Jazz Workshop Australia

Jazz Workshop Australia is a music school in Sydney, Australia, dedicated to the teaching and learning of jazz and improvised music. It is owned and operated by Saul Richardson, Principal, and Karen Richards, Managing Director. It is in a purpose-built space at 58 Atchison St, St Leonards, NSW, Australia.

The vision behind the Jazz Workshop is to make high quality jazz education easily available to students, in one convenient and well-resourced location. We bring motivated students, of all ages and levels, together with some of Australia's finest jazz musician/educators.

It is rare to find a jazz musician who is a truly excellent teacher, who recognises education and their own teaching as a vital aspect of their own professional practice. It is equally rare to find an experienced teacher who is also an expert, working professional jazz player.

At Jazz Workshop Australia we have worked hard to find prominent musicians in whom each of these qualities is combined: Our teaching faculty are all outstanding players and excellent teachers. They are available for private music lessons on: Saxophone, trumpet, trombone, piano, bass, drums, guitar, clarinet, flute, violin and singing.

Another brilliant aspect of the Jazz Workshop is that we offer students the opportunity to play in a range of jazz bands: big bands, jazz combos, and even a jazz for strings ensemble. Students from diverse areas and backgrounds get to work together, playing jazz music and learning the essential skills of jazz improvisation, small group ensemble skills, and self confidence. We offer good, structured rehearsals, access to a huge library of wonderful music, and a community of like minded, motivated students.

During school holidays, and often at other times too, Jazz Workshop Australia runs jazz improvisation workshops. These range from "Jazz For Kids", for primary school kids, through our popular "Introduction to Jazz Improvisation" to advanced improvisation workshops. Most are presented by Saul Richardson, but guest presenters at the Jazz Workshop have included Jamie Oehlers, Jacam Manricks, John Conley, John Morrison, Matt Baker, and even Bob Mintzer.

As part of our project to create a vibrant community of jazz musicians on Sydney's north shore, we also open our facility to professional groups as a rehearsal venue. Swing City, the Jazzgroove Mothership Orchestra, Ralph Pyl's Sydney Allstars Big Band, Blue Riff Big Band, the Black and White Big Band, Gai Bryant's Spare Parts orchestra with Jim McNeely, Tom Burlinson, Blaine Whittaker, and many others have all used our fully equipped and soundproof rehearsal room.

Jazz Workshop Australia operates international and domestic performance tours for student ensembles. OUr most recent tour took a band of our students to New York, Florida and Barbados for great gigs plus workshops with Rufus Reid, John Fedchock and the University of Southern Florida Jazz Ensemble. The students also went to Iridium jazz club in New York city to see an all star band with Cedar Walton, Jimmy Cobb, Javon Jackson, and Buster Williams. A tour like this is an unforgettable experience! We are available help schools and other bands to organise their own overseas tours too, drawing on our years of experience and huge network of contacts.

Perhaps our most exciting event is the annual Jazz Camp, directed by John Morrison. John is one of Australia's great jazz drummers and is a truly inspirational educator who has encouraged and mentored generations of young jazz musicians. Jazz Camp is held in late January in Sydney. It is a residential camp, bringing together some of the keenest and most accomplished students from all over Australia and New Zealand. It caters to students ages 11 to 19 Year at all levels of experience.

We run a shorter, non-residential camp for adults, usually in February.

Jazz Workshop Australia, and our venue, the Jazz Workshop, is a unique and exciting project. We invite anybody keen to learn and play jazz music to visit us and participate in any of the huge range of opportunities on offer.

Improvising in minor keys: The Bebop Minor scale

The Bebop Minor Scale
For young players looking for a scale for improvising in minor keys, the Bebop Minor scale is an excellent option. It is spelled as follows:
1, 2, b3, 4, 5, b6, b7, 7, 8

This is a natural (Aeolian) scale with a raised seventh added to it. Some people, such as Randy Halberstad, refer to this as the bebop harmonic minor scale. Mark Levine calls it the Bebop natural minor scale. The so-called "bebop scales" are normal diatonic scales or modes with one extra passing note added so that there are 8 different notes in the octave. The bebop minor scale is the relative of the bebop major scale, which has a #5 added to it. Such scales, for bebop players, facilitated the long flowing quaver lines favoured by bebop musicians from the 1940's on.

