Jazz Advice

It’s already May and before you know it those lazy months of summer are going to sneak up on you. And just as quickly they’ll be gone, leaving you wishing you had more hours in the day to devote to your music. Before you find yourself in this all too familiar situation, here’s a quick question to ponder: What exactly do you want to accomplish musically this summer?

If you’re not sure and you have yet to give it any thought, chances are you aren’t going to get as much accomplished as you could as an improviser.

For many musicians the summer months are a time when we lose our drive and end up getting rusty. I mean it makes sense, why stay inside a dreary practice room working on ii-V’s all day when you can be outside enjoying the sun and warm weather. However, chucking your practice routine out the window for the entire summer can leave you musically stagnant or worse by the time the fall rolls around.

The encouraging news is that you don’t have to lock yourself up like a prisoner in a dark practice room to see improvement. With a little planning, the summer months are a time when you can take advantage of some extra practice time and still get out and be a normal human being.

You might be a student looking to transform your playing for the next school year, a player looking to capitalize on a few extra hours of daylight, … 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

As an improviser, you can transcribe solos. You can improve your technique. You can listen to your favorite recordings for hours each day. You can practically live in your practice room.

But, no matter what you do or how much time you spend, at the end of the day you still have to deal with tunes. Despite all your hard work and preparation, there are still those tunes you don’t know. Lot’s of them. Hundreds of tunes. How exactly are you going to learn all these tunes?

The truth is that you aren’t going to know every tune ever written. Try as they might, no one does, not even the greatest players out there. However what you can do is slowly but steadily add tunes to your repertoire, one by one.

Each day you can make a little headway. This is the mark of a great player. Aim to know more tunes this week than you did last week. Work tirelessly on your ears and playing what you hear, so you can figure out the tunes you don’t know. Strive to learn something new everyday.

Expanding your repertoire is something that every improviser must deal with, it’s a process that never ends. However, this process of learning tunes doesn’t have to be a recurring nightmare that’s constantly holding you back and preventing you from going out and playing. It can be simple, even fun.

Here are three things that you can do in your daily practice to make the process … Read More

Transcription can be a real struggle sometimes. Some days it feels like you can spend an hour trying to learn a few measures, and after a dozen frustrating attempts, you end up in exactly the same place you started.

If this feeling rings a bell with you, you are definitely not alone. Many of the questions that we get every week have to do with this exact problem. How exactly do you make the transcription process easier?

In a perfect world transcription would be a breeze. You would hear a solo that grabs your attention, bring it into the practice room, and figure it out in a matter of minutes. The entire process would be seamless and easy: hear it, sing it, and play it; translating those harmonies and melodies right to your instrument and on to your solos.

Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, this is actually closer to reality than you might be willing to believe. You can get to this point in your playing, however, the path there is not what you may be expecting.

Getting simple with it

With any complex technique, advanced skill, or in-depth harmonic knowledge that you wish to acquire as a musician, the process has to begin with a very simple concept. A small exercise or idea that you expand, explore, and expound upon. You take this simple idea and master it; building it up step by step, until you are playing at an entirely new level and using skills … 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

Recently I’ve been checking out a book called “You are Your Own Gym: The Bible of Bodyweight Execises.” The author, Mark Lauren, is a former instructor and trainer for elite special forces soldiers.

The central premise of his book, geared toward your everyday civilian, is that you don’t need all those fancy high-tech weight machines or even an expensive membership to your local gym to get in shape. According to the Mark Lauren, what most people don’t realize is that you already have all the equipment you need to completely transform your body.

You are indeed your own gym.

At first glance, it seems like a concept that’s too simple and too obvious to work let alone create elite soldiers. However after a few weeks of sticking to his program, the results speak for themselves. More important and far reaching than his workout program though, is the concept of intrinsic improvement.

This idea of self-engendered personal growth may not be a revolutionary concept in the realm of physical fitness, but in the world of music it is surprisingly rare.

Fitting the mold of the musician

In music, we constantly define ourselves and our musicianship by external factors: the instruments we play, the style of music we perform, the records we listen to, and the groups we play with. Classical musicians are supposed to play a certain way, jazz musicians have to play another way, string players play a certain way, drummers should focus exclusively on rhythm, horn players … Read More

Everybody talks about learning tunes. I mean everybody. It’s the one common thread that you hear about at jam sessions, in music schools, and conversations with great players. So much emphasis is placed upon the need for more tunes it’s not surprising that most players have this burgeoning mental complex about knowing and learning tunes that hangs over their heads day after day like a black cloud.

