How do you learn to play a good solo?
Of course you need to get some good technique under your belt. This includes scales, arpeggios, patterns and licks - plenty of those on the main site saxophone pages. You also need to know how to apply all this to the music, only a very few tunes only have one chord so sooner or later you will need to know your way around some basic chord changes, and not just for jazz solos.
Jazz improvisation teaching is placing more & more emphasis on learning specific scales to fit a chord type. While this approach has some merits (you can gain confidence in soloing over a chord sequence quite quickly), the danger is that you miss the wider picture. It can become easy to get into the habit of running up and down scales rather than finding interesting melodic phrases that can hold the listener’s interest by building up tension and releasing it, or by giving a solo a real musical shape. To get this kind of skill probably the best thing you can do is to listen, learn and transcribe some solos. Then try to analyse what the player is doing or the way they are thinking. It’s useful to learn lots of licks and phrases, but best of all try to invent your own.
I shall be gradually adding more solos these pages so keep coming back!
