Learn Jazz Standards Podcast

Hey. Do you ever feel frustrated by your musical progress because you don't feel like you're improving quickly enough? Or do you feel overwhelmed because there are a lot of different things when it comes to playing jazz that you have to practice and learn?

Sometimes it feels like you're doing all this stuff in the practice room, but it just seems like a mess in your head and like you aren't really improving the way you want to...

"You miss 100% of the shots that you don't take".

 Have you ever heard that old Wayne Gretzky quote? That's the greatest hockey player that ever lived. Or was it Michael Scott from The Office? I get that one a little bit confused sometimes. Anyways, we're gonna talk about that quote, "You miss 100% of the shots that you don't take"...

Hey, I've got a question for you. What's your relationship with music like? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it perhaps a little bit of both? 

Well, on today's episode, I'm gonna get a little bit vulnerable with you, share a little bit my personal life experience with music, my journey with music, and how oftentimes in this journey of playing music and exploring it and getting better, it was quite an abusive and unhealthy relationship...

The melodic minor scale is one of those scales that can be used to explain what we call "chord scale theory" in jazz improvisation.  It's essentially like the mixture of a minor scale and a major scale, having the major third included in it, and you can do all sorts of different cool things, playing the melodic minor scale in different sorts of ways over top of different kinds of chords.

Well, in today's episode, I want to simplify all of that...

The movie Whiplash came out in 2014 and it's about this young jazz drummer named Andrew Nyman, who is determined to succeed as a jazz musician, and he's driven by his demanding music teacher, Terrence Fletcher, who can be best described as a harsh, ruthless yet highly respected instructor who really has abusive teaching methods...

One of the most important things that you can do is listen to jazz music, and that seems so simple, but literally you are practicing when you listen to jazz music.

You will become a better jazz musician, simply by putting on your headphones or putting them on the speakers and just listening to how this music actually sounds.

So today I'm gonna talk about 25 jazz albums that every jazz musician absolutely needs to know, absolutely needs to listen to...

So you've probably heard the advice before that learning material in All 12 Keys is a great idea, whether it be for the sake of playing jazz or any other style of music...

So, what does it take to become a jazz master? I'm talking about someone who plays jazz at the highest possible level, feels comfortable playing in any situation, and always plays amazing music that wows other people.

I'm going to talk today about what I see as the formula for becoming a jazz master, everything that you need to essentially become really good at to get to that level...

Here at Learn Jazz Standards, our philosophy is that the best way to learn jazz and improve is to learn jazz songs, aka. Jazz Standards. The fastest the best way to improve is to simply learn more songs, even if you're starting at the very beginning of your jazz journey.

But there may be some holes for you for how to go about learning. Learning a song, especially a jazz song. It can be an overwhelming task...

Imagine someone calls you for a jazz gig that's to be performed in a couple of weeks and they hand you the list of repertoire, 20 songs, and you don't know any of those songs. What would you do in order to learn a lot of jazz songs quickly and is it even possible?

Well, in today's episode, I'm going to be talking about strategies to help you do that, to be successful in a situation like this, as well as some strategies that will help you in the long term...