The Jazz Bassist
Walking, soloing, and the language of jazz.
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.
— sections.
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.
A jazz musician has a deep understanding of scales, modes and chord construction. It’s a pre-requisite to meaningful 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.
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’ll come to think of them).
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). It’s not a sprint — it’s a marathon. Slow and steady. Focus, listen, and let your ears guide you when your brain isn’t sure what’s ‘right.’
Walking bass applied to actual standards. Watching me play through tunes lets you hear how scales, arpeggios, and walking concepts actually fit together in real music. Listen, watch, then play along.
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 styles and approaches to how one can navigate chord changes — walking, playing free, or soloing. Although we classify quite a broad range of musics as ‘jazz,’ it’s possibly one of the more stylistically diverse styles because the jazz mind is one of broadening boundaries and breaking new ground. Jazz isn’t just swing music — it’s defined by its improvisatory nature and tendency towards syncopation.
The real pro will have enough music under their belt 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 best jazz musicians only need to be able to hear the melody in their heads in order to reproduce it on their instruments. This is a result of a lifetime’s commitment to always growing and exploring.
Internalizing transcriptions to the point that they become vocabulary means you embrace repetition. You don’t have to transcribe an entire 6-minute song. Grab licks. Grab melodic phrases that you find striking. And don’t just transcribe bassists — especially for soloists, there’s no need to limit your exploration to bassists. I prefer horn players, pianists, and guitarists. They play melodies as part of their job description. I want to see how they perceive their harmonic lines.
While transcription is a fantastic way to develop your ‘ears’ (and 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-improved relative pitch).
Sing along with your practice. Learn to really pay attention to the sounds of the intervals. Hearing a melody or bass line and singing it back is a great way to start developing pitch recognition. 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!).
Harmonomics — a buddy of mine (and phenomenal 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.
Rhythm. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — all the right notes in the world won’t save you if it doesn’t feel good. Rhythm is a massive part of feel, of course.
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 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).
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-maps 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.
Reading even 20 minutes per day will serve you FAR better than doing it in large chunks once per week. Reading notation is one of the more explicit ‘use it or lose it’ type skills.
Let’s go a bit further in our exploration of scales, chord scales & modes.
The advanced harmonic stuff — extensions, upper-structure triads, voice leading, substitutions. This is the gear that takes you from "I can play through changes" to "I can hear the changes and play *through* them" — which is a different feeling entirely. It also opens up a lot more melodic territory.
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, and licks. Studying chords on your instrument helps with everything, whether or not you ever intend to actually play them on the gig.
