The 10 Minute Jazz Lesson Podcast

This month we dive into an extremely useful jazz scale and explore the different places it can be utilized. Melodic minor is an important sound in modern jazz and the use of it's different modes are the basis for many familiar sounds. In part 1, we will look at the pure melodic minor from the root and talk about a trio of chords we can use this over. Some of these chords may surprise you but I think you'll start to see some uses you may have never thought of before. Enjoy the episode! WANT THE PDF THAT GOES ALONG WITH THIS EPISODE?? Head over to our Patreon page and when you donate $3 or more a month you get this PDF and every other. We will also be bringing you many extras exclusively to our patrons including transcriptions and a FREE gift  of our latest Ebook, The Diatonic Method. We hope that we bring you value every week here at the 10 Minute Jazz Lesson and we appreciate all of your support!

This month is all about guitar! We will be transcribing the amazing Joe Pass on this swingin' blues, Bag's Groove. Pay attention to how much Joe does with such limited information and, of course, how much he swings! Have fun :) https://open.spotify.com/track/7JrCNEXOunX7RXlJFDvXYn?si=kfQHmXyJSdGuzisiEzZ3HQ

You thought we were done with fourths, didn't you? I'm happy to say, we have one more episode that dives into this important topic. We will be using the Eddie Harris tune, Freedom Jazz Dance to explore a cool exercise taught to me by the great, James Moody when I was in college. Enjoy this 5th episode of the month and I hope you get something out of it! WANT THE PDF THAT GOES ALONG WITH THIS EPISODE?? Head over to our Patreon page and when you donate $3 or more a month you get this PDF and every other. We will also be bringing you many extras exclusively to our patrons including transcriptions and a FREE gift  of our latest Ebook, The Diatonic Method. We hope that we bring you value every week here at the 10 Minute Jazz Lesson and we appreciate all of your support!

This week is the culmination of our series on fourths and we celebrate it by playing a killer etude over the Miles Davis composition, Tune Up. We use this episode as a way to talk about the form, chord progression, and one tricky spot in the tune. Then we move into how I attempted to use fourths mixed with other material to, hopefully, make it sound a bit more natural in context. Enjoy the episode! WANT THE PDF THAT GOES ALONG WITH THIS EPISODE?? Head over to our Patreon page and when you donate $3 or more a month you get this PDF and every other. We will also be bringing you many extras exclusively to our patrons including transcriptions and a FREE gift  of our latest Ebook, The Diatonic Method. We hope that we bring you value every week here at the 10 Minute Jazz Lesson and we appreciate all of your support!

This week we continue our look at fourths and we transition into using them over real chord progressions. In this episode we come up with three ii-V-I lines and explore some different ways of utilizing fourths to craft interesting and angular melodies. Hopefully this will help you to conceptualize how to put this interval into your playing in various ways. Enjoy the episode! WANT THE PDF THAT GOES ALONG WITH THIS EPISODE?? Head over to our Patreon page and when you donate $3 or more a month you get this PDF and every other. We will also be bringing you many extras exclusively to our patrons including transcriptions and a FREE gift  of our latest Ebook, The Diatonic Method. We hope that we bring you value every week here at the 10 Minute Jazz Lesson and we appreciate all of your support!

This week we take a look at one more set of exercises on fourths, building on what we learned in the last episode. This time, our job is to build series of three and four fourths stacked on top of each other. Make sure you pay close attention to what we are talking about here and work on the exercises so you can be ready to apply them in the next episode to real chord progressions. Enjoy the episode! WANT THE PDF THAT GOES ALONG WITH THIS EPISODE?? Head over to our Patreon page and when you donate $3 or more a month you get this PDF and every other. We will also be bringing you many extras exclusively to our patrons including transcriptions and a FREE gift  of our latest Ebook, The Diatonic Method. We hope that we bring you value every week here at the 10 Minute Jazz Lesson and we appreciate all of your support!

This month is all about the man himself, Sonny Rollins! One of my favorite saxophonists, musicians, and people on the planet. Enjoy transcribing the melody and solo on I'm An Old Cowhand from his album, Way Out West. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlatJOsLhPA https://open.spotify.com/track/0dL8xfVkwJjbnexqvMhH0r?si=zOVzhvq_QXymjDDIu4T46A

This month we are going back to a more series oriented run of shows. In July we will take a look at the interval of a fourth and how it can be used in a compelling way. We start with some basic exercises to get your ears and fingers wrapped around this sound over two very common chord symbols, the minor-seventh and the major-seventh, sharp eleventh chords. No need to do these in every key quite yet, let's keep things simple and move slowly through the learning process. Enjoy the episode and don't forget to grab the PDF! WANT THE PDF THAT GOES ALONG WITH THIS EPISODE?? Head over to our Patreon page and when you donate $3 or more a month you get this PDF and every other. We will also be bringing you many extras exclusively to our patrons including transcriptions and a FREE gift  of our latest Ebook, The Diatonic Method. We hope that we bring you value every week here at the 10 Minute Jazz Lesson and we appreciate all of your support!

