LJS 103: Playing Along vs. Knowing a Jazz Tune

Welcome to episode 103 of the LJS Podcast where today we are having podcast listener Gabriel from Fishers, Indiana on the show to share his jazz tips and advice. Gabriel talks about a moment of musical failure, how he learned from it and has been crushing it in the practice room ever since. Specifically, he hones in on the difference between play along and actually knowing tunes. Listen in!
Listen to episode 103







I'm excited to bring on today's episode another awesome listener of the LJS Podcast to share his jazz tips and advice with all of you. This month we have been celebrating the 2 year birthday of the podcast, and to help celebrate, we are highlighting you the listeners, the ones who make this podcast happen!
On episode 104 we will have a bunch of listeners on the show, but for this episode we are honing in on one submission that's a little bit longer and has a great lesson to teach us, worth spending an episode on.
Gabriel from Fishers, Indiana talks about his musical journey, how a musical failure turned into a ton of improvement in the practice room, and how important it is to know tunes on a deep level.
Here are some main takeaways from Gabriel's talk:
1. The difference between play along and playing a jazz tune.
2. Why you need to know all of the parts of a tune.
3. Why practicing along with recordings is such a beneficial practice.
I want to thank Gabriel for his great advice and sharing with all of us his knowledge. Let's all take Gabriel's example and enthusiasm so we can improve on the weaker areas of our musicianship.
Important Links
Podcast Birthday Raffle







Read the Transcript
Brent: Hey, hey. What's up everybody? My name is Brent. I am the jazz musician behind the website, learnjazzstandards.com, which is a blog and a podcast all geared towards helping you become a better jazz musician. Now, welcome to this very special bonus episode of the week. Now, it's not really a bonus episode. If you're listening outside of realtime in the future, this is really just episode 103, but it's bonus because this episode is coming out on a Thursday, which means it's the second episode of the week. We come out with episodes every Monday, and this time we're doing one on Thursday because next week we're gonna be doing our big episode 104 -- really excited about that. But on episode 103, we are having a very special guest on the show just like we did last week. We had a listener of this show who had previously submitted a recording of their story, their jazz advice with us. We have another one of those examples today, which I'm really excited about, really excited to hear from these. I've just been really enjoying all of these.
And in next week's episode, 104, we're having a bunch of you on to give tons of your advice and tips, and it's just really awesome. But today, I have a listener who submitted a recording that offered ... a little bit of a longer recording that had some very specific things that I think are important for us to talk about and dedicate an episode to.
So, I'm excited to introduce you to that guest, so hold on. We're gonna get there really soon. Now, if you've been listening, you know that this is our podcast birthday month. Next week we are celebrating two years of the LJS Podcast, of it being around. Now, of course our blog and all of our other stuff, our website, has been going on for much longer than that, but this is tow years of the podcast, so we want to celebrate it, and to do that we are doing our birthday month podcast raffle. Now, for the raffle we're giving away our jazz eCourses, our eBooks and even some our backing tracks to a bunch of different people who submit raffle entries.