With this ominous mindset, the simple act of learning a tune becomes a painful, long, drawn-out process that we try to avoid at all costs.

For years, I was stuck in this mental box and would force myself to try to learn tunes by pure memorization, from a piece of paper. Hours were spent in fruitless pursuit and it became easier to read tunes than to actually learn them. When it came time to perform these tunes, I was hanging onto these mental facts like a stranded swimmer holding on to a life preserver.

If I couldn’t think of those note names I memorized or that sequence of fingerings, I had nothing to play and worse, no aural skills to keep me afloat.

When you are learning in a situation like this, building a solid repertoire can seem like an impossible task. Even when you do manage to learn a tune, are you sure that you truly know it and will remember it?

If this sounds familiar, you’ve probably had the same thought I often had: There has to be a better … Read More

1. Nobody’s checking for your music degree

Just because you graduated with a degree in jazz studies and minored in Coltrane licks doesn’t mean that you know how to play. Music school has its benefits, but it’s not the end of the road for your musical education – in fact, if you picked up the right skills, it’s just the beginning.

On the flip side, if you’ve never went to music school it doesn’t mean that you can’t play. Becoming a great player takes the same type of work, whether you’re enrolled in a music school or learning on your own with the records. In the end, here’s what matters: Can you play?

2. Keep going back to the fundamentals

When it comes to improvisation, your improvement stems from the basic building blocks of musicianship. Still can’t hear a ii-V progression and rusty on your major scales, but continually trying to improvise over difficult tunes? That’s like trying to be a world-class olympic swimmer and not knowing how to do the back-stroke. Stop setting yourself up for frustration of failure. Start by building a solid foundation of technique, ear training, and language and go from there.

3. Talent is great, but skill and perseverance win every time

Not every person has the same kinds of talents, so you discover what yours are and work with them.~Frank Gehry

A natural affinity or ability for something is great, but to succeed at improvisation you need to tirelessly develop your skills day … Read More

The extreme ranges of any instrument express extreme emotion, but they’re not easy to tackle. The high register is notoriously difficult on most instruments and the low register is often under-developed and under-utilized.

The standard approach towards these registers is to extend your scales and arpeggio exercises as high and as low as you can. Yes, this is a great start, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t do that, however, if you think by simply playing scales and arpeggios in these registers that you’re going to suddenly be using them creatively while you improvise, you better guess again.

And furthermore, the idea of “extending your range” does not simply mean you can play one note really high. That’s useless.How interesting is it really to hear some trumpet player squeaking out the highest note he can in the most un-musical and look-at-me manner?

Get over it. Nobody cares how high you can play. Well, not true; the same crowd that loves Kenny G, probably would love to hear you play high too. But seriously…the high and low registers can be used musically and with purpose.

Once you learn the fingerings and proper relaxed technique to achieve the sound you desire in these registers, there are some obvious but rarely used tactics to explore, which will help you become fluid in using the extreme ranges while improvising.

Apply language to extreme ranges

This is the most obvious concept, yet the most overlooked. We probably sound like a broken record. Language, language, … Read More

Let’s face it, improvisation is hard enough as it is, even when we do spend the time in the practice room. But however much we study or practice, there are some key factors that can destroy our creativity and ability to improvise in seconds.

We’ve all experienced this feeling before in performance. You hear an idea or a line in your head and for some reason or another it doesn’t come out of your instrument. It seems that something is preventing you from playing over those chord changes with ease. Sometimes it’s even hard just to find a good idea to play!

All too often we think the excuse lies in some area that we have no control over or we look for some hidden problem that is keeping us from playing the way we envision.

We get questions all the time from people encountering these issues with improvising. Most of the time people are looking for some hidden problem that is holding them back. I totally relate with this experience and remember looking to advanced harmonic concepts and special techniques to solve my problems.

Nine times out of ten however, the issue lies with one of 5 key areas of musicianship that I’ve listed below. Think of this list as the 5 pre-requisites that you need to have down before you graduate to improvising on the stage.

Without them, improvising is like trying to take the final exam after you’ve skipped all the classes – you’re going to be … Read More