Whatever we call it doesn't really matter. The important thing is that is an effective choice for improvising in a tune, or section of a tune, that is in a minor key. That is a tune with a minor key centre, especially if there is V - I harmony or II-V-I harmony present. The bebop minor scale, starting on the tonic, emphasizes the chord tones in a minor 7 chord (1, b3, 5, b7). When it is played from the leading note (the raised seventh) it outlines chord tones from chord V in the minor key (3, 5, b7, b9). It is also a close match to chord II (b6, 1, b3, b5).

In fact, using a Shearing-style block chord harmony approach, the bebop minor scale can pretty effectively outline every chord in a minor key, just by changing emphasis (or mode). Take care with the raised 7th against chord IV, which can be a little ugly.

Here is an example of how a beginner improviser might effectively play, using a key centre approach, through a tune with two key centers. Bernie's tune is a 32 bar AABA song. The A sections are in D minor (I, VI, II, V, I) and the B section is in Bb major (I, VI, II, V). In the A sections, then, use the D bebop minor scale, which can easily outline all the chords. In the B section use the jazz pentatonic (major blues) scale.

This approach gives the less experienced improviser something they can play without too much difficulty that will allow them to sound good and in style. There are other things more advanced players do, but this is a really effective "entry level" technique. In fact, it is more than that, as it is very close to what many professional players do too. This is a great thing for anyone who wants to learn how to improvise.

To summarise, then: If a tune (or section of a tune) is in a minor key, the bebop minor scale is a great choice.

Blues Scale

Should young and beginner improvisers use the blues scale? No, and yes!

Here's why, in my opinion, it can be a bad idea.

1. It is often the path of least resistance for amateur jazz educators. How to begin improvising -well, you can just use a blues scale all the way through a blues, they say. But hang on. Exactly how many professional jazz players do that -use nothing but a blues scale in a blues solo? Hardly any, if at all! It is really unusual. When students want to learn how to play jazz, they want to know how to play the kind of stuff they hear US playing, not be fobbed off with some lazy lie about "just use a blues scale, man". If you want a simple, lazy approach, try my jazz pentatonic scale idea, a few posts below.

2. We are teaching beginners, so of course we just give them a three chord blues to play on. The blues scale has notes to clash in the worst way with every single chord in the progression. The 4th and b5 of chord I; The b9, and 4th of chord IV; The 4th, b6 and Maj7 of chord V. For what ever reason, kids gravitate towards these notes, in a bad way, and too often sound terrible.

However, the blues is also a key sound in jazz, and many of those dissonances are important, and can be cool. However, they are usually only cool in the hands of an experienced player, who has done plenty of listening.

Think of the blues scale as something that is added to other sounds to create a different colour. It is like decorations hung on a christmas tree. The tree is the main thing -without it, the decorations are just a pile of shiny rubbish lying in the corner. Blues scale is like that -without other stuff going on, it can just be rubbish.

Music Lessons: good teachers are worth it

Happy new year everyone.

To learn to play jazz well, it is important to take music lessons with the best teacher you can get for your instrument. Why? Because it will accelerate your progress dramatically. Playing an instrument is not always intuitive, and jazz brings a whole host of techniques specific to its various genres.

A good teacher will help you with efficient technique, will provide a model for good tone and posture, and will help clarify what is important and what isn't?

How do you know if you have a good teacher? Here are some characteristics of bad and good teachers. This is based on my experiences as a student and my observations as a teacher and performer

BAD teachers

• don't plan lessons. They just do whatever comes into their head at the time. Teachers who "just show you a new song each week" are nearly always wasting your time
• don't give you a balanced program of technique, improvisation, repertoire, aural, theory
• are unreliable. They only really want your money, when it is convenient for them, so they will cancel your lesson for the slightest reason.
• are often late to your lesson
• do the same thing with every student instead of meeting the needs of each individual
• don't prepare for lessons. They often spend a lot of the time you paid for writing things out or photocopying. They will also answer phone calls during your lesson.

