How to learn to jam

Improvisation is the easiest and the hardest thing in music. Little kids do it effortlessly, while world-class performers and composers find it terrifying. I am a confident improvisor, but it took me a few decades to get here. Now I’m teaching classrooms full of undergrads to do it, which means coming up with more of a method than the aimless stumbling that I did. That method involves a lot of careful curation and editing of recordings. We will be listening to some of these as we go. When American musicians say, “let’s jam”, they might mean any of the following things: Let’s play a song that we all know or can learn quickly, and we’ll improvise the details of the arrangement as we go. Let’s take turns playing solos over a predictable song form like twelve-bar blues or a jazz standard. Let’s create music completely from scratch with no preconceived plan. These are all different processes with different-sounding results, but they all require pretty much the same skills. So what are…