Jazz Style and Improvisation for Choirs: Choral DVD

Robinson meets your singers exactly where jazz improvisation feels most foreign and builds genuine confidence through structured, manageable steps. The DVD format lets you show rather than tell, which transforms abstract concepts like trading fours and blues harmony into something your choir can actually hear, imitate, and internalize in real time.

Jazz singing unlocks a conversational, playful quality that many classically trained singers have never explored. Your choir will experience the thrill of spontaneous creation within structure, where trading fours becomes a genuine dialogue and blues feels less like a historical form and more like a living, breathing way to make music.

Directors who want to integrate jazz into their choral curriculum but lack the improvisational background to teach it live. This DVD works equally well for concert choirs exploring contemporary styles and jazz ensembles seeking structured pedagogy for singers new to improvisation.

• Start with the listening and learning section before attempting improvisation; your students need to absorb the sound and phrasing of jazz language before they generate their own ideas.
• Use the three-note improvisation framework as your entry point; limiting the pitch set removes harmonic anxiety and lets singers focus on rhythm, phrasing, and personal expression.
• Have your students master the scat syllables on neutral sounds first, separate from the harmonic content, so they develop rhythmic independence and confidence before layering in chordal awareness.
• The blues and ballad performance selections demonstrate different contexts for the same techniques; play these multiple times across rehearsals so singers internalize how style and genre shape interpretation.

Build a jazz concert or contemporary pops showcase around these techniques, programming the three featured selections alongside your singers' own improvised work. Many directors use this DVD in January or February when singers need a creative refresh and before spring concert season demands full rehearsal focus.

• Improvising within a limited pitch set (three-note improvisation)
• Blues chord vocabulary and harmonic awareness
• Scat syllable articulation and rhythmic precision
• Trading fours (call-and-response phrasing between soloists and ensemble)
• Listening and reacting to ensemble changes in real time
• Genre-specific phrasing and stylistic interpretation (blues, ballad, swing)