I would never have imagined that I would make this video, but lately, I have seen too many students wasting a lot of time and energy on music theory, and I think that is worth talking about. You should learn jazz using what I call a theory-minimum approach. That will stop you from wasting a lot of time.
When I started learning Jazz Standards, I was not concerned with theory, mainly because I didn’t know theory well, and I had no resources to learn from except if I had a teacher around. The first song I learned was Stella By Starlight, which was a truly horrible choice of first song…
To do that, I traveled into the Danish mountains to isolate myself for months and learn to play a solo on that song that would fit the chords, not sound like a complete trainwreck, and make a bit of sense. Of course, Denmark has no mountains, so I was just sitting in my room playing the song with the backing track of the chords I had recorded on a tape because this was a long time ago,.
It wasn’t until recently that I thought about it, but I couldn’t analyze the song. I couldn’t analyze anything for a long time, but I still learned quite a few songs. I am not saying that I sounded amazing or even good when I played, but I did learn the songs, and it took years before I had theory to understand what was going on in those chord progressions.
Don’t get me wrong. This video is not me saying that you should not learn theory, but there is a right and a wrong way to go about this. If you want to get anywhere, stay practical because you can waste much time on theory.
Why Learn Music Theory?
Why do we learn theory? Music theory is not a set of rules; I will return to later. Look at it like this: The goal is to learn to play music, so the goal for any theory you want to get into should be to make learning easier. This already tells you that you want to have a good overview of a bunch of foundational stuff, and the theory is there for you to recognize how things are similar from song to song so that you can use that when learning that song; that is how theory makes it easier.
Most Jazz and pretty much all Jazz Standards are in a key, so you want to have a good overview of:
What notes are in the basic scales
What the diatonic triads are
What the diatonic 7th chords are
And start with the major scale to have an overview. Knowing this makes it easier to see how chords fit together and recognize when more complicated things are happening in a song, like All The Things You Are, which I am showing you here, many chords but mostly in the same key, and being aware of that is useful.
Another thing that will help you is recognizing secondary dominants and II V’s since they are very common and something you want to easily recognize from one song to the next, regardless of the key.
You can gradually learn these things by exploring diatonic arpeggios and chords in the keys in songs. The important part here is to connect the theory to the songs and not try to have them as abstract information or, even worse, rules. They are only worth anything if you recognize them in your music.
Let’s get to some of the mistakes that cause a lot of confusion.
This is a very common problem when learning Jazz. If music theory aims to explain and describe the music, reducing the way you think of the music too much can become a problem.
Ask yourself this: What is the most important part of a song? If you think about it, I am sure you already know. It is the melody. The problem is that we usually improvise not directly from the melody but on the reduced version: the chord progression, so often thinking in chord symbols is enough to solo, but a lot is missing from just looking at a page in iReal.
When I discuss this, comments on the video often suggest that we should only improvise from the melody and not from the chords. However, I think these comments are mostly made by people who either don’t like Jazz or just don’t want to learn to improvise over chords (or both). This misses the point a bit because the tradition of playing from the chords has been a part of Jazz for 80 years now.
But that doesn’t mean you can get into trouble by just thinking about chords and chord scale theory, and Berklee, in the 1970s, demonstrated that quite clearly, chords don’t exist in a vacuum. They are in a song. Let me show you and give you an example of a comment saying that A7(b9) is the same as Cmaj7 in a song
Chord symbols are just letters, and you look at them and forget what the context of that chord is.
Take Em7 which can be many things.
Em7 is the II chord in D major:
It is the III chord in C major:
And it can be the VI chord in G major:
The comment I mentioned was trying to use Barry Harris reduction where you don’t think a II V but instead just think about a V, and he wanted to make that work on this III VI II V progression: Em7 A7 Dm7 G7, but then adapt it to C major.
But if you only look at chord symbols and use rules without listening to what they are,
then things go completely wrong very fast.
In a song the Em7 sounds like this:
and then that would continue Em7 A7 Dm7 G7
Here I am sure you can hear that Em7 sounds similar to this resolution:
Try to hear the Em7
But I am sure you can hear that it doesn’t at all sound like this:
And, in the end, it is about how it sounds, so you have to be careful just looking, and chord symbols and using rules without making sure that you listen to what you end up with. Just thinking about theory will waste A LOT of time. Let’s look at a few practical ways you can let the music come before the theory.
It’s OK if You Don’t Understand Everything
This one can be difficult to accept if you are interested in theory. I use music theory to describe the music, and it is only really useful when you already know the music that this theory describes. But this gets difficult the first time you encounter something you might not have any examples of in songs. A good example could be that you play a Lydian dominant on a backdoor dominant
Or on a V of V in major:
For a beginner, instead of spending a lot of time exploring why we do this and having a relatively complicated analysis that will take hours of research and include lots of references that you would also have to learn, it is easier to listen to it, be aware that it is an option, try to use it, and move on. The concept becomes much clearer as you come across more examples of that sound, and you don’t need to understand everything you play.
Let me compare this to when I was learning Stella By Starlight. I could not analyze anything there and wasn’t even really thinking about the song’s key, in fact I remember realizing that it was in a key a few years later. I knew I did not know exactly how the different chords worked and could only use the melody and my ears to guide what extensions were in there. The way I dealt with that was to focus on just playing more basic lines with chord tones and notes that I felt sounded good. I did the same with songs like Ladybird and There’s No Greater Love; initially, you can play the chords without thinking about minor subdominants and tritone substitutions.
The big advantage is that once you start learning theory, it becomes something you recognize in songs, and you can immediately place it in the music you play; it is not just an abstract concept.
So don’t be afraid to accept a sound and figure it out later. The next one is related because we often spend too much time discussing scales.
Most Of The Time Scales Are Not Important
“What scale fits this chord?” This is a very common question; knowing many scales and modes is considered important in the beginning. In reality, there is no right or wrong scale for any chord in your solo, you can choose yourself, but of course, there are choices that will be more natural to the ear and fit with the song you are playing.
If you don’t know how to analyze chords and have to improvise over chord progressions with many different chords, you often end up just looking at the type of chord and not considering the progression and the song. To return to Stella By Starlight: I could not link Eø A7 to the key of Bb, so I just had to take scales that I felt worked.
The only thing I had to go on was the b9 in the melody on A7,
and I could only play it as an II V in Dm, mostly because it linked the two chords and sounded more right to me than other choices for A7.
And I did explore different scales to figure this out.
There are good and bad things about this approach of looking at isolated chords and choosing scales. The biggest advantage is that you have a way to play over the chord, and if your lines are more rooted in the chord tones than the scale notes, that is perfectly fine for now and a good place to start. The problem you can run into is that, for example, all m7 chords are usually played as if they are Dorian, and all maj7 chords are treated as the I chord in a major key. Often, that is not what fits the song and the key the best, and you spend a lot of time confusing your ears and training them to hear something forced into the song. But keep in mind that the different scale choices are often only one or two notes different, so playing the song is more important.
I am curious what you think about this. In my experience, emphasizing chord tones and being open-minded about the rest can be very useful.
The Basic Music Theory You Need As A Jazz Beginner
But there are things that you do want to know when it comes to basic theory. The knowledge that will help you play solos sounds good when you are composing and also gives you a foundation so that you can play songs and learn how to analyze harmony. That is what I talk about in this video, which gives you a practical overview and shows you how it is all linked to the music, which may be the most important part of it. Check it out!
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