#76 How To Play Jazz Saxophone - A Roadmap

On this week's lesson I lay out a simple roadmap that you can use to understand the skills and stepping stones you'll need in order to play jazz on saxophone. I can't teach you how to play jazz sax in one short video I'm afraid (it's a lifetime's work!), but I can outline the best things to focus on, giving you a great snapshot of where you're currently at and how to get to the next level. Don't forget to pick up your free PDF cheat sheet which has all these points written down and a list of useful resources to help you achieve your jazz goals.

Here are the Q&A topics covered in this lesson, with video time stamps (min:sec). Clicking on the time stamp will take you straight to that portion of the video on YouTube (in a separate tab). Full Time stamps for the video and a complete transcript are at the bottom of the blog.

How do I play jazz on saxophone? (0:36)

• jazz means different things to different people, but most people would say that playing jazz involves playing a melody then improvising a solo based on the chords - to do this, you need to be fairly proficient on your sax, have a working knowledge of musical theory and have a grasp of the genre and style of jazz
• another method of playing jazz is just to use your ears alone. Many struggle with this method, but for some it is all they know

How do I start learning to play jazz on saxophone? (2:48)

• the first step is to establish what jazz means to you and what your goals are - improvising? Just playing the tune? Composing your own songs?
• get clear on your goals then use the 4 stepping stones I outline in this blog

What are the four stepping stones to help me play jazz on saxophone? (1:40)

• #1 Learn the theory
• #2 Go to the source (study the greats)
• #3 Get your sax together! (Be a better saxophonist)
• #4 Synthesise and forget it (internalise as much as possible and express yourself)

What is the first stepping stone to learning jazz saxophone? (5:12)

• the first stepping stone is to learn the theory of jazz
• in the absence of playing by ear (which should be developed), gather a working knowledge of chord types, chord progressions, chord scale relationships, the modes of the major and melodic minor scales and such like

What is the second stepping stone to learning jazz saxophone? (7:33)

• the second stepping stone, learning from the greats, is vital to act as a conduit between theoretical knowledge and actually sounding good!
• transcribing fantastic players will help you develop a great feel, accurate time keeping, great articulation and a rich tone
• try and get the original players not copycats. Try Sonny Stitt for some great jazz language
• using software like Anytune Pro is a great help

What is the third stepping stone to learning jazz saxophone? (10:12)

• the third step is improving your actual saxophone skills
• being a proficient saxophonist will help you execute your jazz skills
• your sax technique practice should include tone, timing, articulation, finger speed, embouchure strength and being smooth across the whole range of the horn

What is the last stepping stone to learning jazz saxophone? (13:02)

• once you've mastered your theory, style and technique, it's important not to be too methodical about your actual solos
• jazz is about self expression and you should try and internalise as much as you can you that your jazz solos are imaginative, meaningful, responsive and graceful

In future lessons we'll look at more "nuts and bolts" stuff like II-V-Is and the like, but this should give you a firm foundation about the overarching plan for learning jazz on saxophone. This week's video was a bit more "off the cuff" and improvised - all in the spirit of jazz! lol I'll see you for next Sunday's lesson where you'll learn one of the most famous sax hooks of all time - "Smooth Operator" by Sade. See ya!

Jamie :-)

Video Timestamps

0:00 - Intro Performance

0:36 - brief intro and titles

1:13 - how to get your free PDF

1:17 - how to get the free Saxophone Success Masterclass

1:40 - the four stepping stones outline

2:48 - what is jazz to YOU?

5:01 - Link Performance 1

5:12 - stepping stone #1 Learn The Theory

7:28 - Link Performance 2

7:33 - stepping stone #2 Go To The Source

10:00 - Link Performance 3

10:12 - stepping stone #3 Get Your Sax Together

12:36 - Link Performance 4

13:02 - stepping stone #4 Synthesise & Forget It!

14:39 - Link Performance 4

14:48 - recap

15:18 - sign off and end music

Video Transcript

Hi I'm pro saxophonist Jamie Anderson, you're watching Get Your Sax Together, and on this week's lesson I'm gonna give you a roadmap which is gonna show you how to play jazz on saxophone.This week's free online saxophone lesson is gonna be a bit more informal than previous weeks not gonna have any fancy graphics and all that stuff and what I'm gonna do is give you a very broad outline of the kind of things that you're going to need to get in place if you want to play jazz on saxophone. There's a free pdf for this lesson you can get by going down into the description and also please go and checkout my free one-hour saxophone success masterclass which is my gift to you guys. It's as much as I could fit in one hour about everything that I know about playing saxophone - just go down to the link in the description to pick that up or you can go to www.getyoursaxtogether.com/masterclass.