This week wraps up our month of listener questions. We are taking a look at the famous Wayne Shorter composition, Footprints. In particular, we are trying to make sense of the turnaround and give ourselves a fighting chance at playing something meaningful over the complicated set of chords. Enjoy the episode and remember to grab the PDF below! WANT THE PDF THAT GOES ALONG WITH THIS EPISODE?? Head over to our Patreon page and when you donate $3 or more a month you get this PDF and every other. We will also be bringing you many extras exclusively to our patrons including transcriptions and a FREE gift  of our latest Ebook, The Diatonic Method. We hope that we bring you value every week here at the 10 Minute Jazz Lesson and we appreciate all of your support!

This week's episode is a natural followup to last week's and is something that is often discussed in our FB group. I also think this is one of the most essential skills to becoming a good and complete jazz musician. Vocabulary is something we all have to practice. It's a building block to being a great improviser and something we can't avoid. But how do we get that vocabulary and different sounds into our playing in a way that makes sense?? That's the million dollar question and what I try to address in this week's episode. Hope you enjoy! WANT THE PDF THAT GOES ALONG WITH THIS EPISODE?? Head over to our Patreon page and when you donate $3 or more a month you get this PDF and every other. We will also be bringing you many extras exclusively to our patrons including transcriptions and a FREE gift  of our latest Ebook, The Diatonic Method. We hope that we bring you value every week here at the 10 Minute Jazz Lesson and we appreciate all of your support!

This week is a long one. You'll have to bear with me while I dive into a long winded topic that requires much discussion. We are continuing our month of episodes directly answering questions from the community. This one is all about how to interpret, understand, and memorize chord progression from our favorite jazz standards. We talk about categorizing tunes into buckets that will help us to remember the progressions at the end of the day. This task becomes harder as we learn more tunes, but hopefully some of the strategies I talk about in this episode can be of use. Enjoy! WANT THE PDF THAT GOES ALONG WITH THIS EPISODE?? Head over to our Patreon page and when you donate $3 or more a month you get this PDF and every other. We will also be bringing you many extras exclusively to our patrons including transcriptions and a FREE gift  of our latest Ebook, The Diatonic Method. We hope that we bring you value every week here at the 10 Minute Jazz Lesson and we appreciate all of your support!

This week's episode is all about simplicity. When we see a flat 9 chord, our minds go to very complicated places that aren't always good. In this episode, I would like to show you an easier, clearer way to start incorporating this sound into your playing. If you're someone who struggles to use this sound and thinking about diminished dominant makes your head swim, you're in the right place. Enjoy the episode! WANT THE PDF THAT GOES ALONG WITH THIS EPISODE?? Head over to our Patreon page and when you donate $3 or more a month you get this PDF and every other. We will also be bringing you many extras exclusively to our patrons including transcriptions and a FREE gift  of our latest Ebook, The Diatonic Method. We hope that we bring you value every week here at the 10 Minute Jazz Lesson and we appreciate all of your support!

This month we are going to transcribe a solo from one of the greatest musicians to ever live, Ella Fitzgerald. I'd like you to work on her scat solo over the famous composition, Take The A-Train by the great, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78vRYUMHlJU

This week we are talking about a very important topic that adds on to our series studying jazz articulation. Ghost notes are crucial to both making lines a bit more natural to play, adding texture, and for many instruments, making lines much easier to accomplish! I'm providing 3 examples this week and pointing out where I would naturally ghost or de-emphasize notes to make things swing much more. This is a concept that every jazz musician should master and you can consider this your jumping off point on this important element of the jazz language. Enjoy the episode! WANT THE PDF THAT GOES ALONG WITH THIS EPISODE?? Head over to our Patreon page and when you donate $3 or more a month you get this PDF and every other. We will also be bringing you many extras exclusively to our patrons including transcriptions and a FREE gift  of our latest Ebook, The Diatonic Method. We hope that we bring you value every week here at the 10 Minute Jazz Lesson and we appreciate all of your support!

This month, we are going to take a look at the amazing Jerome Kern standard, Yesterdays through the lens of the articulation principles we have been discussing in the past 3 episodes. We have a three chorus etude and our aim is to get a bit more adventurous as we move through the composition. One important thing to remember, is to keep the basic principles of swing in mind for the entire etude. Just because we are mixing things up a bit, doesn't mean we can ignore the basics. Enjoy the etude and remember to grab the PDF on Patreon! WANT THE PDF THAT GOES ALONG WITH THIS EPISODE?? Head over to our Patreon page and when you donate $3 or more a month you get this PDF and every other. We will also be bringing you many extras exclusively to our patrons including transcriptions and a FREE gift  of our latest Ebook, The Diatonic Method. We hope that we bring you value every week here at the 10 Minute Jazz Lesson and we appreciate all of your support!