Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Description Of The Musical Concepts Artist-Level Jazz Musicians Employ While Improvising, Jonathan Whitmire

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to analyze musical concepts employed by artist-level jazz performers (professional jazz musicians) playing an improvised solo. These concepts are then compared to the participant's pedagogical background in improvisation. Subjects were videorecorded performing an improvised solo with an accompaniment track of "Take the ‘A' Train". They then participated in an observational research method referred to as stimulated recall where each performer watched the video directly following the performance and attempted to classify the musical concepts they used in their improvised solo. Categories of musical concepts included: scales/modes, chords/arpeggios, memorized licks, melodic variation, rhythmic variation, range/intensity, …