The Ramon Ricker Improvisation Series Vol. Two: Book & CD

Ricker's focus on the blues as the foundational language of jazz means students aren't scattered across abstract concepts but instead build their improvisational voice from the ground up. The inclusion of recorded accompaniment transforms practice into dialogue, letting musicians hear themselves in a real ensemble context rather than playing along with silence.

The blues carries a particular honesty. Working through Ricker's material, you're not chasing complexity but rather uncovering the expressive possibilities hidden inside a twelve-bar form that has anchored jazz for over a century. The recorded accompaniments keep you grounded in real swing and real time.

This series serves any jazz student or working musician who needs a clear methodology for understanding blues harmony and making the leap from knowing scales to actually improvising over them. Whether you teach saxophone, trumpet, trombone, piano, or bass, this book meets your students where they are and gives them a shared language for discussion.

• Listen closely to the recorded accompaniment before playing along. Notice how the changes breathe and where the musicians place the beat, then match that energy rather than rushing ahead.
• Practice the blue notes and pentatonic scales slowly over the backing tracks until they feel like vocabulary you own, not shapes you're remembering.
• Work through the chord substitutions in isolation first. Once the reharmonization sits in your ear, the recorded accompaniment becomes a test of whether you can hear and navigate the changes in real time.
• Record yourself soloing over the CD accompaniments. Playback reveals what's landing and what still needs internalization.

Use this as the core text for a jazz ensemble's improvisation study throughout the fall and winter, reserving rehearsal time for students to present their progress over the backing tracks. For private instruction across your studio, it's an invaluable common reference point that lets students speak about chord tones, passing tones, and blues vocabulary with precision.

• Recognizing and playing blue notes in context
• Hearing and navigating II-V progressions with dominant scales and passing tones
• Understanding basic chord substitutions within the blues form
• Constructing solos using blues, pentatonic, and dominant scales
• Developing time feel and phrasing through listening to and playing with recorded accompaniment
• Identifying variations on the twelve-bar blues form