Improvisation is the easiest and the hardest thing in music. Little kids do it effortlessly, while world-class performers and composers find it terrifying. I am a confident improvisor, but it took me a few decades to get here. Now I’m teaching classrooms full of undergrads to do it, which means coming up with more of a method than the aimless stumbling that I did. That method involves a lot of careful curation and editing of recordings. We will be listening to some of these as we go.
When American musicians say, “let’s jam”, they might mean any of the following things:
- Let’s play a song that we all know or can learn quickly, and we’ll improvise the details of the arrangement as we go.
- Let’s take turns playing solos over a predictable song form like twelve-bar blues or a jazz standard.
- Let’s create music completely from scratch with no preconceived plan.
These are all different processes with different-sounding results, but they all require pretty much the same skills. So what are those skills?
- You need to either know the musical structures you’re working with, or be able to learn them quickly: the rhythms, the chords, the melodies, the form.
- You need to have enough of a vocabulary to come up with ideas in the moment, and enough technique to execute those ideas in real time.
- You need to able to sustain your focus without overthinking or getting stage fright.
Knowing the musical structures is the easiest skill to develop. It’s like learning how to cook: you learn some information, you watch other people, you start following some recipes, you repeat, repeat, repeat until it all becomes automatic. So say you want to be able to play the blues. You learn a blues song, then another one, then another one. You learn about the general concept of the twelve bar blues and its variants. You learn to play twelve bar blues in a few different keys, and then you realize that it’s a pattern that you can easily transpose into any key at all. You learn the standard intros and endings, the most common riffs and rhythms, the patterns and tropes. After a while, you get to a point where you can jump into any blues tune and stumble along reasonably well.
Now let’s say you want to jam in more styles: rock, country, R&B, reggae. It’s the same process, like learning how to cook more dishes. You have to learn a lot more songs, because these styles are not as formulaic as the blues. You learn some scales, some riffs, some melodies. You work on the scales some more. You learn some more riffs. You realize you were playing that melody wrong and try to figure out how to fix it. You work on your scales some more. You learn some more riffs. You learn an entire solo by one of your heroes and it takes you fifty hours. You learn another one and it only takes you twenty-five hours. You learn another that only take you twelve.
This all takes years, but no part of it is difficult. The internet is full of dudes offering shortcuts and formulas, and if those things work for you great, but ultimately, you just have to memorize a lot of music. How do you do all this memorizing, though? There’s no single right way. You can learn from notation, from tablature, from recordings, from YouTube, from teachers, from your friends, from whoever. This process never really ends, but it also never stops being fun.
What if you want to learn to improvise completely from scratch? This is harder, because now in addition to the vocabulary and technique, you have to practice higher-level metacognitive skills: being able to access your vocabulary and technique immediately, changing direction on a moment to moment basis, listening to other people and reacting to them, and just generally being willing to be lost at sea a lot of the time. You can learn all of this through simple practice and experience, but you can be more intentional about it. The big challenge here is finding the right scaffolding.
The best scaffolding is a participatory music community. For a present-day American, this can be difficult to find. Some subcultures are richly supportive of participatory improvisational music: the Black church, hip-hop cyphers, Latin percussionists, jazz jams, blues jams, bluegrass jams, the old-time music scene, the video game music scene. For other styles of music, though, you are probably on your own. Also, even if you do find your way into one of the jam-friendly subcultures, beginners tend to play with other beginners, which is much harder than playing with people who are better than you. But how do you get yourself into situations where you can jam with people who are better than you?
I spent my 20s in New York City trying to surround myself with better musicians than me, with varying degrees of success. You would think it would be easy in New York, especially back when the city was much cheaper than it is now. Ironically, though, while NYC is full of jam sessions, they are full of world-class musicians, and it is not easy to keep up with them. I could occasionally hang, and that felt great, but first I had to get to a pretty advanced level for that to even be possible.
