John Scofield On Improvisation

[00:00:02]There's sort of a myth about jazz improvisation or improvisation of any kind.

[00:00:07]And uh I think a lot of people think that it just comes out of the blue and out of from inspiration that you suddenly hear this melody in your head and and play it. And that's partially true. But uh you're all musicians and you know as well as uh as anybody does that that improvisation is really just sort of speeded up composition and putting together things you already know. You already know how to do and putting together these things in a in a pretty uh artistic way, I suppose. You could say.

[00:00:41]And that comes down to [clears throat] really knowing your tools, which is I think playing on chord changes, which is knowing what notes sound right over what chords.

[00:00:52]Okay.

[00:00:53]Let's uh start with the first one, C major scale.

[00:01:01]Now, we're all pretty familiar with that sound.

[00:01:03]>> [music] >> Now, this works over C major 7.

[00:01:08]There you go.

[00:01:09]>> [music] >> Now, that's pretty boring to just play the major scale all the time, right?

[00:01:23]There are a lot of things you can do with it.

[00:02:03]>> [music] >> And that scale works over a major chord.

[00:02:13]Uh the second scale is Dorian. So, this works over a minor chord, C minor.

[00:02:37]>> [music] [music] >> Now, any of these scales uh the way to get something out of the scales is by taking apart all the intervals in the scale. Now, here we are on Dorian.

[00:02:59]What I can do is I can just play the scale.

[00:03:03]I can play thirds in the scale, which is this pattern.

[00:03:07]>> [music] >> Play fourths in the scale.

[00:03:19]I can play fifths.

[00:03:21]>> [music] >> Uh whoops.

[00:03:29]Play sixths.

[00:03:35]>> [music] >> Play the interval of a seventh in the scale. This is just taking the scales and dividing it up into all the possible intervalic combinations.

[00:03:48]I can take the scale and start it from the first note.

[00:03:51]Make a four-note arpeggio out of it. I can start from the second note.

[00:03:55]>> [music] [music] >> And this is how you get away from just playing things that just sound like scales. Okay, the third scale is something called the Phrygian scale.

[00:04:16]It's a major scale starting on the third degree. This also works over C minor, but sort of has a Spanish sound [music] to it.

[00:04:32]>> [music] [music]