Jazz Advice

Practice is an essential part of your journey as a musician. We all do it everyday…or at least we try our best to, however daily practice doesn’t always guarantee improvement.

Why?? Simply because not all practice is created equal. If you look at the big picture there are two basic types of practice:

• (1) “maintenance practice” in which you are doing the necessary work to maintain your current level and…

• (2) “improvement practice” in which you are breaking new ground, isolating problem areas in your playing and working on skills that you have not yet developed.

Both types of practice are necessary for performing at your peak. There is a certain amount of instrumental maintenance to perform each day to ensure that you are staying at your current level of musicianship and there is also a need to acquire new information and skills if you wish to improve as a player.

However, the barrier that most musicians encounter when striving for improvement is that they get stuck on maintenance practice. Day after day they spend hours practicing what they already know: the same exercises, the same lines, the same patterns, the same tunes.

Hours are being logged in the practice room, but the time is not being spent on the type of practice that will elevate your skills to the next level. Left unchanged, this process can go on for years where you’re just maintaining the musical level that you’ve already achieved, not learning anything new.… Read More

On this site we’ve frequently written about learning tunes. This is no coincidence – learning tunes goes hand in hand with improving as an improviser.

Whether you’re practicing, performing, or simply listening to a few records with some friends you’re dealing directly with tunes. Keeping this in mind, building a solid repertoire of tunes should be near the top of your practice list as a serious musician.

If you haven’t done so already, be sure to check out some of the these articles to help you get started with building your repertoire:

• A Blueprint for Building your Repertoire
• 10 Key Tunes
• 5 Tunes you should know and why
• Do you know that tune?
• How to learn a tune in 30 minutes
• Thoughts on learning tunes
• 5 Secrets to learning tunes

These articles are a good place to begin when you want to start building a solid base of tunes that you’ll feel confident performing, but what’s your next step?

If you’ve learned a handful of tunes and have a solid grasp of chord progressions, the answer is simple – you just need to learn more tunes.

However, this simple solution isn’t as easy as it sounds. As soon as you get into the practice room things begin to look a little different. The prospect of picking out one tune to learn from the hundreds upon hundreds of standards out there can be an overwhelming and even depressing process.

Where do I even begin? Why choose one tune and not another? … Read More

“You have to know the rules before you can break them.”

You’ve probably heard this well-intentioned phrase before. It’s as common and overused as “Practice makes perfect” or any of the countless other sayings that we encounter when it comes to learning a musical instrument.

As students of the music we get bombarded by these catch phrases on a daily basis. Teachers show us their personal philosophy for musical improvement, we take away quotes from masterclasses, books and videos, and even our friends give us helpful pointers.

Despite our best efforts, most of this information flies by us unnoticed without any tangible impact on our playing. But you don’t have to stop there, just dig a little deeper and you’ll discover that there’s some valuable truth behind those words:

“You have to know the rules before you can break them.”

If you find yourself stuck with improvising, this phrase can be a game changer. However to create growth, you have to begin by reading between the lines. What exactly are the “rules” and what does it mean to “know” them?

Anyone can hear this statement and think, “yeah, that makes sense,” but to take that message to heart and then apply it to your own playing takes a completely different kind of person.

What does it mean to Know?

Before I started high school I attended a week long jazz camp with about 30 other aspiring improvisers. Five days of big band and combo rehearsals as well as … Read More

Despite what everyone thinks, being creative isn’t easy. You don’t just suddenly find yourself with talent one day and immediately start creating great works of art. It takes years of hard work to develop artistic skills and once you have these skills, it’s no guarantee that your artistic vision will always find a way to express itself.

Creative people of all types encounter a block at some point in their work. There are a number of outside sources that can cause this block: nerves, pressure, fear, exhaustion, etc. But, the ones that really hold us up are the obstacles that come from within ourselves.

We’ve all heard of writer’s block, however creative troubles don’t just affect that desperate writer struggling to start the first word of that first sentence, they affect artists of all types. The dejected composer sitting at the piano amid a mountain of blank staff paper. The sleep deprived painter with a glazed-over look, staring at a hopelessly blank canvas.

And familiar to all of us, the struggling improviser running through the chord progression to All the Things for the bazillionth time searching for a new line, a new sound, a new approach…anything new to play.

Sometimes this is the way it is, you just hit a wall.

Being inventive, imaginative, and spontaneous on a daily basis isn’t easy and when you finally hit that wall it can be a huge hurdle to get over it. No ideas, frustration, boredom, and a complete creative standstill.

At one … Read More

This is a box. This is your mind in a box. Many people’s minds never leave the box. Why?

Thinking creatively is something we all do naturally. It’s our instinctive and ordinary way of being. To be creative is nothing less than being human. You can’t help but be creative.

But back to the box. Why? Why do we tend to stay within our capacity, within our own perception of what’s possible, within a dull dark lifeless box?

Simply put, it’s difficult to escape the box that is the accepted social norm, the seemingly permanent reality of things. While being creative is our natural state, perhaps going against the grain is not. Let’s view this idea from a biological standpoint.

If you’re a deer and you suddenly notice each and every one of your deer friends frantically charging in a particular direction, you best join the herd or chance getting consumed by a ferocious hungry lion. Join the herd or get eaten. Hmmmm. I think I’ll chill and eat some more grass…ummm NO!! I don’t think so. I’ll join the herd and try to blend in best I can. My survival depends on it.