No matter who you know or where you are, you probably need a way to practice your jamming by yourself in addition to doing it with other people. This is where recordings come in. But which recordings? Jazz musicians have an advantage here, because Jamey Aebersold has built an entire industry out of play-along records. Aebersold records have a pianist, bassist and drummer playing accompaniment to various standards with various degrees of difficulty, and you play solos on top, following the included lead sheet. This is not quite an optimal improvisation experience because the rhythm section isn’t responding to you, but it is vastly better than nothing. There’s an even larger universe of fake Aebersold-style tracks generated by software like Band-in-a-Box or iReal Pro. These have the benefit of being infinitely customizable, and the output is realistic, but I can’t tolerate the uncanny valley aspect.
What if you don’t want to play jazz? You can play along with recordings of anything, in theory, but in practice there are endless complications: the track is too fast, it’s in an awkward key, it’s not tuned exactly to A440, the part you want to play over is only eight bars long and you have to keep skipping back. You could play with a metronome, I guess? Ugh, no thank you. I like drum loops much better, but then you have to put in the effort to source or program them, and they don’t give you harmonic support. Maybe generate backing tracks with AI somehow? You’re kidding me, right?
What I kept finding myself wanting was recordings of actual humans playing actual music that is extremely repetitive, harmonically static and predictable, at a slow enough tempo to keep up with. So I started seeking out and curating recordings like that. One of the best is “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” by the The Temptations (1972), the full-length album version.
This is twelve minutes of absolutely impeccable funk in Bb minor with no chord changes and a predictable structure. If you want to work on funk in Bb minor, you couldn’t ask for a better platform.
George Howlett compiled this invaluable list of one-chord songs from a wide variety of styles and eras. Any one of them would be a good platform for jamming, both with other people and for practice yourself. Hip-hop instrumentals are another excellent resource. Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones Part II” (1994) is in Bb minor, though you do have to deal with it being pitched about ten cents sharp of A440.
Dilla instrumentals are a great way to deepen your time feel. Start with “Thelonius” (2000) by Common and Slum Village, also in Bb minor.
If you can tolerate the Grateful Dead, they are an abundant source of one or two chord grooves for long uninterrupted stretches, though it takes some digging to find the really good ones. The iconic “Scarlet>Fire” from 5/8/77 is one of the really good ones. Start at 7:14 for nineteen minutes of uninterrupted B Mixolydian mode at a nice laid-back tempo.
But what if you don’t like aimless hippie jams? What if you want something harder and tighter? You could look into James Brown; he doesn’t stretch out as long as the Dead, but he has a lot of excellent one-chord grooves. Listen to “I Got To Move” (1970) starting at 0:29 for seven minutes of D Dorian.
The related tune “There Was A Time (I Got To Move)” (1970) is also seven minutes of great D Dorian funk.
(You can read about the complicated relationship between these two recordings here.)
James Brown also has a lot of recordings which are great for improvising, but not quite ideal. “Soul Power” (1970) is a case in point. There lots of different versions circulating; here’s the longest one.
If you want to dance, this is fantastic, but if you want to practice jamming, it’s not quite structurally predictable enough. They go to the bridge once in a while, and the meter gets odd when they switch back to the main groove. I decided to make an edit that just loops parts of the main groove to infinity.
James Brown’s “Blind Man Can See It (Extended)” (1973) is another track that could be perfect for jam practice if not for its slightly too complicated structure. Starting at 1:02, it’s an immaculate groove in G minor. But first, there’s this goofy chord sequence, and it annoyingly recurs at 4:30.
I edited together the best parts of the main groove:
Herbie Hancock’s iconic “Chameleon” (1973) is a great jam vehicle out of the box for its first several minutes, though it does speed up gradually. At 7:36, though, there’s a new section with different chords, and at 11:47 the form gets fragmented and complex.
Here’s a jam-friendly edit of the opening section.
I wanted to give my students some harmonically and rhythmically simpler material that still works as a loop. I chose “The Weight” by the Band (1968) as a gentle entry point into major-key melody improvising.
Here are some loops of the intro and the postchorus:
I love the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence” (1968) as a jam vehicle, but in addition to the structure being a little too unpredictable, I also didn’t want the students to have to compete with the vocal melody.
So I took the multitracks, muted the vocals, and found two good loops, one from the verse and one from the bridge.
