Satin Doll, Improvisation

Dr. Bob Lawrence (00:32.972)

Welcome to Jazz Piano Skills. I'm Dr. Bob Lawrence. It's time to discover, learn, and play jazz piano. Well, here we are, week three of our August study of Duke Ellington's classic jazz standard Satin Doll. Two weeks ago, we began our journey by exploring the harmonic architecture of the tune. We examined its form.

We identified the unique chord changes, of course we studied the harmonic function of the tune, we recognized the common harmonic movement, and as we always do, applied a variety of essential jazz piano voicings. Now last week we shifted our attention from harmony to melody. We used our ears to discover the melody, worked through suggested fingerings, we identified the phrases and the target notes within those phrases, we harmonized the melody, and ultimately we played Satin Doll using three traditional jazz grooves, ballad, bossa, and swing. So today we take the next logical step. We move from understanding the melody to creatively developing the melody. In other words, improvisation.

And today we're going to strip improvisation down to one of its most essential ingredients. In fact, I think it is the most essential ingredient: rhythm. We're going to discover just how much music can be created with remarkably little musical material. In fact, for much of today's lesson, we're going to be

working with only two notes. That's right, two notes. And Satin Doll gives us the perfect opportunity to do exactly that because each melodic phrase in the A section of Satin Doll is constructed using two notes. Now you may be thinking, how in the world am I supposed to develop improvisational skills using only two notes? Well, that's exactly the point.

Dr. Bob Lawrence (02:48.472)

You know, as one of my old teachers used to tell me, Bob, if you can't improvise with two notes, why in the world would you think adding additional notes will somehow make it easier? I have to laugh at that because it's so true. Today we're going to intentionally limit our melodic options so we can focus our attention on developing something every improvising musician desperately needs: a rhythmic vocabulary. Because if you want to be creative, I say this all the time as well, if you want to be creative, you have to practice creativity. And remember, creativity is spawned from limitation, not excess. So today we're going to take the two-note phrases from the melody of Satin Doll, explore the rhythm, develop the vocabulary, and begin improvising.

And as I stress every week, the tunes change, but the skills remain. Today, Satin Doll is going to help us prove that musical truth once again. So today you are going to discover that improvisation does not begin by adding more notes. It begins by learning how to creatively manipulate the notes you already have.

And Duke Ellington's Satin Doll gives us, again, the perfect opportunity to illuminate this musical truth because each melodic phrase in the A section consists of only two notes. That's it. You're going to learn why developing a rhythmic vocabulary—and specifically gaining a command of downbeats and upbeats in time—is absolutely essential.

For developing your improvisational skills. We'll take the two melody notes from the first phrase of Satin Doll and explore 12 different rhythmic variations that I've composed and recorded specifically for today's lesson. Same two notes, 12 different rhythmic interpretations. And you are going to play each of those variations with me.

Dr. Bob Lawrence (05:11.094)

Hear how rhythm completely changes the musical character of those two notes. And then use the same process to begin creating your own rhythmic variations for the remaining melodic phrases that we discovered and studied in last week's melodic analysis. In other words, I'm not simply going to give you rhythmic ideas to memorize. I'm going to show you a process for creating your own. Because

Remember, the melody is not something we play before improvisation begins. I'm gonna say that again. The melody is not something we play before improvisation begins. The melody is where improvisation begins. And if you want to be creative, you have to practice creativity. So today we're going to limit the notes, develop the rhythm.

expand our rhythmic vocabulary and begin discovering just how much music can be created with little musical material. So whether you're a beginner, an intermediate player, an advanced player, or a seasoned professional, I think you're gonna find today's Jazz Piano Skills Podcast lesson insightful, practical, challenging, and of course incredibly beneficial. Well, you know

When musicians first begin studying improvisation, there's a question that always surfaces. That question is what notes should I play? It's understandable, right? After all, we sit at the piano, eighty-eight keys in front of us, we look at a lead sheet filled with chord symbols.

