a great example of Grappelli in his sort of “middle point”. I love Grappelli raw energy when he was playing with Django, however his proficiency seemed to ramp up as he got older. His much later recordings whilst are magic In not always a huge fan of, I felt he seemed to overplay often. (I’m not saying so don’t have this issue myself sometimes!) This point in his playing I felt he seemed the perfect balance of the two. He seemed to effortlessly play amazing Melodie’s that darted around the chords in a musical way and his technique was really on point! What do you think?

Hi all, I wanted to see what was the recording that made you decide you wanted to play jazz in the first place? I remember my grandfather (a jazz clarinetist) telling me about Django and Stephane, he told me about Djangos injured hand when I was about 14 and gave me a CD compilation of the hotclub quintette. I remembered the story wrong and thought it was Stephane who only had 2 working fingers. This is the tune that I listened to a lot around this time, it was a while before I started trying to play jazz but I loved this recording of the Bach double Concerto.

Send me a private message on here to try out a practice club session for free. The Jazz Violin Practise Club is a weekly guided practice session on Zoom. It’s not a lesson. We take apart my own etudes and transcriptions of great solos, break them into clear, playable exercises, and everyone practises along with me by ear. It’s all about learning real jazz language through repetition and doing, not talking about it. It keeps you accountable, builds your ears, and gives you a practical way to develop improvisation every week.

Transcribing is often cited as the best way to really take in jazz language. By that I mean learning a solo by ear and applying it to your instrument. I do this a lot and have done it loads throughout my time learning and practising jazz violin. However I know that many find it tough and do not have the time to dedicate to learning a whole solo. Whilst I think it should still be something you try to do if you can, this is my short hack for when you find yourself getting stuck. Just learn to sing it. This will help you understand phrasing. It will help develop your ear. It will help you hear swing and groove better. All of this will translate to your jazz playing at some point and you do not even need to pick up your instrument. You can do it as accurately as you want to. Even just learning to sing the general shape of a great solo will help to some degree and you can do it whilst washing up. Chances are that you will end up wanting to work some of it out on your instrument once you have got into singing it. ❓Which solo should we all try singing this week?❓

Looking to hear one thing you have practised a lot that has helped you make large leaps in your playing. I’ll go first... Forcing myself to play a certain amount of phrases within a certain amount of bars. For example, taking an 8 bar section of the form and saying: "I have to play three improvised phrases within this section." What’s yours?