Jazz Piano Improvisation - The 3 Methods Of Jazz Improvisation

By Author: Lin chuanXing
Total Articles: 3
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In this article we will look at jazz piano improvisation and the 3 methods it combines to create this unique style. By learning these three methods and using all of them at various times while you play, making songs your own becomes very easy to do.

1. Improvise on the Melody: There are four parts to this method that consist of paraphrasing, adding to the start, middle and end, changing the rhythmic content and ornamenting. When you combine all four of these parts to create a new melody from the old one, you can hear the original song beneath it, but it is a fresh interpretation that takes on a life of its own.

2. Improvise on the Harmony: This method consists of two parts with various techniques within them. For example, the first part, harmonic generalization, includes use of the tonic triad as well as major, minor and diatonic scales. While the second part, harmonically specific, deals with arpeggios, scales in the tone center as well as chord alternatives. These are just fancy words for the various ...
... scales that exist that you can draw upon during your improvising. Learning these different scales will allow you to vary your jazz pieces and add many facets to your improvisations.

3. Motivic Development: Developing the melody can be done using repetition, transposition, mode changes, pitch and rhythmic augmentation, displacements, fragments and many more. Once you have the basic idea of the song down, it becomes fairly easy to tweak little sections and change the song dramatically. This is why it becomes so easy for musicians who know how to implement the technique of improvisation to carry on a song for so long.

This article discussed the 3 methods that make up jazz piano improvisation. By improvising on the melody and the harmony and using motivic development to embellish songs, a musician can create new material from old that can help them not only add to their library of songs, but can help them excel in improvisation techniques of many other styles.