Another Installment on Sight-Reading

You can apply the following tips for improving your sight-reading equally to any genre of music but I have endeavored to address some of the challenges specific to jazz.

PRACTICE READING

The best way to gain a skill is to practice it. Make sight-reading a regular part of your practice routine. Collect music of all kinds as sources for your sight-reading practice – especially if it looks too difficult for your current skill level. Good sources of music for sight-reading (and practice in general) are the many jazz etude books that are now available.

Be on the lookout for alternate sources of music for sight-reading. When I began playing the baritone saxophone, I discovered that the instrument’s range is identical to that of the cello. Since E-flat transposing instruments can read concert-pitch bass clef as treble clef with a modification of the key signature, the whole repertoire of unaccompanied cello solos became available to me for sight-reading.

SCALES, PATTERNS, AND IDIOMS

The easiest music to read by sight is music you already know. Most music, and especially jazz, is constructed from fundamental building blocks of scales and patterns. Learn to play and, most importantly, to recognize these scales and patterns, and you already “know” a significant amount of music. Sight-reading then becomes an exercise in recognizing and executing larger chunks of music instead of reacting to a string of individual notes. This is analogous to how we learn to read words. When a child first learns to read, he sees the individual letters and “sounds out” each new word. After developing a vocabulary of recognized patterns of letters (words), reading becomes more spontaneous and fluid. When you begin seeing musical patterns that are part of your musical vocabulary, your mental effort is redirected away from merely playing the notes and toward a deeper musical comprehension.

Learn as many scales as you can. Start with the 12 major and 12 (melodic) minor scales but do not stop there. Learn the harmonic minors, natural and other modal minors, augmented (whole-tone) scales, diminished, pentatonic, blues – the list is endless! Also, learn the “chord” for each scale – the arpeggiation of the chord tones. It is
important not only to learn to play the scales and chords but to recognize them when they appear within a piece of music.

Patterns, idioms, or riffs, are the clichés of music. Some of these clichés are instrument-specific and involve the use of special techniques. Many patterns are formulaic rearrangements of the
notes that make up a scale or chord. There are many books on the market that focus on patterns of various types. Learning to recognize and play these patterns is “expanding your vocabulary”. The more patterns you know, the less often your brain has to stop during sight-reading to “look up” an unfamiliar pattern.