The Jazz Bassist

The jazz bassist is always improvising. Whether you’re taking a solo over changes or you are playing whole-notes on a slow ballad… The jazz bassist is always striving to be in the moment and choosing what they play based on what’s happening around them. A real jazz bassist will never play a song the same way twice. Every moment is packed with the potential to create.

That said, it takes a long time to get to the point where you can be truly free in the moment and improvise your way through any chord changes, sometimes replacing them with your own because you want to emote or convey something different in the moment, or have the ‘ears’ to follow someone in the band when they take liberties, and interact meaningfully with things as they evolve and change, in real time and with intention.

What does it require to be a proficient jazz bassist?

That’s entirely subjective, but I’ll give you my thoughts:

• Harmonic awareness - a lifelong pursuit of the understanding of jazz harmony as well as the need to always see where else it can go. The better you understand the rules, the easier it is to break them and do something interesting , thought provoking and musically meaningful.

• Stylistic awareness - the proficient jazz bassist has done their listening homework and explored the approaches of a myriad of players. They know the roots of the music and have listened to every era of the style, at least a bit… This doesn’t mean that you have to blast dixieland in the car while driving down the highway, but you should at least explore the style and see if there’s anything that you connect with or can learn from it. Jazz is a life-long pursuit of evolution and knowledge. Jazz musicians are the theoretical physicists of the music world.

• Fearlessness - my greatest area of struggle in my development as a functional jazz musician (that and hating dixieland. (I kid, I kid). In order to speak freely and commit to improvising as a way of life, musically speaking, you also have to embrace ‘mistakes’. A lot of the great moments are born out of unintentional notes. The ability to make a ‘bad note’ sound good is really the ability to accept that note, and understand how to use it to your advantage. Turning a mistake into an ear-catching harmonic resolution. Once you deeply believe that all notes are created equal, to some extent, and allow yourself the freedom to explore within that construct, it’s liberating. You realize that it’s more about context than wrong notes and right notes. You start thinking with a broader perspective and your ears are more open to interesting harmonic relationships.

Keep in mind… I’m a groove guy who has worked a lot on jazz. Enough that I have played with some pretty phenomenal jazz musicians and gotten called back but, I don’t really consider myself a ‘jazz musician’ so much as an… improvising pocket player.

The good news is that I think a lot of musicians just starting to explore jazz are coming from a similar place and may resonate with the methods that I adopted for myself when I committed to learning more about playing jazz. This entire website basically represents my journey to understanding jazz, and therefore music, as a pocket player who aspired to be able to do it all one day.

Fundamentals Module | Scales 1 | Arpeggios/Chord Construction 1 | Walking Bass | Play-throughs | Transcription | Ear Training | Rhythm | Reading | Scales 2 | Arpeggios/Chord Construction 2 | Chords on the Bass

Fundamentals

It’s of the utmost importance that we develop a solid foundation. When you couple good practice with a strong foundation, we have the most efficient path towards realizing real growth on our instrument.

Click the button in order to download some helpful shape diagrams for the pentatonic, major and minor scales referenced in a few of these lessons.

top of page

Scales: The Basics

A jazz musician has a deep understanding of scales, modes and chord construction. It’s a pre-requisite to meangful improvisation over chord changes. We’ll dive a little deeper into this stuff later on in these lessons, but here is the more foundational side of scales and major scale harmony.

The following videos are designed to help you with both your internalization of the scale basics and how to use them but also your mindset with regard to the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of it all.

top of page

Arpeggios and Chord Construction: The Basics

And here, we begin to explore arpeggios and, by extension, chord construction. Chords are really just scales played in 3rds (instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, we will be stacking them in 3rds. 1, 3, 5, 7, 2, 4, 6 or 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, as you will come to think of them)

top of page

Walking Bass Module

Download the practice charts, transcriptions and play-along audio at the bottom of the page!

TIP: Take your time with each of these lessons (especially when things get a little more open to interpretation). As they say, “It’s not a sprint… it’s a marathon”. Slow & steady….. You’ve got all the time in the world. Just focus, listen and let your ears guide you when your brain isn’t sure what’s “right”.

top of page

A Breakdown Of My Approach To A Few Tunes:

top of page

 Transcription:

Transcription is at the heart of the jazz student. Not only do you need to explore the vocabulary of music in a broad way but you need to have a deep understanding of different style and approaches to how one can navigate chord changes, whether walking, playing free, or soloing. Although we classify quite a broad range of musics as ‘jazz’, it is possibly one of the more stylistically diverse styles of music because the jazz mind is one of broadening boundaries, trying new things and breaking new ground. By definition, jazz isn’t just swing music…. It’s more defined by it’s improvisatory nature and tendency towards syncopation.

In other words, it’s a style defined by harmonic awareness and rhythm, married with an explorative approach.

Due to copyright laws, I can’t just add my favorite tunes and streaming audio of their music but I can give you a list as a launching point and provide some public YouTube videos as a launching point.

The real pro will have enough music under their belt and in their head that, even if they don’t exactly know a tune, they’ll know it enough to give a reasonable facsimile when someone calls a cover. The bets jazz musicians only need to be able to hear the melody in their heads in order to reproduce them on their instruments. This is a result of a lifetimes commitment to always growing and exploring. Don’t be daunted though! The important thing is that you are continually trying to be just a little bit better tomorrow than you were today. Jzzz musicians tend to be obsessed not with being better than another player, but being better than themselves, every day. The results take less time to become apparent than you might think (yet, the journey is endless).