And suddenly we're expected to create something on the spot. So naturally, we start searching for notes. We learn scales, we learn arpeggios, we learn modes, we learn patterns, licks, tension tones, approach tones, enclosures, chromaticism, the list goes on. And before long, we have

Dr. Bob Lawrence (07:37.518)

Accumulated an enormous amount of information. And yet, when it's time to improvise, many musicians still don't know what to play. Why? Well, maybe we're asking the wrong question. Maybe the first question shouldn't be, what notes should I play? Maybe the first question should be, what can I do with the notes I already have? Now that's a very different question. And it leads us to a very different way of studying improvisation. You see, improvisation

Isn't simply the ability to select notes. That's not what it is. Improvisation is the ability to take musical material and creatively develop it. And where do we already have musical material? the melody of the tune. The melody is sitting right there in front of us. We've heard it.

We found it, we figured it out, we phrased it, we identified targets, we harmonized it, we played it, sound familiar, we did all that last week. So why in the world would we throw all of that away when it's time to improvise? Well, we absolutely should not. The melody is not something we play before improvisation begins. A lot of people think like that.

The melody again is where improvisation begins. Right? The melody is where improvisation begins. And one of the first ways we can begin developing that melody is through rhythm. Think about this. I can give you two notes and ask you to play them one way rhythmically. Then I can take those exact same two notes, change out.

Dr. Bob Lawrence (09:50.888)

absolutely nothing about the pitches, the same two notes, but alter the rhythm. And suddenly we have a different musical statement. Change the rhythm again, another statement. Again, another statement. Same two notes.

Different musical ideas. Now, I think, I don't know about you, but I think that's extraordinary. And it illuminates something we say every single week at Jazz Piano Skills. Rhythm gives everything life. Fact number seven: rhythm gives everything life. Now, here's where things get really interesting. We tend to believe that.

Creativity requires options. Lots of notes, lots of scales, lots of patterns, lots of possibilities. But I've discovered over many years of teaching that too many options often make creativity more difficult. Again, as one of my teachers used to say,

Can't improvise with two notes. Why in the world would you think adding additional notes will somehow make it easier? I love that. Because it forces us, that statement that he made to me, that statement forces us to confront an uncomfortable musical truth. If I'm unable to create something interesting with two notes, adding five notes, seven notes, right, doesn't necessarily make me more creative.

It may simply give me five more notes I don't know what to do with. That's why I tell students all the time, if you want to be creative, practice creativity. And creativity is what? I said it earlier. Creativity is spawned from limitation, not excess. Limitation forces us to explore. It forces us to listen.

Dr. Bob Lawrence (12:03.648)

Limitation forces us to discover possibilities within musical material we might otherwise overlook. Give yourself every note and you can go anywhere. Give yourself two notes, and now you have to discover how many places those two notes can take you. That is what I mean by practicing creativity. And you know what?

Duke Ellington has handed us a wonderful opportunity to do exactly that with Satin Doll. The melodic phrases in the A section are economical. Each phrase, two notes. That's all we need. Today we're going to take the first of those two note phrases, and without adding a single pitch.

I'm going to show you twelve different ways to rhythmically reinterpret it. Twelve. Same two notes. And here's the important part. Those variations are not licks for you to memorize.

They're demonstrations of possibility. They're designed to help you begin developing a rhythmic vocabulary to help you become comfortable placing musical ideas on downbeats and on upbeats. The goal is to helrhythmic variation become instinctual. Because when rhythm becomes part of your vocabulary, you stop having to intellectually manufacture every musical idea.

You begin to speak rhythmically. And that's when improvisation begins feeling less like solving a musical equation and more like having a musical conversation. So today we're going to resist the temptation to add. We're going to instead subtract. We're going to remove notes, remove clutter, remove options.

Dr. Bob Lawrence (14:18.846)

And discover just how much music has been sitting inside two notes. So important because musical freedom doesn't always begin with having more. Sometimes musical freedom begins when we intentionally give ourselves less and learn to do something creative with it. That's improvisation, that's musicianship.

