note: most of this applies to all improvisation (including dance) with some obvious changes. I will let you discover those changes by yourself and not ruin the fun ;) Enjoy! <3

In my opinion I don’t think there is one unique or correct way to learn how to play jazz because each person is different and might find it difficult for different reasons. However, I can share you my experience.

before sharing it I have to mention that User-12810123839087597648 answer to this question basically has all the key ingredients to learn to play jazz, in a more summarized way than I have expressed it.

I learned how to play music when I was in 4th grade and started playing clarinet. All the way up to the end of High School I was mostly involved with school orchestra and mostly played music by reading it. I think this is one of the things that made learning to play jazz the hardest thing. What I mean, is learning to improvise. Knowing how to read music and play music that you hear in your head are totally different things. However, to even be able to play music from your head you must first hear it in your head. Not being used to this type of paradigm, I usually had a hard time improvising because most of the time I felt I was just playing random notes and felt lost. Also, if I remember correctly, I was extremely worried about playing wrong notes or not playing notes that were allowed according to the chord. Its true that its really important to follow the harmony in the music for it to sound best (or most authentic yarayarayara…), but its also important to develop an inner voice. This is extremely difficult at first because at the beginning, if you are not used to jazz music, you are unfamiliar with the harmonic progression (at least at an intuitive level, i.e. you can’t hear it yet) and also making your music sound like real jazz. I remember trying all sorts of things at the beginning, like only playing notes in the chord, the scale, memorizing licks etc. All these are not bad things to do but looking back I think the important thing is to not over constraint the beginner by telling him he is only allowed to play the notes in a D dominant 7th chord. I think its more productive for them to teach them a simple scale that sounds fun to play (say a blues scale) and then play along either a real blues record or play along with someone that knows how to play jazz. The thing is that Jazz and Blues were mainly an aural tradition, which means that it was learned by actually trying to play the music! I am not sure how much I can emphasize it, but I will say it again, its an aural tradition. Try to play it by ear and start of with something simple. Don’t ever postpone the exercise to improvise. Do it every time you practice.

For example, I think one of the best things is to do is play with an experienced blues player, get your horn out, maybe put a real record or a play along and try to play a call and response game. He plays some blues musical phrase and you try to respond something that makes sense with your own instrument. Pay attention to what he says and try to copy him and at the same time try to break the rules. If you play a “wrong” note, I am sure you’ll notice it. Don’t worry about wrong notes. Worry about developing this intuition on when its a good time to play and what. If you play say, a blues in G then try to only play notes in a blues G scale and experiment on going out of the scale sometimes. This exercise is to get you out of the habit that you need to be told what to play and giving you the courage to improvise. Usually, people that start off get to focused on scales and chords. These are good, but don’t pospone improvising. This can be a slow process, but eventually, you’ll feel it and be willing to improvise to music.

Its easy to say “just improvise”, but what do you play? Well, as I said, learn a blues scale, get a blues play along and try to find out when that its good to play that scale. Mostly, it will be fine most of the time. Eventually, you’ll get tired of this and be like, is this all? But I still don’t sound like the great jazz players. Well, true…probably because you have not heard enough jazz. Did I mention this is an aural tradition? Glad you remembered…then go to itunes (or whatever) and purchase a few of your favorite blues and jazz players and listen to them. Listen to their music a lot until when you start playing in your play alongs, you hear their phrases. You will have to hear them a lot for this to happen, but when it does happen, try to sing your musical ideas first and if you have the time, try to transcribe those notes into you instrument. But its extremely, important to actually try to scat the music. Take advantage of this if you are alone in the car or walking….lisent to jazz and try to scat your ideas or play games with the original records and try to “call and respond” to their music. If you have this, then you’ve done something really good to yourself by developing intuition. If you don’t know what or how to scat listen to some more jazz until you can or listen to Ella Fitzgerald’s scat. Its important to remember that to learn to sound like a jazz player you need to have it internalized how Jazz music actually sounds like. This is something that its easy to forget if you always played from reading music and never enough from actually trying to mimic the music your listening. With this you will hopefully pick up licks, articulation, and many of very subtle things that cannot be picked up just by reading.