I like having students improvise on jazz tunes, but I don’t want them having to negotiate chord changes until they get the rhythmic feel and phrasing down. So I’m always looking for jazz recordings where there are passages on one or two chords, and where the tempo isn’t overwhelmingly fast. John Coltrane’s “Mr Knight” (1962) has beautiful Mixolydian vamps with bottomless rhythmic depth.
I edited the vamps together here:
To help the kids internalize the feel of a jazz waltz, I like the intro and interludes from McCoy Tyner’s “Contemplation” (1967). It isn’t strictly a waltz, more like alternating bars of 4/4 and 2/4, and it takes some getting used to.
Here’s the edited version:
When we cover odd meter, the obvious jazz recording to reach for would be “Take Five” by Dave Brubeck (1959), and I like that one fine, but to mix things up I like to use Brad Mehldau’s arrangement of “Anything Goes” (2004).
Here are loops of the intro and bass solo:
For 7/4, I like Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill” (1977).
Here’s the edit:
The Mahavishnu Orchestra’s “Miles Beyond” (1973) has always attracted me with its smooth, funky 6/4 groove, but that groove only occurs in short snatches between the hectic and disruptive parts.
It took me a lot of effort to pull seamless loops out of this, but it was worth it, I love practicing over it.
You can listen to and download all of the jam tracks here:
I keep writing about the jam tracks here over and over, and maybe you find it annoying, but I feel like I’m on to something important here and I want to get the word out to other music learners and teachers. I don’t know how scalable this practice is. I didn’t have the idea until I had been producing music in various DAWs for many years already, so the audio editing side is easy for me, but I recognize that this is an obstacle for other people. Even if you wanted to make your own loops and jam tracks, not everyone knows how to even get an audio file onto your computer, much less line it up to the tempo grid, much less make seamless loops. So I don’t exactly know what I’m advocating for here. Learn how to do this yourself? Hire me to teach you how to do it? Hire me to make loops for you? Use my loops? Just be inspired by the concept? All of the above?
Beyond their practical music education value, making the loops and edits is a satisfying creative act unto itself. In his must-read book Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop, Joseph Schloss points out that sampling doesn’t just juxtapose different source material together. It also juxtaposes the sampled material with itself, by connecting the end of a phrase with its beginning. In so doing,
looping automatically recasts any musical material it touches, insofar as the end of a phrase is repeatedly juxtaposed with its beginning in a way that was not intended by the original musician. After only a few repetitions, this juxtaposition… begins to take on an air of inevitability. It begins to gather a compositional weight that far exceeds its original significance (p. 137).
I meant the jam tracks to be background for practicing, but a couple of people told me that they enjoy just listening to them. After I heard that, I started just walking around listening to them too. Why not? It’s not the same experience as listening to the original songs, it’s much less interesting. But they are conducive to a meditative flow state. I don’t have any new age spiritual beliefs, but if I did, this is where I would start talking about them. I certainly believe that meditative flow states are good for you. That’s one of the main reasons people should play music!
Listening to loop-based music has had another benefit, too. I’m an anxious person, and it shows in my instrument playing. I’m full of good ideas, but I lose confidence, I break ideas off too quickly, I compulsively change direction and move to something new too fast. I sound the best when I can focus deeply, settle into an idea and let it evolve smoothly, work up a trance. There is nothing unusual about me in this respect. My fellow white people suffer from anxiety in epidemic proportions. I know a lot of musicians who can spin off one idea after another, and I know very few who can commit to a single idea with full concentration and commitment. But those are the people who sound good. When I play over a good loop, it’s like audio Adderall, it calms and directs me. I feel how much better it sounds to ride the groove than to fight it. This is a habit that I started bringing to jam situations where there weren’t any loops, and I find that other poeple love it when I myself am suppling the loops.
Anyway, the original point of this post was to talk about how you can learn to jam. And I do think people should learn how to jam. Playing existing music from a score or from memory can be intensely satisfying, and so can composing on paper or producing in a DAW, but there is nothing like creating in real time with other people. I don’t know how to talk about the experience without reaching for mystical language that makes me get on my own nerves. If you’ve been in a good jam, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, all I can say is that you would enjoy it.