jazz playing and am really starting to notice the difference.

I’ve spent some time practising useful scales - particularly diminished and melodic minor modes - and am becoming a bit less wooden in my use of them when improvising. I’ve done some ’round the circle’ playing of motifs and licks in all keys but need to do more of that. I’ve focussed mostly on a couple of tunes as a playground for trying things out. These include ‘My Foolish Heart’ and McCoy Tyner’s ‘Walk Spirit Talk Spirit’.

I still need to work on faster playing; I still stumble over fingering during faster impro passages but have no trouble if I learn a passage. I guess I just need to get used to either thinking ahead a bit more or to working with a range of different fingering.

Off to the Jazzwise Summer School in just over a week. My erstwhile fear has gone, after a few months of practice, and I’m really looking forward to it.

The whole point of going is to write up my experience in Yamaha’s YES magazine, which I edit, and hopefully inspire teachers to invest some time in their own jazz playing. If they do this they will find, as I’ve done, that their teaching will move up a gear (and not just in jazz) and they will get untold measures of personal satisfaction!

This entry was posted on 18/07/2008 at 09:26 am and is filed under Yamaha, Education, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.