There really isn’t a linear list of thing to master you get to play jazz. In reality, there are many things you need to learn (all simultaneously). However, the ones I find most important are:

1. Have the courage to actually improvise
2. Develop a feel of what the authentic jazz music sounds like.

with those two you have gotten the beginning to developing your own musical voice.

At the beginning you might not feel what I call, the harmonic gravity of the music. What I mean is that like most music (unless your listening to Clouds by Debussy, btw love that tune) has a harmonic flow. You will start hearing it by listening to lots of great jazz records, but you can also actively learn hear it by playing along the chord progression. This is a great time to learn the chords of a specific song and play the chord changes with some play along. There are also different choices of scales you can do for each chord (you can check jazz theory books for that) and play along with it. For example, usually its not a bad choice to play a Mixolydian scale over a dominant 7th scale. These are great exercises to get you more confident on what are the scales that are usually played along each chord and will develop your ear to hear the chord progressions. Hearing the chord progression is such a plus. At one point, once you hear it, you might abuse it. I remember that after a couple of years, I became a bit lazy and stopped reading the chord progressions and just sort of went with it, because I was just so comfortable with the chord progression. I should have not been lazy and tried to follow the music more carefully, but the fact that I could space out and just play along with the group and not feel scared was a consequence that I just loved the chord progression so much that I’d just go with it. Don’t abuse it if you get there. Anyway, the point is to learn the chords and hear the chord progression. I am not underlining learn the chords because if you are just starting there are soooo many chord you don’t know and honestly, just spending hours and hours memorizing all is definitively good for you as a musician but it won’t necessarily get you to improvise faster. Internalize the chords relevant for a couple of songs and then start form there. I say internalize because memorize is not even close to enough. When you improvise you don’t have the time (and should not) be worrying about “is F# the right note to play for this chord”. If you do that you will miss the moment to actually improvise so make sure you know the tune your playing and its notes.

I am the type of person that needs to know the rules before I feel comfortable doing stuff, I am a mathematician and curious scientist by nature, so I am obsessed with understanding things. Its not necessarily bad to be like and I learned a lot of theory , ideas and history of what jazz is, but its not strictly necessary to do that. I think the most important goal is to actually improvise and to have fun with the music and if you want to eventually get to the technical level of a professional Jazz musician, you can do it if you want with lots of practice. But before you do that, first get develop your inner voice and a intuition to what jazz music is. I think this is more important at the beginning.

Even though I don’t recommend to spend hours memorizing every single chord, scale etc in isolation (which can be super boring), there are 3 things I always play when I warm up:

1. the chromatic scale to have control and know every single note of my instrument.
2. the major scales (which most other schales can be “derived” from)
3. the major chords (which most other chords can be “derived” from)

they basically form all the music you will play, so warm up with it and have it memorized.

There are a lot of other things you can do to keep improving your jazz improvization. Some of the things I did were:

1. transcribe your favorite jazz players
2. play from charlie parker’s omni book for warm ups
3. memorize someone famous jazz musician’s solo and play along with it
4. get a private jazz teacher
5. Jamey aberesold’s books and DVD are a good start
6. know some of the tricks that make you sound like bebop players (I forget what the patterns where but you can learn them, I can write them later here if you want)
7. and many more things that I can’t remember right now…but…
8. never forget to keep listening to Jazz music!

There are so many other things I could say but honestly, its much easier if you get a jazz teacher to guide you and if you get out there and actually try to improvise yourself. If you can’t do that, another option is a oline Jazz course offered by berklee Jazz Improvisation - Berklee | Coursera if you want more “official” training. I have not seen it myself, but I bet its good. I could say a lot more technical things but there are better resources than me to get that info. Books, records, online courses, universities, conservatories, etc etc etc…but the main ideas I wrote here with is developing your inner voice, developing your jazz ear and not being scared of improvising are the most important at the beginning.

Now days there has been a lot of study of jazz and I think we know a lot of the things that make it sound like jazz and you study them specifically, but, do you think louis armostrong was told how to play jazz? I doubt it! He probably went out there and got his horn out and played. Heard someone else play and was like, I like that, but lets change it to make it sound more like what I would play and then Loui was born! It might sound weird but if you do it for long enough your brain will “magically” eventually learn to do it…