And that's exactly what we're going to work on today. All right. Before we go any further, I want to, as we always do, take just a moment to review the seven musical facts that serve as the foundation for everything we do here at Jazz Piano Skills. And remember, these facts, these facts do not change from week to week. The tunes change, the lessons change, the musical application changes, but these seven musical facts remain constant because

They describe the fundamental relationships found within everything we hear, everything we study, everything we play. So here we go. Fact number one: music is the production of sound and silence. Sound, of course, being our primary sounds, major, dominant, minor, half-diminished, and diminished. Fact number two, sound is produced harmonically and melodically. Fact number three: harmonic sounds equal chords, or we often refer to chords in the piano world as voicings. Fact number four, melodic sound equals arpeggios and scales. Fact number five, harmony and melody have motion. Circle motion, diatonic motion, chromatic motion, ascending and descending motion. Fact number six, movement is decorated with tension, or what we call chromaticism.

And finally, fact number seven, rhythm gives everything life. Let's think about that fact number seven for a moment. Rhythm gives everything life. We say it every week, but today we're gonna prove it. I'm going to give you two notes, and we're gonna keep those two notes. We're not gonna add additional notes. We're not gonna add a scale or an arpeggio.

Dr. Bob Lawrence (16:46.19)

We're not gonna add a mode. We're not going to add additional chromaticism. We're simply going to take those same two notes and change the rhythm. And every time we change the rhythm, something remarkable happens. The musical statement changes. Same notes. Different rhythm, different musical idea. Think about what that tells us. If two notes can produce 12 distinct

Distinctly different musical statements simply through rhythmic variation, then rhythm isn't something we add to music after choosing the notes. Rhythm is one of the things that makes those notes music in the first place. That's why fact number seven doesn't say rhythm makes everything more interesting. It doesn't say rhythm decorates everything, it says rhythm gives everything life.

And today's Duke Ellington Satin Doll is going to help us experience that musical fact firsthand. But there's something else I there's something else I want you to notice. Look at how beautifully these seven musical facts organize what we've been studying this month. Two weeks ago, we studied the harmony of Satin Doll. Facts two, three, five, six were right there guiding us. Last week we studied melody.

Facts two, four, five, six, seven helped us understand what we were hearing and playing. And today we're studying improvisation.

Are we suddenly introducing an entirely new category of musical information? Absolutely not. We're simply learning to creatively manipulate the musical relationships that have been sitting inside these seven facts all along: harmony, melody, motion, tension, rhythm. Same musical facts, just a new application. And that is exactly why.

Dr. Bob Lawrence (18:52.246)

We review these seven musical facts every single week. They take what can appear to be an enormous, complicated world of musical information and organize it into relationships that we can actually understand. Because the goal of music education is not to make music more intelligent. I said that last week. The goal of music education is to make music understandable.

And when music becomes understandable, creativity becomes much less mysterious. Improvisation becomes much less intimidating. And we begin realizing that we may not need more information. We may simply need to become more creative with the information we already have. Seven musical facts, two notes, twelve rhythmic variations.

And an entire lesson in improvisation waiting to happen. Now that is making music understandable. All right, let's take time to welcome all of our new Jazz Piano Skills listeners. If you are joining us for the very first time, welcome. I'm delighted that you're here. And if you've been listening for the past few minutes thinking, hmm, this is a little different from the way I've heard jazz panel explain before, well.

I think you're right. Jazz Piano Skills is an educational program designed to help you develop the essential skills needed to become a confident and accomplished jazz pianist. The goal is really quite simple: to make music, as I was just stressing, understandable. And how do we do that? Well, we make music conceptually simple. I've said it for years. If music is complicated upstairs, you have no shot of it coming out through your hands.

In other words, if we can't organize music clearly in our minds, we have very, very little chance. Well, actually, we have no chance of developing it successfully in our hands. And ultimately, we have no chance of expressing it musically. So, in many ways, the entire Jazz Piano Skills approach can be summarized with three simple objectives. Simplify it conceptually.

Dr. Bob Lawrence (21:19.81)

Develop it physically, express it musically. That's what we're trying to accomplish every single week. We use a single jazz standard as our musical laboratory while exploring four essential areas of jazz piano development. Week one, harmony, week two, melody, week three, rhythm and improvisation, week four solo piano. Again, the tunes change, but the skills remain, and each week builds naturally upon the previous one.