Learning jazz is, of course, a lifetime's work so there's no way I can actually teach you how to play jazz in totality in one short video. However, I've broken the approaches down, or the steps, or the methods, into four distinct different categories. The first one is learning how to play jazz from the theoretical, academic standpoint. The second approach is by learning from previous jazz masters like the ones pictured behind me and like the saxophonists featured in my Hall of Fame series. The third important milestone for learning jazz is you have to master your own instrument - you have to be technically proficient at playing this lump of tubing, stick of wood and pads. So you gotta "get your sax together" lol And finally the fourth phase, or the fourth step, is synthesizing all those steps and then trying to forget about them to really express what you want to say from your heart.

Before we kick off, let's talk about jazz itself. This is not a lesson on the history of jazz or what jazz is, but jazz means something different to absolutely everybody. For some people jazz might be Louis Armstrong "St James Infirmary", for somebody else it might be bebop, Charlie Parker, or hard pop like Hank Mobley or John Coltrane in the 50s, for somebody else it might be cool jazz like Dave Brubeck "Take Five", for somebody else it might be bluesy - I did a video recently on the blues - you get blues jazz, THAT might... some people might think that's jazz. And then there's the sort of journeying, epic jazz of the 60s like later John Coltrane and the free jazz movement - THAT might be jazz to some people. And then of course later on jazz fused with lots of other kinds of music like jazz rock, jazz fusion, jazz funk, Grover Washington, Kool And The Gang. You might like smooth jazz, you might like modern jazz, whatever that is, big-band jazz, you might even like jazz fused with electronic music and DJ culture. For you THAT might be what jazz is.

So for everybody we've all got a different concept of what jazz is so it's very difficult to teach people what jazz is because you've got everything from Kool And The Gang to Louis Armstrong and everything in between. But whether it's straight ahead jazz, bossa nova, afro-cuban music or even folk jazz like Jan Garbarek for example, some of the key elements are gonna remain the same in jazz and that's what we really want to get to grips with if we want to learn how to play jazz. 

So the important thing is to get very clear in your head what jazz is for YOU and what you want to achieve with your jazz. Do you just want to play famous tunes like Summertime or Take Five, or do you want to be able to improvise? Do you want to be able to improvise on a simple blues scale or do you want to be able to play over complicated changes, or maybe modal music? So the first step is to really have a think what jazz is to you and what your goals are and what you want to achieve by playing jazz.

So first of all let's talk about the first approach and that is learning the theory of jazz. I guess you'd say this was my early path. I went to the Fife Youth Jazz Orchestra and I went to various jazz summer schools and I really went through the jazz education system which of course is not traditionally how jazz was learned in its infancy back in the 40s, 50s and 60s. But yep, I'm a total product of the jazz education system which has got its pros and cons which we'll talk about later. 

So how can you learn the theory, the cerebral part of jazz, the knowledge, the nuts and bolts? Well, you can obviously take private lessons. I know that many of you who've got a teacher and hopefully that teacher can teach you this kind of theory. You can also buy books there's many books, great books, on jazz and now of course just like you're watching here you can go to YouTube which is increasingly becoming the most popular resource to find out about jazz. This is all quite sort of more bite-sized stuff compared to going to music college itself which is a very detailed and intensive education into music. 

I went to university to do music and then I went to the Guildhall School of Music to do a postgraduate degree in jazz and studio music and I learnt a hell of a lot there. In fact let me just grab my notes... So here are just a few of my notes that I took at the Guildhall School of Music. It's all very detailed and this is just the tip of the iceberg. 

So, the kind of stuff that you can learn when you go to music college or from books or even from YouTube is: chord types, the modes of the major and melodic minor scale, chord scale relationships, common chord sequences, what two five ones are, how to use enclosures, how to use rhythmic devices, improvising techniques, best practices for playing jazz, group interplay, you can learn all these things at music college, which is exactly what I did, and if you study with me I can teach you the theory of all these things as well. All this stuff is super important, however, it's not the be-all and all as you'll see when we move on to approach two.

So approach two is learning from the masters. Behind me you can see some classic albums and you can see some of the most famous players of jazz saxophone in history. Now for me this is what I did after college. When I went to music college I studied the very theoretical, cerebral parts of jazz which I could then apply when I started studying the Masters and what I did was I transcribed as much as I could. Loads of different solos of classic players, classic recordings. So the main body of work you can do in learning from the Masters is, of course, transcribing them. 

I always say it but you can go to my video linked up there on transcribing to learn how to do it. What I did was, after I'd finished music school and I’d accumulated all that theoretical knowledge, I then started transcribing all the best players in jazz, and I don't know where the rest of them have gone, this is only a small percentage of what I did. I learned the solos. I wrote them all out. I saw what these people were doing: Sonny Stitt, Sonny Rollins, loads of John Coltrane, even modern players, you know, Branford and all the rest of it and I studied those recordings until I learnt how these people did it. 

