LearnJazzPiano.com archives: connecting lines

james3 -- 01/11/2007, 09:32:11 -- #32293

Hey all,       What do you guys do to practice connecting lines?  How do you work on connecting lines? Thanks, James

Scot -- 01/11/2007, 09:44:08 -- #32293

Work on scales and arpeggios. Also, work on playing scales and arpeggios over tunes without stopping between chord changes. This is just an exercise.  First time through the tune play quarter note scales without stopping. Just change the scale every time the chord changes.  Same with arpeggios.  Then put them together as the final exercise. Once you can do that without any problems with a tune, then do it with eight notes, then with triplets.  Once you can go around a tune like this, it should be no problem while you're playing to connect lines. The thing is, don't think of it as connecting lines in the first place!  Your improvisation is a composition, you should be thinking about melody and rhythm.  Practice changing a few notes in the melody of a tune when improvising, practice playing every other note in a song during your solo, there are so many things you can work on, choose one thing and work on it for two weeks.  nothing else, just that one thing.   See, the one thing that great players have over the rest of us mortals is that they are very dedicated to focusing on a single problem. I have been lucky enough to spend a lot of time chatting with Benny Greene the last couple of summers. Cool guy, kind of edgy, very nice and very serious about music.  Back when he put a lot of practice time in, when he found something he couldn't do, say a passage in a bebop head, he would take that passage and work on it for the rest of the day, very slow. He would play the passage over and over again, learn it with both hands, all keys, make exercises out of it, always very very slowly, maddingly slow actually, and he would work on this little thing for hours and hours.   Most of us would work on it for five minutes then move on.  Then again, most of us are not called when someone needs a pianist at the Blue Note, and Benny Greene is. Also, we all know what good music sounds like.  So record your lines.  Listen to them.  Analyze what you don't like about them, then fix the problem. Recording your own playing is such an easy thing, yet so few people do it. Why?  If we all recorded our practice sessions and listened to them, we would probably all be monster players.

7 -- 01/12/2007, 19:57:04 -- #32293

What do you guys do to practice connecting lines?  How do you work on connecting lines? I have to assume that you mean connecting vertical lines according to the changing harmonies. For instance over one chord you're playing two beats of a dorian scale, the next two beats some dominant thing and then 4 beats over lydian figures. So your question is "How do I connect a dorian scale to the super locrian? And then how do I connect THAT to a Lydian?" I'm glad you asked. There are some principles to connecting vertical melodic devices: 1 & 2 Newton's musical laws of motion (I just like to call it that). 1. An ascending line tends to continue ascending 2. A descending line tends to continue descending "The Surrounding Note Figure" aka "Encirclement" 3. When a melody take a jump of a 3rd or more, the ear expects to hear the next note as one of the logical notes in the MIDDLE of the previous "jump". Inner Ear 4. Pre-hearing is the mark of a true musician. Your mind's ear will tell you which note is your best choice next. Let the music tell YOU what the best course of action is.

dougmck -- 01/12/2007, 22:18:06 -- #32293

The most useful book that I have come across for this is Bert Ligon's book 'Connecting Chords for Linear Harmony'. This looks at three simple melodic 'outlines' that he suggests lie at the heart of many jazz phrases (albeit often disguised with ornaments and other melodic devices) - lots of examples from real jazz recordings. There are a couple of pages to download that explain the basic ideas here - http://www.music.sc.edu/ea/jazz/Theory/outlinesbooks.pdf At the school where I teach, we use this book often. Doug

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