Jazz Advice

Learning the hard way??

You thought you came here to find an easier way to learn improvisation, right? Well to be honest, the easier way is not always the best way and if you’re in something for the long run, getting things right from the start can save you a lot of time and years of frustration.

Don’t let the title throw you, it’s not actually learning the hard way, it’s just learning, period. Over the years, the term “learning” has slowly come to mean something else. Instead of actually studying and mastering a skill, “learning” has evolved into memorizing the main facts and pieces of a skill; in other words, the goal is proficiency rather than mastery.

When we learn something today, we find the shortcuts that give us the desired results with the least amount of effort. We start with a guide book, an outline, a list of definitions, a cheat sheet, and we can even look up the answers if we get lost. Whatever the task is, we want to be able to perform it well right away. The actual skill is not as important as the end results.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, and in many cases it’s the most efficient way to learn things. If you want to pass an exam in school, memorize the formulas, the definitions, and the dates, and you’ll pass the test. Traveling to another country? Get a guide book, learn a few key phrases in the native … Read More

A reader recently asked:

At my college, to get into the lab bands you have to be a really great sight-reader. What are some ways to become a great reader besides just saying “read whatever you can.” I am decent at sight-reading, but I want to take it to that next level. How do I go about doing this?

It goes without saying that sight-reading is an important skill to have as a musician. You sight-read new pieces in your rehearsals, you need it when you sub for a big band, and it’s a dreaded part of the audition process. It is by no means the most important skill to have as a musician, but if you want to be a “working” musician, it is something that you definitely need.

This is a great question, but it’s also one that often gets answered with the vague, apathetic answers that you mentioned. Telling someone to “just sight-read more,” no matter how well-intentioned, is not going to help them improve.

Sight-reading, like many other techniques that we develop as musicians, is a skill – a skill that can be learned and continually improved upon. Rather than putting yourself in a room and trying to blindly improve your sight-reading chops by doing it over and over again, look at the specific elements involved in this skill and work on developing them.

It’s Sight-Reading

Somehow, we’ve all had this idea put into our heads that sight-reading is this completely new skill that we … Read More

Your mental approach to the things you do can have everything to do with your success or failure. The way that you think about everything from setting goals to learning actual skills directly affects how you will perform any number of tasks. This is especially true when it comes to practicing improvisation.

When we think about our goals in music and how we’re going to accomplish them, we can look at things in one of two ways. We can take a step back and a look at the big picture or we can take a magnifying glass to the task at hand and focus in on all the nitty-gritty details.

Both give us a surprisingly different perspective of the same music and in turn, can be useful in many different ways.

Take a moment to reflect upon your own mindset as you set your goals and head into the practice room. Are you constantly setting your sights on the big picture and the end result of your work or are you focused on the specific details that will lead you to achieving these goals? Maybe you do a little of each, or maybe you’ve never even thought about it at all?

The answer to these questions are more important than you may think and if you’ve been having trouble realizing your goals, the culprit may lie with your mental approach. Even though both approaches are essential for your improvement, there is a specific time and a place for each one, … Read More

What exactly is it that makes the musicians that we call “masters” great?

What sets them apart from everyone else? Is it their technique, their sound, their originality, the way they can play over chord progressions? Well…these are all pieces of their mastery, but what is the reason for their mastery?

These are questions that I’ve often wondered about over the years as I’ve worked to improve on my own. Can anyone truly reach this level of mastery, or are those idols that we look up to, from Bird and Miles to Trane and McCoy, simply super-human?

After spending time around some of the best musicians in New York, it gradually became clear to me that the top musicians in the world do indeed have a certain characteristic that sets them apart. It is something that is not uncommon with the best athletes in the world, the most successful entrepreneurs, or the most tenacious research scientists.

And encouragingly, this is something that we can all aspire to develop within ourselves.

When we first encounter greatness, it seems like a magical power, but when you begin to study it, this magic wears off and the path to greatness appears to be fairly obvious; obvious, but nonetheless remarkable. The same is true of achieving mastery in jazz.

Secret…?

This “secret” quite simply, is the incessant drive to keep improving.

Now I know that you were expecting a secret practice routine, an underground way of learning solos, or some secret harmonic technique. Every … Read More

In learning most anything, there’s an accepted and standard way of approaching the material. There exists a typical method that emerged over the course of many years. In many disciplines, this method came about through trial and error, meticulously analyzing what techniques have worked best to allow an individual to excel as quickly and efficiently as possible toward their desired goal.

Unfortunately, in jazz improvisation, this did not happen. In jazz, the standard method of learning today arose not from understanding how the masters of the music learned this art, but instead from the world of academia. These academic studies focused on the results of what the jazz legends produced and ignored in entirety their process of how they learned.

By studying and analyzing commonalities among the end product (great solos), these studies drew formal conclusions and neatly packaged them in a digestible way, making the world of jazz improvisation available to everyone, but watering it down for those who wish to learn it on a deeper level.

Ok, so it’s not quite as bad as I’m making it sound. No, there’s not this corrupt agency out to destroy the world of jazz and all its practitioners…although it would make an interesting plot for a movie. There’s not necessarily one group of people that created this watered down version of learning jazz that I’m labeling as “the academics.”

Nonetheless, this false paradigm does exist, it was created in an academic setting, and it does stagnate the learning process of those … Read More

Visualization can be a very powerful tool when it comes to achieving your goals. Everyone from professional athletes to ballet dancers have used this simple, but effective technique throughout training and competition to reach their peak level of performance. The simple task of mentally preparing for challenges and envisioning success can transform and drastically improve your musical performance.

