As I review improvisation methods and curricula, it becomes very clear to me that there are two kinds of improvisation, and the way these two are approached go kind of like this:

1. Let's get everyone playing whatever they feel, and lower our inhibitions so we can express ourselves through musical sounds.

2. Let's get each of the students improvising good melodies that follow the harmonic tones of the chord progression, while allowing them to develop their own sense of personal expression.

Musicians and music educators who do not know how to improvise usually have the wrong idea about what it means to improvise. They think a jazz musician is making up new melodies on the spot. Do jazz musicians invent spontaneous, brand new musical ideas while improvising? Not really. Improvisation is not so much creating something new as it is creatively organizing melodic ideas that have been learned previously.

A famous series of jazz improvisation books proclaims that "everyone can improvise", and music educators everywhere profess to believe that music should be taught to ALL children. However, when it comes to teaching improvisation in our music classes, consider the following questions:

1. Can all of our students develop competency with improvisation, or just a few?

2. Do we feel successful, as teachers, when only 2 or 3 students can play a good improvised solo?

Been there, done that...failed at teaching improvisation. Yes, I have failed over and over. Improvisation is just so complicated! And no matter what words I have used, kids just don't get it...and they certainly can't do it.

Okay, so they can all have some fun playing unique rhythms and melodies with one basic scale, and I celebrate that success. But as soon as you try to get them playing over changes, FAIL.

Plus, there is never enough TIME to really work that hard on improvisation, with concerts and festivals constantly demanding your attention. So, I went on year after year accepting "failure to teach improvisation" as the norm. And my colleagues all agree that it is normal. One teacher recently gave a jazz clinic at a music educators conference and said, and I quote, "Teaching improvisation in the jazz band is too challenging and time consuming, so I just tell my students to learn to improvise in their private lessons".

However, prominent jazz educators like Roosevelt Griffin, who works at a low-income school at which none of his students can afford private lessons, agree with me that not only CAN we teach improvisation in our jazz band rehearsals, but that we MUST.