We learn a tune by degrees, over time. The more you run
choruses, the more ideas suggest themselves to you–and your
personal voice develops itself into the composition, and
your lines grow organically. The composition begins to speak
to you. A song is a living thing, in the river. Some tunes,
such as Lush Life, take even masters a lifetime to learn.
Linear Jazz Improvisation Songbook Series will get you into
tunes in the most direct fashion, with no unnecessary
theory or terminology. It is at once profoundly useful and
simple at the same time.
If you practice in the ways described below you will
gradually and naturally begin to shed your scales,
arpeggios, and runs naturally and organically. The special
challenge of playing the guitar, piano, and saxophone is
that it’s too easy for your fingers to run amuck. Sing
everything you practice–both with the instrument and without.
This helps you get directly to the source of melodicism,
since you will be disinclined to sing mindless scales and
generic licks.
The other important part of LJI Method is in
incorporating the rhythms of the composition at hand, which
can be systematically permutated and developed. In the case
of standard tunes, which don’t have the hip rhythms one
finds in jazz compositions, you must develop the rhythms
you create on head.
Linear Jazz Improvisation systematically develops the
most important skills needed for personal and meaningful
improvisation based on a deep mastery of the most important
aspects of specific tunes. Solo lines developed in this
fashion will work with any harmonization. The primary
elements are all lines: Harmony is secondary.
1. Reduce the melody by eliminating repeated notes and
non-harmonic tones.
2. Learn the guide tone line, based on the 3rds and 7ths,
which gives you the essence of the tune’s harmonic
progression–but in the form of lines.
3. Learn the song’s Root Progression.
4. Develop these Essential Compositional Elements by adding
each of the 10 LJI Chromatic Targeting Groups.
5. Do all of the above with the Song’s Reduced Rhythms–which
can be developed through Permutation and Displacement.
6. Combine all of these elements systematically–and then
ultimately intuitively, through lengthy improvising.
Lines developed in this manner will work over
virtually any re-harmonization of that tune–in any style.
Listen to Davis, Coltrane, Monk, Rollins, Brown, et al, for
this quality: Without needing to know it, audiences embrace
improvisations based on the composition. This process
begins by learning how to paraphrase the composition at
hand–and going from there.
LJI Songbook Series
Blue Funk (Blue Monk) is our recommended book for your
first application of LJI targeting and the development of a
specific composition’s melodic rhythms. It is a popular
12-bar Bb blues mainstay of the jazz repertoire by
Thelonious Monk. The 10 LJI Chromatic Targeting Groups are
systematically applied to the melody and its rhythms,
guide-tone lines, and root progression. Included are many
fun etudes that combine and summarize the studies into
musical solutions that can be used on the gig. Buy the book,
download the Free Sound Files, and practice along. Check
out the links below to see and hear examples:
http://www.byrnejazz.com/product.php?id=5
6 More Great LJI Songbooks:
http://www.byrnejazz.com/store.php
Blue Bossa
All the Things You Are
Stella by Starlight
I Hear a Rhapsody
Riffraff–F Blues
Blue Rendezvous
To get a better idea of LJI and how it works, there
are a great many both music and sound examples of the 15
different LJI books to be found in the More Information
sections for each book in the ByrneJazz Online Bookstore
(just click on each book): http://byrnejazz.com/store.php
In tomorrow’s essay I will discuss Developing
Transcriptions into Improvisations.
Yours in jazz,
Ed
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JazzTalk with Ed Byrne 