So what do you get from studying the Masters? Well, you learn phrasing, you learn articulation, how to sound really in the pocket and authentic, you learn that from transcribing solos. You learn rhythm and a great feel and a great time feel because you have to exactly copy how they play it, you learn great licks, the basis of jazz language, you learn the feel of how to play jazz, you learn to emulate the sound of your favorite players, and of course, you learn a lot of different jazz tunes while you're doing all your transcribing. 

So for me, approach two has to be done hand in hand with step one which is learning theory. Without the theory, you could just go straight to the masters and learn, which is probably better than just doing approach one to be honest, but then using the theory you can put the two together, and then you can look at the masters knowing what the theory is as well and THAT'S the real golden ticket. So step two - learn from the Masters and transcribe your heart out!

Now step three is learning how to play your instrument. You can have all the theory in the world and you can transcribe as many solos as you want, but if you can't play saxophone you're in big trouble. So for me this has just been ongoing work throughout my whole life. Working on technical exercises, studies with a tuner to improve my intonation, lots of tone stuff, so this is stuff that you must work on. Studying the great players in approach two will actually help your technique because you need to get that technique to play a lot of the stuff that they play. 

So you can have a private teacher again, you can goto youtube, you can get books, you can go to music college, all the same ways of learning how to really master your instrument, and of course watching this channel. And you're going to learn how to get a fantastic tone, you're gonna learn to master the technique of the saxophone, finger technique, body position, breathing, articulation, tonguing, you're gonna learn how to use overtones, you're going to develop embouchure strength, you're gonna improve your intonation and you're gonna extend the usable range of your horn - definitely to the bottom and hopefully into another octave above the normal saxophone range. 

So these are all the things that you're going to learn when you master your instrument - now that is going to let you play the transcriptions that you've made and it's also going to help you apply the theory that you've learned. 

The double whammy is using exercises which use the theory you've learned and developing new technical expertise. So for example in my video linked up there now on scales, how to practice scales part two, you can practice your scales in thirds but using your theoretical knowledge you can or you can also start memorizing what chords it is you're playing. 

So for example if I'm in C major and I play 7th chords going up the C major scale it sounds like this...If you know your theory from step one you can start ingraining in your head that that's C major seven, D minor 7, E minor 7, F major 7, G7, A minor 7, B minor 7 flat 5 as you are playing it - so you're getting your technique together and you’re starting to learn about chords.

The final step four, is synthesizing that's easy to say isn't it, synthesizing everything that you've learned from one to three. So you’ve learnt the theory and you have to mix that in with the transcriptions that you've learned from the masters and analyze what they're playing using the theory and then learn from it and then using your technique you can execute those ideas. 

But at the end of the day you have to try and make as much of that automatic as you can. So really you learn one two and three and then you have to do your very best to forget it all because the most important thing about music is expressing yourself - your heart and soul. 

Everyone lives and breathes music. Imagine a world without music - it would be absolutely miserable. You know, I’ve made my whole life about saxophone and music and I LOVE it! I love it love it love it!! And presumably YOU love it because you're watching this video, so when you play jazz sometimes it can be too overwhelming dealing with everything -chords - Ugh! Where am I? Where's the chord sequence? But practicing enough will help you internalize enough of that so that you can really express the emotion of what you want to communicate through your sax and of course the greatest musicians have all done that. 

They, they go above and beyond technical considerations to be the Masters that they are. That might be quite a lofty aspiration for most but try at the end of the day, whenever you play, just to make music. Leave space, listen, try and communicate an idea, something meaningful. So that is the fourth step of putting it all together.

So that's it for this week. Hopefully I've given you an overarching roadmap on the kind of things that you're going to need to get together if you want to play jazz. You need to learn some theory, some knowledge, you need to study the great players and see how they're doing to make it sound like jazz. You need to get your saxophone together and finally you need to synthesize it all into an expression that's meaningful musically and that can communicate some emotion, people!

Thanks again for watching, I really appreciate you guys watching these videos and giving me all your support. Remember to go and have a look at the 1-hour saxophone success masterclass at www.getyoursaxtogether.com/masterclass.I've put together a PDF for this lesson, which you can get from the link in the description, which is summarizing the main points of what I've been talking about and giving you some of the resources that you can go to from my previous videos to help you on your journey learning how to play jazz on saxophone. It's been a pleasure - I look forward to seeing you next week, keep practicing smart, keep enjoying your instrument and I'll see you later. Bye!