This is the 7th lesson in my series on improvising on the saxophone, and we’ve been building things up to this point – where we can tackle a complete chord progression! In this lesson we’re going to get you improvising over the 12 Bar Blues, arguably one of the most important chord progression in jazz for you to master!

For the purpose of this lesson, we’re going to work on a fairly straight-forward version of the 12 Bar Blues which just uses dominant 7th chords. We’re also going to focus exclusively on playing chord tones as doing this is going to better help you become accurate with improvising over a chord progress, and help you lose any vagueness.

First 12 Bar Blues: Part 1

This video lesson is rather big, so I’ve had to divide it into 2 parts. Therefore, in Part 1 we going to focus on the Structure of the Blues; the arpeggios of the Dominant 7th chords used; and then get you playing the arpeggios and their different in versions and applying them to our form of the Blues.

There’s 29 exercises in Part 1 alone and so this video is meant for repeat viewing. That way you can really get the chords and their arpeggios under your fingers as well as internalise the sound and form of the Blues.

This is great for your technique on the saxophone, but it’s also great ear training for you. Stick with it, and the work will certainly pay off in the long run.

So, let’s get to it!

Let’s continue our work on improvising by looking at your first complete II-V-I chord progression!

This is the 6th lesson in my series on improvising on the saxophone and you’ll find all on my other videos on my YouTube channel or in previous blog posts.

The II-V-I chord progression is arguably the most important progression in jazz music, and so let’s take a deep dive into it, with lots of exercises to work on to help build your accuracy and fluency when improvising.

Let’s get to it!

Join me on my quest to help you learn to improvise on the sax! This is the 4th lesson in my series on improvising on the saxophone and you find the other videos on my YouTube channel.

In this video we’ll be looking at the hugely important chord progression in Jazz. That of the chord I to chord IV movement.

For this exercise we’ll be improvising over 2 dominant 7th chords, with 2 bars on each chord.

This time I want to work on the progression in two different ways with you. Firstly, I want you to improvise using purely chord tones, as this is great for your ear and accuracy. Then secondly, I want you to improvise using mixolydian modes, as this will help you build a better sense of flow into your soloing. Ultimately, when we improvise we use a combination of both scales and arpeggios to express our ideas!

Let’s get to it!