Having a good ear is going to help a ton when you’re playing with other musicians.
Really, it’s a part of listening.
Being able to read music is also crucial since then all you need is a sheet and you can play many songs of many different styles.
At a jam session, you could have a real book, but it’s likely you will be playing songs that you already know.
One simple exercise you can do is listening to recordings of melodies and simply playing what you hear. You might need to play back a small piece many times, but don’t worry your ability to do this will improve very quickly.
A step beyond that would be to play back improvised solos as you hear them.
i think you have to start with the basics and train your ear to at least figure out if a note is lower or higher than the previous one in a sequence. then interval recognition. then play the sax solo of baker street after listening to it once.
Hey Ugo,
That’s a good point about recognizing intervals. One way to do that is to figure out a song that has a particular interval- the minor second in the Jaws Theme for example. And play that in your mind to compare.
-Neal