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Chord Tone Soloing on Coltrane's Giant Steps: One of the concepts that my students and I were working on in improv class this week was Chord Tone Soloing as applied to various compositions including Giant Steps. Practice techniques and concepts included focusing on motives, soloing with chord tones while limiting the range to an octave and Chord Tone Connection in which we go up and down the entire range of the instrument and connect from chord to chord with stepwise motion.

Here's a clip on improvising with Pentatonic scales for the standard Green Dolphin Street. There is a post on the All Things Improvisation blog that includes this videoclip as well as a page listing the pentatonic scales being applied. Vibist Volker Heuken from Nuremberg, Germany did an excellent job transcribing the solo.

Here's the link to the All Things Improvisation blog: http://allthingsimprovisation.blogspot.com/2015/03/pentatonics-on-on-gr…

Article from 1985 addressing harmonic concepts as applied to Stella By Starlight. Hard to imagine that I wrote this 30 years ago. The great thing about music is that I'm still working on these concepts. It never ends.

Here's the article:

https://drive.google.com/a/berklee.edu/folderview?id=0Bxbpdyow6QPOflF1W…

Berklee Improv Class - Applying the improvisational concept of Four Note Groupings over John Coltrane's Giant Steps. In my 39th year of teaching and it's still a pleasure to teach improv to these talented and motivated musicians. I feel fortunate to be able to pass on the information as well as learn and grow along with the students.