Jazz soloing - How free are you?

[don_oz]

Re the title, how free am I?

I'm this free:

[mr. beaumont]

Wouldn't you say that there was one further level (as outlined in the "Four Stages of Competence")? On the best nights, I feel that the improvisation controls itself and you keep out of the way - i.e. unconscious competence.

I would not, personally. I think that's the best of level 2.

Level three is where you can have that happen AND control it.

But these levels are just my made up shit

[pcsanwald]

Which of these categories do you fall into?

I started out by learning Jamey Aebersold style chord scales over ii-V-Is in high school. my solos didn't sound very good.

Later, in college, when I took lessons from an actual jazz musician, I learned to sing/play a bunch of solos and would incorporate some of those things into my own solos (sometimes paraphrasing), so I'd say I moved from chord/scales into "lick libraries" + "chord tones". my two main sources for licks were charlie christian and charlie parker. At this point I started to sound like an actual jazz musician, sometimes.

In the 20ish years since, I've moved over to being almost entirely an ear player. by this I mean that the fastest way for me to learn music is to hear it, which has required a fair amount of work (I always had a good ear for a melody, but learning to identify harmony is something I had to develop), and also I can generally improvise over most anything and sound good. one thing I've noticed is that whatever melody has been stuck in my head recently is likely to come out in some form when I'm improvising.