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Repertoire & Resources

fortable with this, we can encourage students to stretch patterns on every chord, that pattern can actually lead
by adding ornaments or small melodic modifications. to some great lines!
As the students’ ears develop further, the more com- Super-secret hack: for an overwhelmingly large num-
fortable they will feel wandering further away from the ber of jazz standards, if the student sings ideas based
melody. This exercise also helps students internalize the on the tonic scale associated with the key signature of
form of the song. the piece, it’s going to sound pretty good most of the
Part of what makes jazz fun (and, at times, frustrat- time. Scalar Patterns using thirds, fourths, and enclousu-
ing) is the harmonies. The sooner that students can res (surrounding Do, Mi, and So with upper and lower
become comfortable with harmony, the more success neighbors) all fall into the category of “things that sound
they will have. I often begin by having students sing a whole lot more complex than they actually are” (Figure
the bass roots of every chord, in time with the chord 3).
progression. This again builds familiarity with the form Jazz is a direct descendent of the blues. And your stu-
and gets students thinking about listening for the bass. dents already know the altered pentatonic scale that we
After this, I like to have students sing Simple Chord refer to as the “minor blues scale” (La-Do-Re-Ri-Mi-
Patterns using the root, second, third, and fifth of every So-La) because they listen to pop music. Blues is the “B”
chord—a Do-Re-Mi-So pattern on each chord (Fig- in R&B, after all. Call-and-response is a great way to
ure 2). Foundational harmony is king here. And while help students build blues vocabulary, and doing so over a
I might not want to listen to an entire solo of 1-2-3-5 twelve-bar blues is even better (Figure 4)!

66 CHORAL JOURNAL October 2023 Volume 64 Number 3