In Visualization for Jazz Improvisation, the idea of using visualization to cultivate the techniques involved in improvisation were discussed. Once you’ve explored the benefits of visualizing chord tones and progression, don’t stop there. The technique of visualization can be used to positively affect every aspect of your playing and performance. Below are four more ideas for using this technique to improve your total musicianship.

Visualizing your sound

As a musician, your sound is one of the most important aspects of your playing. Whether you play classical trumpet, folk guitar, or jazz piano, your sound is the first thing that reaches a listener; and it’s the one aspect of your musicianship that can speak directly to the emotions of the listener.

However, contrary to what most people think, your sound does not come from the mouthpiece you use, the instrument model you play on, or the etudes that you study. Yes, these factors can influence your sound, but the origins of the sound you produce run much deeper.

It’s the concept of sound in your mind, the sound you hear in your head, that determines what is going to come out of … Read More

When your goal is to improve at a skill like improvisation, you will stop at nothing to gather as much information as you can. Your search leads you in every direction: out of print books, the method books that the masters studied, seeking out jazz gurus and famous teachers, and searching for bootleg recordings. Along the way you pick up stories and legends, “jazz folklore” if you will.

Some of the stories are surprisingly true and others are mere exaggerations. Some stories have been stretched and altered to the point, that when they finally reach you, there’s not one ounce of truth left in them. Sometimes we only get a small piece of a story, a half-truth, and we set out to follow this example, only to find out later that this goal that we set out trying to attain was in fact, an urban legend.

Because these stories can have a powerful effect on us as we set our personal goals and head into the practice room, it’s important to separate fact from fiction. A simple misguided, but well-intentioned belief, can lead us in the completely wrong direction and cost us valuable time and effort in learning how to improvise.

In Mythbusting the Top 5 Myths about Jazz Improvisation, five common misconceptions about learning to improvise were discussed in detail. Here are four more jazz myths to keep in mind as you head into the practice room and onto the stage.

1) All the practice you need is … Read More

“Anyone can improvise!”

The phrase rolls off the tongue with the banality of many a late-night infomercial. “Anyone can get ripped abs! Anyone can make millions from home! Anyone can speak Navajo!” But when it comes to jazz, is this statement really true?

This has been a debate in the jazz education world since it’s institutionalization. Can improvisation be taught in a classroom? Can you take someone off the street and teach them how to play over a blues? Is everyone actually capable of improvising?

Over the years, I’ve often heard these phrases uttered in private lessons, music schools, and on gigs by a number of people: “I can’t improvise. I’ve never learned how to improvise. I don’t do the jazz thing. Making up solos is just not for me. I don’t understand how to pick out which notes to play.”

Some were accomplished musicians and others were absolute beginners, but when you hear the above statements across the board, it makes you wonder: Maybe some people are just not cut out for this.

However, it can be all too easy to make rash decisions when things are challenging and frustrating at the outset. If you look at what actually goes into the process of improvisation, you’ll find that it’s much more accessible than it appears to be.

Improvising is a skill

The first thing to realize is that improvisation is a skill, not some magical power that a few chosen people possess. Changing your mindset in this small … Read More

Learning to improvise is a path with many steps leading to many different levels.

Contrary to the belief held by some that improvising is a talent, or even a skill allowed to only a special few, the truth is much simpler. Time and again we must tackle new concepts and tirelessly practice them until we have them in our ears and fingers. The wondrous aspect of learning improvisation is that it is a process that never ends – you can always improve and there will always be another level to strive for.

The difficult part, however, comes in pushing yourself to get to that next level.

In the process of learning to improvise, we immediately make big jumps in skill level. We go from knowing a few major scales to understanding chord structures, from hearing basic chord progressions to playing improvised lines over entire tunes. Eventually we transcribe a solo and begin to think about the concepts of phrasing, motivic development, sound, time, and articulation.

All of these steps are huge and it truly feels great when we accomplish them. We go from dealing with music superficially to actually creating something meaningful and personal. With each level, a whole new world of sound and possibilities is discovered.

As we become more advanced technically and more sophisticated harmonically however, it takes more and more work to break through to the next level. Despite our previous successes, roadblocks inevitably pop up in the way of our improvement: we get lazy, complacent with … Read More

There exists a hidden trap on the path of learning improvisation.

One that you can fall into without even realizing it.

In music school practice rooms, jam sessions, and even in the performance hall, the art of improvisation can frequently devolve into a petty competition. Rather than sharing information and focusing on musicality, some musicians aim to “cut” other players or show off their technical or harmonic prowess.

Instead of an atmosphere of mutual learning and musicality, it becomes every man or woman for themselves. As a result, other musicians squander musical information and keep their ideas to themselves because they feel it will put them ahead in the game, when in fact it does just the opposite.

What they’re missing

If you keep your musical knowledge and discoveries hidden away in the hopes of staying one step ahead of the competition, you are setting yourself up for disaster. Not only are you promoting musical stagnation, but you are effectively stunting your own growth as an improviser.

When someone relies on a “secret lick” to sound hip or a trick technique to wow the crowd, the search for new ideas and influences comes to a standstill. Instead of continually learning, transcribing and experimenting with new harmonies, you return again and again to these stale ideas.

Because so much attention is paid to holding onto these licks and preventing the success of rival players, nothing is left to focus on finding new information. This is not a recipe for success.

If … Read More