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

Learning language is vital to your success as an improvisor. Without it you’re truly lost. You may know a scale, a chord, a concept…but without the fundamental ideas of what to do with these tools, you’ll aimlessly wander through the harmony. These fundamental ideas are gleaned from learning and studying language.

A reader recently wrote in, “I’ve been transcribing and learning language from my favorite players, but now I feel like I’m just repeating the same stuff over and over. How do I get beyond this?”

For starters, make sure you’re learning language not licks, and that you’ve spent ample time making lines your own. If you’re doing those two things, you should already feel like you’re not playing the same stuff all the time.

But, how do you set yourself up from the get-go feeling like when you learn a piece language, you’re going to open many doors, not just one door to one line, in one particular situation? The answer lies in how you understand the line, and what you do with that information once you know it.

The inner workings of jazz language

Whenever you study a piece of jazz language, whether it’s a line you just transcribed, or it’s something you learned months ago, always ask yourself, “What makes this specific line special?” Really dwell on it and ponder the answer. In some cases it’s immediately obvious and in others, it may taking some more thinking.

The point is, you need to realize early … Read More

Recently I’ve been studying and transcribing a lot of Miles from around 1956-1957. Albums like Cookin’, Relaxin’, and Workin’.

More than the notes or the harmonic devices in his solos, the one thing that sticks out about Miles is his sense of phrasing. This is what sets him apart and why so many listeners connect with his sound. Miles could play anything he wanted, but he always plays musically.

It takes an advanced and honest musician to improvise a melody that they are hearing in their heads amid the wash of constantly moving chords and time. And it takes an even more mature musician to not play all the scales, and patterns and language that they’ve practiced for hours.

Most people don’t realize how much it work and focus it takes to get to the point that you can free yourself from the theory and play something that you’re hearing and feeling.

This idea of phrasing and creating meaningful musical statements is one aspect of improvising that is missing from a lot of players’ solos. Improvising is not just using scales or inserting a pattern into a chord progression, in the end it’s all about creating music and performing personal melodies.

What is a musical phrase?

When you improvise a musical phrase, you essentially become a composer, creating new melodies on the spot over an established chord progression. Therefore, studying or at the very least becoming familiar with the elements of composition is essential for creating … Read More

People have been writing in a lot lately asking us what’s okay and what’s not okay to transcribe. With all the different styles of jazz and genres of music, people are entirely confused as to what’s acceptable to transcribe.

I have to admit, upon receiving these questions, I was a bit confused. I thought to myself, “How can somebody not know what to transcribe?” We talk constantly about how to pick solos to transcribe. It all boils down to  this: you need to love what you’re transcribing.

But as the questions continued to pour in, I began to realize that people arrive to transcribing with a handful of assumptions which keep them shackled upon their quest as an improvisor.

The first assumption: I’m only allowed to transcribe Bebop

Jazz is made up of a span of about 5 or 10 years, right? So wrong. There’s a whole history of this music before and after the so-called “Bebop” era. And while were at it, let’s talk about all these jazz “periods.” Jazz is commonly split into all these neat little boxes with nice little names. Swing, Bebop, Hard Bop, Modal, Free…and the nice little names go on…

And then each musician is then stuffed neatly into each one of these categories. Charlie Parker goes here, Cannonball there, we’ll put Trane there, and let’s throw Miles here. Okay, done! That’s jazz!

Hindsight is 20/20

Looking back, we seem to think that jazz happened in this neat orderly fashion. It did not. So-called … Read More

Play it slow. Feel every beat. Subdvide. Hear every note. Concentrate on every single detail.

There are dozens of different ways to describe the process of slow practice, yet it seems that the majority of successful musicians in any genre are saying “practice slowly!”

Every teacher that I’ve ever had, from classical players to lead trumpet players to accomplished improvisers, has stressed the importance of focused slow practice. I’ve heard it in masterclasses, I’ve read about it in books, and I’ve watched it in video clips.

