Greetings from San José State University! Allow me to welcome in another school year — a year that I hope will be filled with success and progress for you and your music program.

In the many festivals I have judged in the Bay Area and in Northern California, I have heard a number of excellent jazz ensembles — ensembles with a great sense of swing, time feel, matching articulations and dynamics, pitch accuracy, and all of the things that make a great ensemble sound like a coherent unit. The one thing that is consistently at a lower lever than other facets of the music is the students’ improvisational ability. I encourage you to take the opportunity this year to encourage your students to improve their improvisation.
There are a number of ways to approach teaching improvisation to beginners. The most common and effective way is to limit the students to a single scale to be used over the entire course of the improvised solo. The reason this is a good idea is that by limiting the pitch content a student can choose from for his/her solo, the more likely he/she will play notes that are consonant with the underlying harmony — this tends to make the student feel much more confident about what they are playing. Th e most common application of this technique is used on the blues form with the students employing only the blues scale for their improvisation. However, I do not think that the blues form and its appropriate blues scale is the best choice for beginners. The harmonic content of the blues is simple in its basic form, but is still too harmonically sophisticated to play only one scale sound over its entirety and have the student still sound convincing.

A better type of composition to have students focus on in their efforts to improve their improvisations is a modal composition. A modal tune is at its essence only comprised of a few scale sounds and therefore is very appropriate for applying the technique of limiting your students to only one or two scales for their improvisation. A great example of a modal composition is the Miles Davis piece “So What,” which can be found on the album Kind of Blue. “So What” is an AABA composition that uses only one scale sound for the A sections (the D Dorian scale) and one scale sound for the B section (the Eb Dorian scale). These two scales are easily learned by a high school jazz musician and by limiting themselves to pitches only contained within these two scales and subsequently applying them at the appropriate point in the composition, the student will be able to play a solo that is consonant, correct, and convincing.

Of course, this does not account for style within a student’s solo — but that can be drastically improved by listening to a wide variety of albums by the jazz masters. Have a wonderful semester and if you get a chance, drop me a line!