GOOD teachers

• Plan lessons for each student
• are prepared for each lesson. They spend the time you paid for actually teaching you
• work through a program that meets the needs of each individual
• present a balance in lessons between technique, improvisation, repertoire, aural and theory
• will make every effort to get to your lesson, because they are professional. Even if all their other students cancel on a given day, they will still feel it is worthwhile teaching you.
• assess your progress and help you work through weaknesses, but will move at a good pace through things you can do well

Do you have a good teacher, or a bad one? Anyone can call themself a "music teacher". However, there is a lot more to it than that. Sadly, in my experience, most of the people who call themselves teachers are really just wannabe performers between gigs. They just want money, they don't care about you. The wannabe just wants to fund their fantasy of living the life of a musician. Do yourself a favour, and avoid them!

There are lots of dedicated professional educators who will take you seriously and do a good job of teaching you. Ironically, most of them also seem to be much more successful, and busier, performers than the "wannabes".

Where can you find a good teacher? Well, there are places like my music school Jazz Workshop Australia. Also look for people who are teaching at good universities or successful high schools. A great idea is to find really good young players and find out who taught them.

Good luck, it is worth it.

How to keep your jazz band motivated

Keeping your band motivated

By Saul Richardson

1. Goal setting

2. Rehearsal cycle

3. Plenty of music

4. Plan for a positive experience

5. Empower the students

6. Set high standards

7. Tight rehearsals

Goal Setting

Make band for something. Set achievable goals for the short, mid and long term.

Short term goals might include learning a new chart, and end of term concert, entering an eisteddfod, a workshop with a prominent musician.

Mid term goals might be an annual performance trip away, a major concert perhaps with a famous musician, a jazz festival or a CD recording.

Long term goals can include an regional or overseas tour, participation in a major competition, or to become recognized as a leader in your field.

Every time you rehearse, it really helps if the is something coming up, some reason for the rehearsal even if it is a quite distant long term goal.

The rehearsal cycle

Have a rehearsal cycle. Have periods of weeks, sometimes even a couple of months, when the band can focus exclusively on learning new music. Schedule no concerts, and decline offers of gigs if you can. Let the band spend time working at learning and perfecting new material.

Performances can actually get in the way of learning. Too busy a schedule can force us into the trap of just running over the same pieces again and again. If a concert is immanent, there is always pressure to polish the few pieces you will be playing, rather than setting aside time for something new

Play plenty of music

Play lots of new music throughout the year. This makes it interesting for the musicians and teaches them to sight read at the same time.

Early in the process or with a new band things will usually be very hard going. You may struggle to get through two or three charts in a term, or even longer. However, persistence will pay off. Certainly spend most time working on those charts, but set aside some time every rehearsal for sight reading. It might just be the first eight bars of a new tune. It doesn't matter, so long as the students are sight reading.

The worst thing you can do is what I call the competition method: A band learns only three or four charts in a year and “perfects” them so they can get high grades in various competitions. The students will more or less learn by rote. They will not learn to sight read, and the band will never be able to play more than three or four charts per year. The competitions might be exciting, but the band will be tedious.

We spend most of our time in rehearsals teaching the same things over and over again. The same “tricky” rhythms, the same things about accents, articulations, note lengths, cut-offs, dynamics, listening, intonation. The big band music young bands play typically involves different combinations of the same rhythmic cliches, the same articulations, even the same structure. Sight reading is largely when the students can generalize from one chart to another and recognize the similarities.

One of my bands, at North Sydney Boys' High School, can easily get through fifty charts in a year, playing all of them to a high performance standard. They can do this because the band can sight read. We can spend our precious little rehearsal time working on higher level concepts like ensemble and interpretation, rather than being bogged down by lower order things like notes and rhythms.

