Inside/Outside Improvisation

Juampy Juarez teaches his approach to inside/outside improvisation — playing with consonance and dissonance across a solo. The language started in the '60s with Coltrane, Evans, Shorter, Hancock, Dolphy, and Coleman; on guitar, Martino, then Holdsworth and McLaughlin, and later Metheny and Frisell built whole schools on it. Because fusion is, harmonically speaking, modal jazz with different orchestration and rhythms, learning to play in and out puts you on the same path to improvising over fusion.

What's covered

• Playing arpeggios, triads, pentatonics, and quartal triads that represent scales, instead of running scales
• Superimposing modes over a single chord — e.g. mixing C Ionian with C Lydian sharp 9 over Cmaj7
• Ideas from the melodic minor and harmonic minor scales, plus the harmonic major and whole tone scales
• Elements of modern jazz improv: long intervals, string skipping, more than one idea per chord, straight eighths, counterpoint-style comping
• A practice method: static chord, then a tune, then transpose, then speed it up
• How improvisation changed harmony toward modal jazz, and how it connects to chord-by-chord improv

Juampy's parting advice: transcribe the masters and play these ideas with other musicians as much as you can. 15 PDFs included, covering Coltrane's pattern, harmonic major modes, major-triad studies on the diminished, harmonic minor, and melodic minor scales, phrase collections for minor, dominant, maj7, and diminished chords, whole tone and symmetric augmented material, and more.