So if today's episode raises some questions or you'd like to study today's material in greater depth, then Invite you to visit jazzpianelskills.com. Once you're at the site, you'll discover all the benefits of becoming a Jazz Piano Skills member, including the podcast packets, the interactive courses, the weekly Masterclasses, Lisa's listening list, and our online community.

and of course ongoing support. All of it's designed to help you continue growing as a musician. All right, on to the question of the week. And this week's question comes to us from Mark Thompson, living in Nashville, Tennessee, Music City. Mark writes, Dr. Bob, I've spent a lot of time practicing scales, practicing modes, practicing arpeggios, practicing chord tones,

And transcribing solos from other players. I feel like I know quite a bit of vocabulary, but when Improvise, my solos still sound like exercises rather than music. I either play too many notes or find myself running scales up and down the keyboard. What am I missing? Hmm.

Geez, Mark, I wonder why I selected your question for today. It's a fantastic question, and I can assure you you are not alone. I've been asked that question many times. In fact, I think you've described one of the most common frustrations musicians experience when learning to improvise. And I want to introduce a way of thinking about music, musical vocabulary that I believe,

Dr. Bob Lawrence (23:42.508)

will help bring some clarity to your question. Not only for you, but for everyone listening. I like to organize improvisational vocabulary. Let's use that as the primary category, improvisational vocabulary. I like to organize it into three, or I like to think of it as three data sets. The first data set I call pitch vocabulary. Now, pitch vocabulary consists of the pitches and pitch organization available for musical use, right? We take the pitches, we organize them by scales, modes, or arpeggios, chord tones, right? These are pitches. In other words, pitch vocabulary answers the question.

What notes are available to me? That's it. And Mark, from your question, it sounds like you've spent quite a bit of time developing your pitch vocabulary. Now that's great, but there's a second data set that's every bit as important. And unfortunately, it's often neglected. That would be rhythmic vocabulary. Rhythmic vocabulary consists of

The various ways we can organize musical information in time, downbeats, upbeats, syncopation, anticipations, rest, sustained notes, and countless combinations of rhythmic placement and duration. So if pitch vocabulary answers what notes are available to me, then I would say rhythmic vocabulary answers when do I play them?

And now we arrive at our third data set: melodic vocabulary. Melodic vocabulary is what happens when we fuse our pitch vocabulary with our rhythmic vocabulary to create meaningful musical statements, to create meaningful motifs, to create meaningful phrases, or riffs or licks, or melodic ideas.

Dr. Bob Lawrence (26:09.912)

Right? So let's simplify all of this. Pitch vocabulary tells us what. Rhythmic vocabulary tells us when. And melodic vocabulary is what we say. Now think about your question again, Mark. You've spent a tremendous amount of time developing your pitch vocabulary. More scales, more modes, more arpeggios, more patterns.

transcriptions, more notes. But what if the reason your improvisation still sounds like an exercise isn't because you need more pitches? In fact, I bet that's not the case at all. What if instead of more pitches, you need a larger rhythmic vocabulary? Let's see that's a very different diagnosis. And if the diagnosis changes, the way we practice

has to change as well. And this is precisely why today's lesson is so very important. We're going to temporarily remove pitch vocabulary from the equation as much as possible. We're going to use two notes. That's it. Two notes. We're going to hold those pitches constant and focus our attention entirely on developing the rhythmic possibilities surrounding them.

downbeats, upbeats, space. Right? Twelve rhythmic variations using the same two notes. Now why why? Because we're isolating the skill we actually want to develop and that's rhythmic vocabulary. Then once the rhythmic vocabulary begins becoming comfortable or instinctual and physically accessible, we can begin fusing it with our

Pitch vocabulary and what grows as a result are melodic vocabulary. Pitch vocabulary + rhythmic vocabulary = melodic vocabulary. Let me say that again. Pitch vocabulary + rhythmic vocabulary = melodic vocabulary. You know where most people are stuck? It's not just Mark.

