Everyone in jazz education agrees: music is a language.

We tell students to build vocabulary. We talk about fluency. We compare practicing jazz to learning French or Spanish.

But think about how primitive the state of this "language education" actually is.

Every real language has a dictionary. A reference you can open to look up a word, see what it means, where it came from, how it's used in context, and what variations exist.

Jazz doesn't have that.

We tell you to build vocabulary while giving you no reference for what the words actually are or mean.

You learn a lick off a Wes Montgomery record. Is that a "word"? Is it a phrase? Is it three words strung together? Where did Wes get it? Is there a more common variation? How do other players use this same idea?

"Just use your ears."

This is the most common advice given to aspiring jazz improvisers, and it's the most misleading.

The problem is that this advice does not take into account what stage of improvisation the student is in. In fact, most of the teachers giving advice on improvisation do not understand the 5 levels of improvisation development and how that changes what the student should work on.

I’ll give you two examples to make this crystal clear…

“I know my scales…why can’t I improvise?”

I’ve taught hundreds of adult students inside Chase’s Guitar Academy, and learning to improvise is by far the biggest challenge they face and want to overcome.

So why do people struggle to improvise?

In my experience, the problem comes from viewing improvisation as a problem in the first place, where there are ‘correct’ or ‘wrong’ notes for any given chord.

Instead of this academic model, students need to adopt a language model where improvisation is another form of communication.

Music as a language is not a metaphor.

At its core, music is a language. The purpose of music is to communicate, although unlike spoken languages, music doesn’t communicate on the level of concepts but rather on the level of perception and emotion.

In order to understand how to spontaneously create melodic ideas — improvisation — we must first understand the nature of what we are trying to create.