The way to start a band on the way to being able to sight read is to give them plenty of music to play. However, it is important that there is variety too.

Variety of music includes a variety of levels of difficulty as well as of style. A band should play music at its own level plus or minus a couple of levels. Most of what you do should be just a bit challenging for the band, but playable with rehearsal. A few pieces should be really tough for them, maybe even so difficult that you won't ever perform them. Your students will benefit from, and enjoy, playing this music.

Every band should also have a set of easy music, things the band can more or less sight read and that stay in the folders permanently. These charts sound great every time the band plays them. They also mean that you don't need to waste rehearsal time rehashing old music every time an ordinary gig comes along, disrupting the learning cycle.

Plan for a positive experience

It is vital that band is a fun, positive experience. When you band plays in public they and their parents should come away feeling good about what they have achieved. In concerts, program music so that most of it is comfortably playable by the band. Intersperse this with a few challenging party pieces, but only if they are properly prepared. If the party piece doesn't sound amazing, it isn't ready yet.

A word of caution too: it often seems like a good idea to end a gig with your biggest, showiest number. But what shape are young players “chops” likely to be in by the end of a gig? The average school band seems to be burnt out after about fifteen minutes of playing. End the concert with something solidly impressive, but not too demanding. Don't risk a train wreck during the closing number, because that will leave a poor impression and will leave the students feeling disappointed. Audiences will remember the last thing you played more than what happened in the middle of the set.

The same goes for rehearsals. Try to end with a strong piece so the kids can go away feeling good and motivated. When rehearsing new music play the section or sections of the piece you want to work on and then stop. Don't let it peter out and end in disaster. Tidy up whatever it is you want to focus on that day and then say “that's all I wanted to do with that one today”, and move on.

Empower the students

Teach your students about jazz and how to play it, including improvisation and rhythm section techniques. This helps put them more in control of the music and makes it a whole lot more fun.

One of the things that makes jazz fun to play is its interactivity. This is especially true for the rhythm section. There are times, for instance during improvised solos, when the musicians are (or should be) improvising collectively, making something exciting and musical out of a few vague chord symbols or suggested drum rhythms. Teach your rhythm section and soloists to do this and you band will be transformed. If you don't feel confident teaching this side of things, get someone to come in and work with them a few times.

Encouraging the students to organize and run their own sectional rehearsals is a powerful way for them to develop leadership, independence and responsibility, and ownership of the music. The extra practice also helps the band sound better. Many students only play their instrument once per week, in rehearsal. If they do sectionals, they will play twice each week.

Set high standards

Set very high standards. Make it clear that you, and the band, demand quality. Build a culture that values quality through persistent effort.

Give realistic feedback to students, both praise and criticism. When something is praiseworthy explain why, and likewise if it is not. We do our students no favours by telling them they are good when they aren't. The Count Basie band is good. The Jazzgroove Mothership Orchestra is good. Does your band sound just the same as them? If not, why not? What are the differences between them and your band? Believe it or not, there are student bands that come close to a professional standard. If your students aren't there yet, let them know! Praise improvement, praise effort, let them know they are on the way or they are better than before, but don't give them delusions of being something they are not. That just builds arrogance, complacency, laziness, and mediocrity.

Tight rehearsals

Rehearsals should be disciplined, but fun. They should be planned, logical and have purpose that the students can see. A good rehearsal has a sense of urgency about it, and a feeling that everything is being done for a reason, and that it is important work.

As director one of your jobs is to control the mood. Make jokes and allow others to make jokes, but stay focused. Sometimes you need to be very serious, othertimes light hearted. Vary the pacing of the session too. Don't always do the same thing. Predictability will become boring, so avoid it.

Insist on punctuality, start on time, and end on time. Try to set a good example yourself. But if you are running late, the rehearsal should begin without you. They can still play music without you there. It is the job of section leaders and senior players to make this happen.

The “Jazz Pentatonic” scale

The “Jazz Pentatonic” scale

This is a name I have made up. It really refers to a major pentatonic scale with a flat third added to it as a blue note.