Our pre-programmed biological tendencies pervade every part of our life from how we think to how we interact with others. In terms of interacting with others, we have a desire to be accepted. A desire to fit in. To fit in it’s only natural that we act accordingly with what others are doing. In the interest … Read More

Each day when you get your instrument out of its case and set out to practice improvisation, your goal is to play the right notes. Whether it’s playing with great technique and great sound or finding the best line to play over that new tune, you’re looking for the fastest way to sound good over all those chords that you stumble upon.

Lucky for us, the right notes have been laid out for us in theory books and on the pages of play-a-long tracks. But have you ever stopped to ask yourself: “Why exactly are those notes the “right notes?”

What is it that makes them right and the other notes wrong? Are we just following the rules of music theory on blind faith or are those “right notes” right because we hear them that way?

Music theory is important in understanding the inner workings of harmony, but the true test of the “right notes”comes with your ear. What does it sound like? The interesting aspect of music is that this “sound” is different for every person. Listening is a truly subjective endeavor. What one person hears as pleasing, another person can find unlistenable, even unbearable.

Sometimes it has to do with personal taste, but more often not it has to do with exposure and experience. I remember the first time I listened to Schoenberg’s Pirot Lunaire:

To my untrained ear, it sounded overly dissonant, almost like noise. However, putting it on today it sounds surprisingly accessible. The piece … Read More

If there is one thing about playing jazz that’s shrouded in mystery, it is improvisation.

Improvisation exists in other types of music, even in musical traditions from the far reaches of the globe, but in jazz it goes much deeper. It is somehow vitally tied to the spirit of the music, and it’s not just musicians who recognize the power of the improvised solo. This essence has been captured in everything from literature to movies to pop culture.

There is something alluring about the idea of the jazz musician; a creative soul channeling the intangible through their instrument, essentially creating something out of nothing.

However, despite all of the attention, we still can’t seem to define this creative endeavor. You can get a degree in jazz studies, you can study the philosophy behind improvisation and creativity, and you can even scan the brains of improvising musicians to discover the secret pathways of the mind in its most creative state, but there still seem to be more questions than answers.

Alas, improvising continues to remain an elusive mystery.

As musicians hard at work developing this skill in the practice room, we often get lost in the music. It can be all too easy to lose the ability to look at the music objectively from an outside perspective and after some time, we’re no longer able to hear music with a naive untrained ear.

We become part of the music and suddenly we see the world in a different way. It’s … Read More

When we practice jazz improvisation, we zoom in on one area of study so much that we often lose sight of the whole. How do we practice in this truly focused way, while simultaneously train ourselves to perform in a way that expresses all of what we know?

In other words, how can we shift our perspective from a one-pointed zoomed in view to a wide angle lens where we’re capable of drawing from many concepts, lines and techniques?

The answer: practice mixing.

Mixing is just that. You practice mixing multiple techniques during a chorus or several choruses of improvisation. By doing this, you learn how to widen your gaze and not get hung up on playing the same thing every time around.

The more you learn to mix everything you practice, the more it will be available in live performance as it will be natural for you to move from one idea to another, or to sprinkle in some new concept you’ve been working on at just the right moment.

What to mix

What can you “mix”? Well, when you think about it, in general, anything you play is either a piece of language, or a concept. Really, even a piece of jazz language is an example of concepts in action, so essentially everything is a concept, but for sake of clarity, I prefer to think of language and concepts as two complimentary entities.

So, you can mix:

• language with language
• language with concepts
• concepts with concepts

These are … Read More

Great solos don’t come from nowhere.

The ability to apply innovative harmonic concepts, flawless instrumental technique, and appropriate musical language doesn’t just materialize out of thin air. These prized aspects of excellent musicianship have to start somewhere. However when it comes to pondering our musical idols, for some reason we can’t help thinking in this illogical and romanticized way.

From Charlie Parker to Miles to Michael Brecker we see the staggering end result of their work and can’t imagine it being any other way. They never had to work hard, those amazing solos just came out naturally, right?? The reality though, is that each great player and more specifically, each great solo has an exact origin and a traceable path from idea to implementation.

Now this idea is nothing new to musicians, but an area of contention among many is what exactly it is that goes into creating a great solo. There are many theories out there as to what it takes to become a great improviser. Just take a look at all the different concepts and methods you can study in books and the DVD’s put out by dozens of big names.

Even between great players, there are discrepancies as to what works and what doesn’t work.

Despite all of these personal methods, there is one consistent truth that can’t be ignored. When you improvise a solo, you can only draw upon what you’ve practiced and ingrained in the practice room. It’s as simple as that – if you … Read More

I practice a lot. Some days more than others, but I try to get in a couple hours everyday no matter how busy I am. In many jobs I’ve had, I’ve even been known to take my horn to work and sneak away in a spare room once everyone leaves.

I bet your life is just as busy as mine. Between work, family, and personal obligations, our musical endeavors fall to the wayside and end up in a chaotic mess; you scramble to find an hour to practice and when you finally do, you’re not sure where you spent your time yesterday, where you should spend it today, and what you should spend it on tomorrow.

Relax. It’s time to get organized.

Documenting what you know

The first and main step in getting organized is documenting what you know. This is an easy step to pass by. Believe me, I still have much of what I know undocumented. Why is this bad?

It’s not necessarily bad that not everything you know isn’t documented and it’s probably impossible to document literally  everything you know, however, conversely, the more you can document what you know, the more you will understand where your greatest strengths and weaknesses lie. Think of your documentation as a visual representation of your arsenal.

Document language you learn

Every week you should be further ingraining the language you know, and introducing new language into the mix. With all this language coming in and out the door, it’s easy … Read More