Designed for vocal students to better connect what they "hear" with what they "play."

Describes how to improvise melodies over any chord progression, covering such topics as the chord theory, phrasing, melodies, scales, soloing, articulations, and rhythms.

This book provides practical advice on professional jazz singing. Topics covered include getting inside the lyrics, personalising the song, creating an emotional mood, word stress, melodic variation, breathing, rhythm, choosing a key, writing a lead sheet, creating an arrangement, organising a gig book, rehearsing, and playing styles.

Why don't classical musicians improvise? Why do jazz players get to have all the fun? And how do they develop such fabulous technique and aural skills? With these words, Jeffrey Agrell opens the door to improvisation for all non-jazz musicians who thought it was beyond their ability to play extemporaneously. Step-by-step, Agrell leads through a series of games, rather than exercises. The game format takes the pressure off of classically trained musicians, steering them away from their fixation on mistake-free performance and introducing the basic concepts of playing with music itself instead of obsessing over a perfect rendition of a written score. Agrell draws an analogy with sports that illustrates the absurdity of the traditional approach to classically-oriented music performance.

A landmark in jazz studies, Thinking in Jazz reveals as never before how musicians, both individually and collectively, learn to improvise. Chronicling leading musicians from their first encounters with jazz to the development of a unique improvisatory voice, Paul Berliner documents the lifetime of preparation that lies behind the skilled improviser's every idea. The product of more than fifteen years of immersion in the jazz world, Thinking in Jazz combines participant observation with detailed musicological analysis, the author's experience as a jazz trumpeter, interpretations of published material by scholars and performers, and, above all, original data from interviews with more than fifty professional musicians: bassists George Duvivier and Rufus Reid; drummers Max Roach, Ronald Shannon Jackson, and Akira Tana; guitarist Emily Remler; pianists Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris; saxophonists Lou Donaldson, Lee Konitz, and James Moody; trombonist Curtis Fuller; trumpeters Doc Cheatham, Art Farmer, Wynton Marsalis, and Red Rodney; vocalists Carmen Lundy and Vea Williams; and others. Together, the interviews provide insight into the production of jazz by great artists like Betty Carter, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, and Charlie Parker. Thinking in Jazz overflows with musical examples from the 1920s to the present, including original transcriptions (keyed to commercial recordings) of collective improvisations by Miles Davis's and John Coltrane's groups. These transcriptions provide additional insight into the structure and creativity of jazz improvisation and represent a remarkable resource for jazz musicians as well as students and educators. Berliner explores the alternative ways—aural, visual, kinetic, verbal, emotional, theoretical, associative—in which these performers conceptualize their music and describes the delicate interplay of soloist and ensemble in collective improvisation. Berliner's skillful integration of data concerning musical development, the rigorous practice and thought artists devote to jazz outside of performance, and the complexities of composing in the moment leads to a new understanding of jazz improvisation as a language, an aesthetic, and a tradition. This unprecedented journey to the heart of the jazz tradition will fascinate and enlighten musicians, musicologists, and jazz fans alike.

Designed to help introduce vocal improvisation into choral teaching. Shows how improvisation can be used in both the general music classroom and the choral classroom.

"[Student will learn the following:] open a fake book/sheet music with chord symbols and play a tune, accompany vocalist/instrumentalist on any type of tune, get a solo piano/vocal gig, use the piano as a helpful tool to practice vocal improvisation, analyze the chord changes to a song and understand the function of each chord within the progression, double-check published leads-sheets for accuracy, improve composition skills by being able to play and hear the tunes, improve improvisation skills by understanding the harmonic construction of a song."--Page 2