Kung may extra cash Ka to spare, look for aya Yuson..take a private lesson from a master..
Have you been to Aya lately?
Reason I ask is because I went ahead and got jazz lessons from him. Really, really big help if you already know your basics; he can take you to the next level. However, Aya suffered a stroke before my lessons, so he had some trouble fretting out a guitar (I took my lessons with him without him holding a guitar).
It got to a point that I felt that the advanced lessons needed for him to fret the guitar to show me, and honestly I wanted for us to jam na to get the feel and improv thing to happen.
No dice.
The sessions evolved into him pointing out a note on my fretboard and me pressing the note. After that quick demo he will sing what he wanted me to play and I’d have to immediately capture that. Fun and challenging at the same time. Man, did he know every note of the fretboard though and each chord possible.
But that was around three years ago, I wonder if he's done with therapy and can jam na?
Having said that, lessons with Aya pay for itself. But, I suggest you do some self study first so you don’t get lost in the woods if you take lessons. Things like scales, inversions and major, minor triads shouldn’t be alien to you.
Every one hour session I've had with him resulted in exercises I still do right to this day.
His excercise on spelling out the triad for each note of a scale got me very far in improv situations.
Sadly, work intervened and months stretched into years and I haven’t been back to him.
Some Lessons Learned:
1.) We started the session with him asking me to play anything. Since I loved the blues and can play a decent twelve bar I played that and he liked the fact that I had a solid grounding in the blues which would make improv and jazz song structure easier to teach.
From there we went into a study of a typical Jazz Blues like Billie’s bounce and how the blues evolved into Jazz.
2.) Common Jazz song structures derived from standards. Yup there’s a pattern for chords that seem to be embedded in the standards (invaluable lessons right there)
3.) Making sense of the scale modes in improv. What does a Dorian. Ionian and Lydian scale feel like when superimposed in some chordal situations. (made my nose bleed)
4.) Exploring the permutations and weirdness of 7th chords (made my brain bleed)
Overall good stuff. But! I still don’t play jazz as good as I want to. Even if I studied and forced myself to dedicate a year to listening, I’m just not getting there due to non practice and non jamming, and honestly, I love the blues better. While I do know how to improvise and know jazz in theory, having the gift to play it is an entirely different manner. I can memorise and play a jazz tune but playing one on the fly and improvising like a damn madman on the spot will be a fever dream for me.
Sadly, the soul of improvising o jazz (which is one of its cornerstones) isn’t just a matter of doodling together notes. You can get away with it, even fake it. But it has to start with living and breathing jazz — as for me, I’m now content to be a fan.