I should explain one of my pet concerns about the way improvisation is taught. There's a real difference of approach that I think is worth considering. A lot of books about improvisation and a lot of ways teachers go about it are based on learning familiar jazz phrases and playing them over and over in all keys. In fact, a lot of jazz books are sort of page after page of exercises. That are made up of a familiar jazz lick, jazz phrase, kinda phrase that we're so used to hearing. And the writer will make up a whole page exercise that taking you through different keys, different ranges of your instrument and so on. The idea being that you'll become fluent at playing these jazz-like phrases and sound like a jazz musician. Now I'm gonna make a comparison here with speech. Let's say, I'm gonna go to France on my vacation. And I don't speak French but on the airplane going over I have a little phrase book and I memorize some things that I can say. Maybe, what time is it? Where's the train station? Or what time is lunch, or I'd like to order an omelet please. Okay, so now imagine that I'm sitting in my Paris cafe. And somebody walks by and they hear me say to the waiter, I'd like to have an omelet please, in French. Now for a moment, that person might think, oh, he speak French. But, think about it. I can't tell a story in French, I can't make a joke I can't discuss politics or philosophy. That's the kind of language skill we want, if we wanna be improvising. It's not enough just to have some convenient phrases that we can play, and sound like we're a jazz musician. That's not it. It doesn't work just to sound like you're improvising. You actually have to be able to improvise which means we need to understand the process and develop the skills and the tools that make that possible. So if you've been trying to study out of books that take the repeated phrase approach, I advise giving it a second thought as to whether that's really helping you or not. There's supposed to be some magic moment that after you have mastered these repetitious phrases that at some point you'll suddenly be able to really improvise. But it doesn't compute, it's not logical. You don't learn to speak effectively by reciting a handful of phrases over and over again, in many permutations. You actually have to learn the language. So that's what we're gonna be doing.