Does improvising bring you joy? If you’re playing music you love, both you and your audience will be swept up in that transcendent joy. Here’s a topsy-turvy, tangled up, spaghetti-shaped, four-bar phrase that just tickles my spirit every time I play it. Hope you dig it too. Click here to watch the video.
Below is a chart, in case you’d like to woodshed this crazy phrase in all 12 keys. But, if you’d rather learn to play melodies like this one by ear, without a chart, you can download “New Ears Resolution” by clicking on this link.
…So what is it that makes a phrase like this tick? I wasn’t thinking about rhyme or reason when this tune popped out. I was just jamming away, enjoying the feel and sound of the horn. This melodic form slowly evolved as I tried various approaches. Only after the fact did the underlying harmonic structure reveal itself. Let’s compare the melody with the chords it implies. For each chord, numbers indicate which degrees of the chord occur in the melody. You can see here that this tune is made up primarily of chord tones.
As you begin to “practice joy,” you’ll discover how many of your ideas actually make logical as well as musical sense.
CRAIG BUHLER JAZZ 