Learn How to Improvise:

Riff-Based Backgrounds

Once you learn one of the riff-based blues heads, you can start to form your own arrangement of a jazz song for performance in-class, or on the stage.

In this lesson, we discuss adding riff-based backgrounds to your solos. In this scenario, we asked Miles (trumpet) and Devin (saxophone) to come up with their own background figures that we could insert behind the piano solo during our performance of “Sonnymoon for Two”.

In a teaching setting, you could come up with your own chosen backgrounds and convey them to the class by ear. We have attached a .pdf, “Riff-Based Backgrounds (Key of B-Flat) to give you a few basic examples. Try choosing 2-3 backgrounds to teach different sections of your ensemble, and ask students to commit them to memory. Then, behind each solo, choose whether you would like a background to be played quietly behind the solo. You could layer backgrounds together if you wish to add even more texture to the solo.

As we discussed in the “Riff-Based Blues Songs” lesson, it’s a good idea to teach the backgrounds using numbers as they relate to the key of the song. For example, the saxophone background in the video lesson is begins on the “5”, then rises to the “flat 7”, back to the “5” then down to the “1”, or root, all in the key of B-Flat. In addition to teaching your students the fundamentals of building scales, this method of assigning numbers to notes allows them to correlate the sound of each note with a number, helping them to associate each unique scale degree with its characteristic sound.

Want to send this video to your students? Use this link: https://youtu.be/wZN-dD_ym1o