It is spelled:

1, 2, b3, 3, 5, 6, 8

It can be used effectively in any tune or section of a tune that is not in a minor key. In other words over major and dominant chord structures. Shelley Berg uses a similar approach in his “Chop Monster” method. I have also seen Australian musician/educator Ed Wilson use this approach successfully to teach complete beginners. Dan Greenblatt calls it the major blues scale in his book The Blues Scales.

It is common for beginning improvisers to be taught blues tunes and to be told to use the blues scale throughout. This can work, but is actually difficult. Also, it does not reflect what jazz musicians actually play when they improvise on a blues. We do use the blues scale, but only in conjunction with many other sounds. In fact, it is very, very, rare for a jazz musician to construct a whole solo using only the blues scale. And yet we tell young players to do so. Why? Because we think it is an easy way out. Plus, it is called the blues scale, so it must be right? But it isn’t…

The jazz pentatonic scale comes much closer to what professional jazz musicians play over a blues progression. As students progress they can add passing notes to the pentatonic scale, including notes from the blues scale. This will add variety to the sound and help create more flowing lines.

Then, as they progress still further and develop an awareness of time in their playing, students can use the many other techniques jazz players use in improvisations.

Unlike the blues scale, the Jazz Pentatonic avoids clashes:

Blues scale includes notes 4, and b5 of Chord I, 4, b9 of chord IV and 4 of chord V. Young beginners will, if given the option, ALWAYS, play the 4th against a major or dominant. They gravitate towards it. Jeff Jarvis called it “ the magnetic fourth”.

The minor 3rd of the jazz pentatonic scale against the major 3rd of major and dominant chords is a “blue note”, but is a common and accepted sound. It is a juxtaposition we are used to hearing.

The Jazz Pentatonic is easy to play, easy to hear, easy to teach and avoids bad notes. It allows beginning improvisers to sound good straight away. It gives them something they can reliably use while they learn more advanced techniques.

Examples of usage:

Blues whatever key the blues is in, use a jazz pentatonic scale in the same key. Emphasise the key note. This is an example of using the scale through a whole tune.

Rhythm changes Concert Bb jazz pentatonic scale through the A section. In the bridge, 2 bars each of D jazz pent., G jazz pent, C jazz pent and F jazz pent. This is an example of using the scale in a section of a tune.

Blue Bossa Use concert Db jazz pent. In bars 9 through 12 (II V I in Db major). Here is another example of using the scale in a section of a tune. The rest of the tune is in concert C minor.

Can improvisation be taught?

Can improvisation be taught?

There often seems to be an attitude in Australian jazz circles that, despite the global proliferation of jazz education, you can't really teach jazz. Education is important because it gives we musicians a source of income when gigs are scarce. Of course, when times are good, the teaching is the first thing we drop.

It can even a little bit humiliating to be a teacher:

“Where are you playing? “
“Oh, I'm mostly just teaching...”

This is wrong, of course. Jazz, and jazz improvisation, can be taught, and the job of teaching it should be an important part of being a musician.

In the past there was a golden age in which gigs were abundant, jazz was everywhere, and the young musician could learn on the bandstand through a kind of apprenticeship system. There were jam sessions, there were many entry-level gigs, and young players could get gigs alongside more experienced players.

Sadly, this is no more. The gigs have dried up and competition for playing work is fierce. Jam sessions occasionally come and go, but they are rare and fleeting. They are not serious gatherings of experienced musicians mingling with young up-and-comers. They are places where kids go and hear other kids, or even worse, they degenerate into a kind of shabby open mike session. Certainly not the learning experience of old. Nothing compared to, say, watching every tenor player in town coming down to try to best Ben Webster as he passed through with Ellington's band.

The apprenticeship system is mostly gone. What to replace it with? Jazz education.

The site of learning jazz has moved from the bandstand to the universities and schools. The great musicians of our time are commonly found on the faculty of a university, college, school or conservatorium. They are there passing on their knowledge, handing down the legacy of jazz, just as they used to on the bandstand.