Improvising is what separates the artists from the technicians and the reason why people want to play the saxophone. It’s the act of creating your own music on the spot, over chord progressions, and through it you’ll find your own sound. I didn’t start out by trying to improvise a whole solo, I listened to the people who came before me and I tried to absorb everything I could from their playing. This starts by listening to their playing, trying to figure out their phrasing, the way they articulated their notes, their rhythmic feel, and the choice of their notes. Then I’d copy phrases from my favorite recordings by slowing them down and playing along with them, then bringing the recording back up to speed and playing along, and finally by trying to play the phrases from memory. This gets you inside the heads of great players and you start to understand how they think.
Understanding these harmonic building blocks is the next important step, beginning with major and minor scales, modes of the major scale, pentatonic scales, and the blues scale in all keys. But instead of simply memorizing finger patterns, you want to associate these scales with the kinds of harmonies they evoke—e.g., Mixolydian for dominant chords, Dorian for a minor feel, altered scales for an edgy tension leading into a dominant chord resolving to a major chord. Practice playing these scales over a backing track or a basic chord progression in a moderate tempo, and try to rely on your ear rather than your fingers to tell you which ones sound right in which situations. Soon you’ll come to know standard progressions such as ii-V-I changes in every key, so that you can improvise over them and find the guide tones and other chord tones that you want, with the improviser’s goal of stating them and playing melodic patterns around them.
Similarly, groove should not be neglected in the pursuit of an effective improvisational language. As I say in my book, jazz happens in the pocket. It is important to develop a strong sense of swing by first counting the triplets aloud over your playing, then without. Use the rhythmic principles of syncopation, anticipation and displacement to create a sense of forward motion or surprise. Use a metronome set to “two” to make you more aware of the pocket. Playing with drummers, or even using a drum machine, will also help.
With increased confidence, the player starts to establish a personal style by combining the phrases that he has learned into his own style, which might include a tendency towards linear, melodic playing, or the use of more jagged, intervallic movement, or a reliance on string bends and pitch inflections. He will try playing at different tempi, in different keys, and with different feels to discover where he is most comfortable, and will improvise multiple versions over the same track to recognize what his tendencies are, and to then try to incorporate other ways of thinking. Often the best results come from setting one’s self up in a limited way – if the player only has a few notes to play with, or only plays in the low register, or only plays triplets, he is forced to think differently and less likely to play clichés. Eventually, all of this experimentation yields a style that the player feels is honest and unique.
Finally, the last step in learning how to improvise is to have the confidence to interact with others in real time. This is the ultimate goal of learning to improvise on the saxophone: to be able to have a conversation with the rhythm section, with the song form, and with the listeners. To be able to interact with the rhythm section in a way that if the drummer plays a different groove, the saxophonist adjusts his/her phrasing to fit the groove. When a musician plays a certain chord, the saxophonist adjusts their solo to match or contrast with that chord in a way that adds tension and release to the overall feel of the song. This is the ultimate level of trust in one’s abilities, to know that they have practiced enough to be able to make these kinds of decisions in the moment without having to think about them, to be able to just respond naturally as if they were having a conversation at dinner with their friends. It’s this level of interaction that will ultimately make the saxophonist enjoy what they’re doing, because they won’t be worried about the technical aspects of playing anymore. It’s the ability to express oneself freely without the burden of a long practiced solo that will make playing the saxophone fun.