It doesn’t matter if you’re working on the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto or figuring out how to solo over Confirmation, s-l-o-w p-r-a-c-t-i-c-e is oddly enough the quickest way to your goal. Check out the great Itzhak Perlman discussing the benefits of slow practice:

I guess it makes sense, right? The slower you go and the more time you have to process information, the easier it is to learn something. And the faster you learn something, the more efficient you’ll be at improving and achieving your goals.

There’s a sort of contradictory, Yin and Yang quality to all of this that you have to come to terms with. To play fast, you must practice slowly. To play the high notes, you must first master the low notes. To innovate you must assimilate the past. These phrases are easy to remember and have a nice ring to them, but practicing in this fashion is another story.

Number one, it’s counter-intuitive and two, it’s flat out hard … Read More

One of the questions we’ve been getting a lot lately is where to start learning jazz improvisation. There’s so much information out there, that knowing where to start is a complete nightmare.

If I could start again today, I’d ignore nearly all the information out there in terms of method books and do my best to learn this music the same way that the greats learned. They didn’t have books filled with transcriptions of their favorite players. They didn’t have real-books or fake-books packed with sheet music of tunes. And they certainly didn’t have play-along records that they could pop in and jam with.

They learned from the recordings of their heroes, coupled with playing with others.

Now don’t get me wrong. It’s up to you whether you use any of these materials and even play-alongs can be used effectively, however, why fix it if it’s not broken?

In other words, people were learning how to play jazz long before any of this material existed and they certainly sounded just fine Sure, the convenience of playing with a play-along record when you have no one to jam with can be fun and beneficial, but in my experience, as well as observing countless other musicians’ experiences, nearly all these resources distract you from the pathway that will get you where you want to go.

Where to start

Here’s a checklist to get you started learning jazz improvisation. If you simply go through the checklist, you’ll be well on your way … 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

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

A magical thing happens when you listen to a recording of your favorite player and begin to play along with the record. It’s almost as if an unconscious transformation takes place, an instant instruction through aural osmosis. Simply by sitting by the speakers with your instrument and taking in those sound waves, you can instantly imitate that player’s unique musical style.

Ironically though, many of us miss this connection because we have tunnel vision on the music theory. Somewhere along the way, we’ve picked up this mentality that you learn the notes in one place and get the style from another.

Chances are you’ve even heard someone describe musical style with words while teaching improvisation: “bend that note, lay back on the time there, ghost those notes, play with a brighter sound, tongue those notes shorter, put some edge on it!”

These phrases give you a general target to aim at, but when compared with the actual sound, these verbal descriptions continually fall short of the intended target. To truly grasp style, it must be experienced and understood on a deep emotional level. This is where the benefits of transcription and serious listening come into play.

The majority of improvisers have a set definition and goal when it comes to transcribing, which usually begins and ends with figuring out the specific notes of line or solo. But think about it, once you’ve learned those notes, do you sound like that player from the record when you’re by yourself? Is that … Read More

Learning improvisation can be a curious process. Every now and then as we endeavor to educate ourselves musically, we hear bits of advice and pick up words of wisdom from master classes, videos, books, and conversations. Yet, we don’t really listen to these directions or take them to heart.

The truth is that we can’t accept these words of wisdom. Well, at least not until we discover their validity for ourselves. We need to be hit in the gut emotionally and we need to see the light with our own two eyes.

This is the funny thing about human nature. People can tell you repeatedly how to do things, whether it’s how to eat right, how to exercise, or how to play jazz, until they are blue in the face. But, until you change your diet, hit the gym, and start transcribing solos, experiencing these tangible results for yourself, this information has no impact on you.

You have to have that light bulb moment where you realize “Oh yeah, this stuff actually does work…” You need to realize that you’re not some exception to the rules that everyone else is following, these words apply to you and they can help you. You simply need to listen.

For me, this moment came after I moved to New York. All of a sudden I was in a musical environment where the level was extremely high. From seeing my heroes play nightly in clubs to seeing unknown players tearing it up at jam … Read More