Dr. Bob Lawrence (28:35.308)

Most people are stuck with pitch vocabulary. And you know what? It's not their fault because I think a lot of jazz educators are stuck in pitch vocabulary. That's what they teach. And they never get to rhythmic vocabulary, which can't then produce the melodic vocabulary. So that formula is really important. Pitch vocabulary + rhythmic vocabulary = melodic vocabulary.

Suddenly improvisation begins looking a whole lot less mysterious. This is why simply adding another scale, another mode, another lick, another handful of notes may not solve your problem, Mark. Heck, you already have plenty of words. What you need are more ways to organize those words into meaningful musical sentences. And that's exactly what we're going to work on today. Right? Because remember.

The melody is where improvisation begins. And if you want to be creative, practice creativity. So today, two notes, rhythmic variations, one essential objective. Developing a rhythmic vocabulary that can eventually become an instinctual part of our melodic vocabulary. So, Mark, I think today's lesson is going to help you see improvisation in an entirely different

in a much more understandable way. All right, let's take a look at today's educational agenda. What are we going to accomplish today? Our focus this week is improvisation, but more specifically we're going to focus on developing the vocabulary that gives improvisation life, our rhythmic vocabulary. And as just discussed in our question of the week, I'd like to organize our improvisational vocabulary into three data sets.

Pitch, rhythm, melody. Pitch vocabulary tells us what notes we have available. Rhythmic vocabulary tells us when to play those notes. And when pitch vocabulary and rhythmic vocabulary come together, we begin developing our melodic vocabulary. What we actually say musically. That's melodic vocabulary. So today we're going to intentionally limit

Dr. Bob Lawrence (31:04.63)

Our pitch vocabulary so that we can isolate and develop our rhythmic vocab. And Duke Ellington's Satin Doll gives us again the perfect, the perfect template, the perfect musical laboratory for doing exactly that. All right, so remember the phrases we identified during last week's melodic analysis. Well, again, each melodic phrase in the A section of Satin Doll consists of only two notes. That's not a problem.

In fact, I think that's a gift. Because those two-note phrases allow us to remove melodic complexity and focus our attention on one essential skill, rhythmic variation. We're going to explore how those two notes can be rhythmically manipulated using various combinations of downbeats and upbeats in time. So by the end of today's lesson, a whole

You will understand why rhythmic variation of the melody is the first step in developing improvisational skills. You'll have 12 practical rhythmic variations under your fingers. You'll have a process for creating rhythmic variations on your own. And most importantly, you'll know how to continue developing this essential skill long after today's lesson is over. Because ultimately, I don't want you asking.

Dr. Bob, what rhythmic variation should I play? I want you sitting at the piano thinking, let me see how many I can create. That's the goal. All right. So if you are a Jazz Piano Skills member, now is the perfect time to hit the pause button. Download your podcast packet. As always, today's packet contains everything you'll need to get the most from today's lesson.

The educational illustrations, the lead sheet, the play-alongs, all of it designed specifically for our study of Satin Doll and improvisation. Don't forget to visit the Jazz Piano Skills Online Community Forums and spend some time with Lisa's listening list. And this week, when you do enjoy Lisa's listening list, I want you to listen maybe a little differently. You know, of course listen to the notes the great players are playing, but but spend

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even more time listening to when they're playing them. Listen for downbeats, listen for upbeats, syncopation, space, listen to the length of the notes. And listen to how rhythm allows different musicians to take very familiar melodic material and make it sound completely personal. You're listening for rhythmic vocabulary. And I think once you start listening for it,

You're going to hear it everywhere. If you're not yet a Jazz Piano Skills member, I want to thank you for joining us today. I hope you've enjoyed the first half of today's episode and found our discussion helpful, encouraging, and most importantly enlightening. I'd love to have you join us. And whether you decide to become a member or simply continue enjoying the first half of our podcast each week, please know that I'm grateful you're listening.

And I sincerely hope that Jazz Piano Skills continues helping you make music more understandable. And perhaps just as importantly, helping you realize that becoming the musician you want to become is absolutely achievable. So again, thank you for joining us. And as always, continue to discover, learn, and play jazz piano.