Question:
Can anyone recommend a book, preferably with a cd or tape, of cliche jazz licks? I know that you don't want to aspire to playing cliches, but when I learned rock and then blues improv I started by getting a foundation of cliche licks, then when I felt comfortable playing in the style I was more easily able to branch outward. I want to apply this model to jazz, now that I have studied to the improv level.
Answer:
Learning cliches: some do, some don't. Whatever. I wouldn't however invest a whole lot of money in buying books of transcriptions. In my own work, the only thing I've found those useful for is if I want to check my own transcription work (which really isn't all that often). If you buy books of transcriptions, and supposedly learn them without really getting them inside of you (which you have to do if you memorize them aurally from recordings and transcribe them) then you probably aren't really learning them.
Books like David Baker's "1,001 Cool and Useful Blues Patterns" (not a real title, but he did several books like this): I've never found those kinds of licks all that useful or even cool-sounding. They always sound so unhip to me. I've found much more use out of going to a really cool recording of someone playing the blues and then listening and transcribing. One can gain a tremendous amount of usability from transcribing just one recording, or even one record.
Everyone's learning methods are different: I'm still working on discovering mine, after some ten years of serious jazz study, and playing in jazz ensembles for 27 years now.
Here's an example: I was taking a Jazz Theory class at New England Conservatory about five years ago. It was being taught by a Berklee grad who also studied with Charlie Banacos (a legendary Boston-area teacher). One of our assigments was to write a solo on "Joy Spring" and then we'd play it in class.
