Student’s question:
I have been playing the saxophone for 20 years. I am mostly self-taught. I did about 2 years of jazz studies but I don’t think I was musically ready to grasp what I was taught. I have problems remembering tunes and I want to feel more confident improvising. I don’t know how musicians can remember long chord progressions with 20 or 30 chords in them, let alone improvise over that many chords! Am I missing something?
How we approach this in IFR:
I understand exactly how you feel. Almost every jazz student tries to take on too much information at once. The reason why it’s so hard for you to learn and remember new songs is that you haven’t had a chance to learn the basic building blocks from which all of these songs are made. So you’re trying to memorize a long sequence of information with no context. This would be hard for anyone.
But this isn’t what improvising should feel like at all. You shouldn’t have to “memorize” anything. All jazz standards are made up of much shorter chord progressions that are mostly interchangeable. Each of these shorter chord progressions appears in countless jazz standards. So the solution to your problem of struggling to memorize long chord progressions is to study the much shorter building blocks. When you’ve mastered these building blocks, it’s much easier for you to grasp a long jazz standard as being a tour through 3 or 4 building blocks that you already know very well.
This is the approach we take in IFR. We take one harmonic situation at a time and we give you the opportunity to truly understand this material and find your own creative voice before moving on. This puts you in a much more empowered role because there’s very little material to memorize, and so you’re able to get right into the experience of improvising and expressing yourself creatively. But you’re also building a deep mastery of an essential chord progression that you’ll see again later.
It doesn’t take long before this approach adds up to an ability far greater than you can develop from practicing tunes alone. Again, because so many songs make use of the same harmonic progressions, taking the time to understand these essential chord progressions saves us years of frustration in the future.
So my advice would be to accept that your difficulty in memorizing long chord progressions is not due to any personal limitations of your own. It’s because you’re trying to memorize large amounts of random information with no context. The solution is to do more work at the foundational layer of your ability. Master the essential chord progressions that we study in Pure Harmony Advanced and Mixed Harmony Essentials. Just enjoy working with that material and give your full attention to each detail. Once you’ve started to feel totally at home in that material, you’ll start to see these chord progressions everywhere. And this will massively simplify the task of remembering those long chord progressions you’re talking about.
