Low Eh!

Oliver Nelson’s book, Patterns For Improvisation, is a book that I worked through in college, and I had picked it up a few times since. Over the last few weeks I have been assigning exercises from the book to some of my students.

There are a few things that I love about this book.

First, it’s a technical workout with lots of long eighth note lines, and most of the exercises travel through all of the keys. It’s a study on what notes are most important when you’re trying to grab a breath to maintain your air.

It also has so much practical language for developing improvisors. I’ll have a student work through an exercise, then identify what key a set of notes is in (usually in four note, or eight note groupings), and then work it into a set of changes that is being internalised. This gets my student to make the alterations while keeping the interval structure, and develops their ability to play eighth notes in context.

Here’s an example from Exercise #1 from the book, and how I would get my students to work it over a ii-V-I.

I have found that there’s a ton of useful and practical information in this book. Having the ability to extrapolate the lines from the book and work them over familiar tunes makes this book a definite recommendation from me!