Oliver Nelson: Patterns for Improvisation Sheet music – 17 Feb. 2017

This a good addition to a jazz players library, nicely printed music sheets , useful exercises for most instruments, many thanks !

Really helpful exercises to improve technique. Will take a good time to work through them all though. Think of it as a long term project.

Oliver Nelson ( 1932 - 1975) was a jazz saxophonist, playing soprano, alto and tenor and was a composer and arranger. This book consists of 81 exercises which are in various time signatures. All the sequences are in the key of C Major, and the patterns continue on different scale steps. Notes are annotated chromatically, so you just play what you see.There is a brief introduction before the exercises begin, and it makes interesting reading as there are some words of wisdom from the author, which help provide some motivation for tackling page after page of pattern playing.If you are looking for a more theoretical approach, there are plenty of alternatives such as Patterns for Jazz (Coker, Casale, Campbell, & Greene) which provides some supporting music theory, but the advantage of this book is that you can just pick it up and play it.

I had this book many years ago and,like other books or records, lent it to someone who never returned it. It used to be the bible of jazzers in the 70's and 80's, in fact Phil Woods played one the tunes in the back of the book as a full - blown jazz number. Luckily it's still in print and Amazon stock it at a good price so I have my old friend back.Quite a few wannabe jazzers took Mr. Nelson too literally and started producing jazz consisting of just patterns, a trend which has unfortunately continued until today. Consequently we have a host of so called jazz player who all sound the same!This book should be used as Oliver Nelson suggests, that is to take bits and pieces and incorporate them in your jazz solos. Phil Woods again is a supreme example of this. You hear one or two phrases coming up in his solos, but being the genius he is they are so beautifully incorporated and lead to other ideas of his own. Follow Mr. Woods kids, and you'll see what I mean!

It's easy to understand why so many jazz books are presented this way, and it has nothing to do with making learning easier. If you take a single 4 quaver cell and apply it to 2-3 octave range, you'll yield around 10 bars of content. Then present the same idea in all 12 keys, and you've suddenly filled 2 pages of music notation with a lot of black notes. A book of 100 pages could easily be boiled down to around 20bars of "seed" ideas, and presented on a half a page, but that won't make much money, so everything is written out fully. This is not helpful to an aspiring improviser. Playing the presented material off the page is only good for sight reading practice. But to develop improvisational skills you are surely better to take a single seed idea (eg a 4 note cell) and apply it to all the scales/keys you know in your head, developing that part of your musical brain. The problem with nearly all learning material that is sold, is that the commercial goals will inevitably be at odds with the teaching goals. There are so many books that could be boiled down to a few pages, but who's going to buy a leaflet for £30?