The following videos are just a launching point. Tailor your transcriptions to your own aesthetics and genre preferences. Bottom line, find the music you love and the players you’d like to emulate and start learning their bass lines, one note at a time.

Internalizing transcriptions to the point that they become vocabulary means that you embrace repetition. You don’t have to transcribe an entire 6 minute song! Grab licks… grab melodic phrases that you find striking… grab melodies that you like (a melody is called the ‘head’. in jazz)… Additionally, don’t just transcribe bassists! Especially when transcribing soloists, there’s no need to limit your exploration to bassists. In fact, I prefer to transcribe horn players, pianists and guitarists. I' want to go the source! They play melodies as a part of their job description. I want to ‘see’ how they perceive their harmonic lines and licks’. For example, Chet Baker’s vocal solos are some of my greatest founts of melodic approach and sensibility.

I could post a hundred videos from each of these players… If one resonates with you, do some digging and find more. I’ll just post one video from each of these world class players.

First, here are a few thoughts about how to go about transcribing tunes as well as a ‘process’ video of me transcribing Erick Coomes on “166th St.”, by the band ‘Lettuce’.

Some Players I find inspiring and motivational:

I’ll likely continually add to this list in particular. There are just too many players and groups that come to mind. I have choice paralysis. Here are the first dozen or so that come to mind…

top of page

Ear Training

While trancsription is a fantastic way to develop your ‘ears’ (as well as being more fun and satisfying in some ways), there are other ways to really take your development to the next level. Specifically training yourself to improve upon your relative pitch, or even develop perfect pitch (yes… you can train yourself to have perfect pitch or, at the very least, much improves relative pitch).

• Singing along with your practice. Learn to really pay attention to the sounds of the intervals. Can you play a major 3rd and then sing it back? Can you do it enough to play a note and automatically hear and sing a major 3rd above that note?

• Even just hearing a melody or bass line and singing it back is a good way to start developing your pitch recognition. Take it further by playing various intervals and singing them back to yourself.

• If you have a piano, play chords and try to identify each note of the chord with your voice.

• Play a basic triad and try to sing the available tensions of the chord (advanced mode!)

These are some examples of how you start to work on this at home.

Harmonomics • A buddy of mine (and phenomenal and versatile musician) developed an ear-training app that is a deep dive right into the serious kind of ear-training one would do at a conservatory. He uses it regularly and it shows.

This is exactly how he practices ear training (and he’s WAY better at it than I am, to be honest).

top of page

Rhythm Module

Jazz is as much about syncopation as it is harmony. The clave, or mother-rhythm of jazz is really syncopation. It’s in the upbeats! For this reason, we can’t ignore our subdivisions.

You may recognize this as the ‘Rhythm Module’. You’d be accurate.

Personally, working with rhythm like this (like a drummer) was crucial in my development of my internal time and my external time-feel. I still feel like this is one of the best ways to begin your exploration of time and time-keeping (aside from just playing music with recordings and other humans, of course. NOTHING beats that, ultimately).

downloads:

TIP: Take your time with each of these lessons (especially when things get a little more open to interpretation). As they say, “It’s not a sprint… it’s a marathon”. Slow & steady….. You’ve got all the time in the world. Just focus, listen and let your ears guide you when your brain isn’t sure what’s “right”.

top of page

 Reading Notation

You don’t have to know how to read in order to play well (in any style). BUT… it makes everything easier… You can work through written exercises, notate your transcriptions, get WAY more gigs (the best way to learn, is to gig) and studying new styles, concepts or approaches at home in the shed is just more efficient if you can use written examples.

Here, you’ll find a few videos that I’ve done with regard to reading the basic ‘road map’s of chord charts or lead-sheets.

Beyond that, the only way to practice reading is to do it! It’s all about mental muscle memory and to reinforce that just takes doing and repetition.

• As this is all about reinforcing mental muscle memory, reading even 20 minutes per day will serve you FAR better than doing it in large chunks of time, but only once per week. You need to build slowly and gradually upon what you internalized yesterday, in order to grow. Reading notation is one of the more explicit ‘use it or lose it’ type skills that I’ve come across.

Beyond that, having music to read at home is the best way to practice this. Here are some book recommendations: (most are also listed on the MATERIALS page)

NOTE: There are also a ton of worksheets as well as etudes on the MATERIALS page that you should absolutely download and utilize!

You should DEFINITELY hit the play-along page and explore the Erskine Jazz Essentials play-along series. I mean… if you’re going to practice playing bass in a jazz style, you might as well get to play with Peter Erskine and Alan Pasqua!!

top of page

Scales: Going Further

Let’s go a bit further in our exploration of scales, chord scales & modes.

top of page

 Arpeggios and Chord Construction: Going Further

top of page

Chords on the Bass Module

Make sure to download the worksheets at the bottom of the page!

Chords are a phenomenal way to map out harmonic shapes on your fretboard (and they sound cool, too). Internalizing chord shapes and relationships not only gives you an interesting sonic palette from which to draw from, but it also gives you a quick skeletal structure of harmony which you can make use of in your bass lines, solos, licks…. Studying chords on your instrument helps with everything, whether or not you ever intend to actually play them on the gig.

top of page