Introduction to Jazz Improvisation

Learn to perform a full improvised solo on the blues, combining rhythm, melody, and harmony with confidence and style.

This four-week course begins by building your foundation with the 12-bar blues form, learning how to follow its phrasing and structure, and practicing your very first improvised solo using Duke Ellington’s “C Jam Blues.” As you learn to recognize where solos begin and end, you’ll also develop the ability to anticipate and respond to the flow of a jazz performance.

Next, you'll deepen your rhythmic skills, exploring key concepts like the Charleston groove, the “Rule of Three,” and rhythmic development strategies. Through listening, clapping, and improvising, you’ll develop a strong sense of time, repetition, and variation—all essential ingredients in compelling jazz solos.

The course will then teach you melodic tools for your toolbox, focusing on the blues scale and its expressive power. Drawing inspiration from artists like Lee Morgan and the Kansas City jazz tradition, you’ll experiment with combining scales and rhythms to create blues solos that feel both grounded and inventive. By the final week, you’ll learn how to build solos over chord changes, use voice leading between harmonies, and perform your own three-chorus solo over a backing track—ready to take your first confident step into the world of jazz improvisation.

What you will learn:

Prerequisite Skills:

• 2 years of playing experience on a melodic instrument, or 2 years of singing experience
• Foundational music notation reading skills (i.e., you can read notes on the staff of your instrument)