Hi, welcome back. This is week 11 of alto sax lessons in the music coach. This week, you're going to work on one of the original parts of improvising, which is improvising off of the main melodies. In the early days of jazz music, improvising hadn't even really taken hold yet. And what was happening was individual soloists who were playing the melody, were embellishing it and changing little things about the rhythms and the phrasing of the main melodies that everyone knew. And this was sort of the seed that was planted and grew into people taking full solos and speaking their own language and making up their own art on top of forms of music.

So it's a great thing to have an ability to be able to really know the melody so strongly that you can embellish shouldn't make it yours. I'm just gonna play you a little example of how you can play the first melody slightly differently. In the second melody, here's an example of one way you can change it a little bit. So making little changes to things can add a lot of flavor to it. It's also a great way to begin or end your solo by playing the melody. It's a way to cue the rest of the band that you're wrapping up your solo or it's a way to take over from someone who has been singing or playing the melody right before you take a solo.

Alright, keep up the great work and we'll see you in the practice room.