Phrasing: A Lost Art
Photo by Jimmy Katz
BY COREY CHRISTIANSEN
Corey Christiansen, a former senior editor and guitar clinician for Mel Bay
Publications, is known for his fluid jazz
improvisation and instructional chops. He
teaches full-time at Utah State University
and is an Artist-in-Residence at the
Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington,
Indiana, the Atlanta Institute of Music, and
the Broadway Music School. To learn more
about his CDs and DVD, and see his current workshop and performance schedule,
visit coreychristiansen.com.
What we are going to try to do now is
use the same technique, but replace the
lyric and song melody with an improvised melody. This is harder than it might
seem, because as the soloist, you have
to remember and be accountable for the
melodic material you play in the first
phrase so you can repeat verbatim it in
the second.
We will start out with some simple
ideas that are generated from the blues
scale and graduate to ideas that use a
CHOPS: Intermediate
THEORY: Advanced Beginner
LESSON OVERVIEW:
• Learn to become accountable
for your phrasing
• Create improvised lines that
outline the changes
• Develop an understanding of
phrase structures in the blues
If you can’t account
for what you’ve played,
you are subjecting
yourself to an out-of-control solo that,
frankly, will be devoid
of strong phrasing.
Click here to hear
sound clips of
these examples.
Phrasing: When it comes to an impro- vised solo, it’s pretty much what sepa-
rates the good players from the greats. It’s
the difference between a solo that sounds
like a composition and a solo that sounds
like the fingers are just randomly falling
down on the strings.
melody we’ll manipulate to follow the
chord changes. Even though this is a
simple concept, many advanced players
have a hard time accounting for what they
have played. If you can’t account for what
you’ve played, you are subjecting yourself
to an out-of-control solo that, frankly, will
be devoid of strong phrasing.
In Fig. 2 you can see an example of
putting this phrasing to use in a melodic
way. I’m intentionally keeping the examples pretty easy. This concept is the classic
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