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

Improving at jazz improvisation is a process. It’s an interesting process because it’s both static and dynamic. It’s dynamic in the sense that it constantly involves bringing new ideas, material, and concepts into your playing, keeping you excited, motivated, and passionate about your own playing. And it’s static in the sense that you have to stay with things long enough for them to sink into your subconscious, having the capacity to creatively utilize them in the future.

The Reviewer

You know you’re a reviewer if you’re bored with your playing and feel like you’re in a rut. These symptoms indicate that at one point you learned a set amount of information and then stopped expanding your knowledge-base, hence, you’re bored with the same old lines you’re playing.

Most people tend to be reviewers. It has to do with our comfort zone. As we learn something new, our learning curve is straight up and we make giant leaps in progress very rapidly. Then, gradually, our progress slows, until it comes to a screeching halt.

At this point, we practice what we’re good at and ignore the aspects of our playing that need work. Consequently, we’re in a constant state of review. You’d think that the material we review would get more and more solid, but in this completely static mode, our lines and concepts actually get worse. Why is this?

Because our passion goes out the window, we become less and less excited about the stuff we’re playing day in and … 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

Amateurs phrase in a way that sounds boring and boxy. In contrast, professionals phrase in a way that gives excitement and forward motion to their playing.

In this article I’ll explore some tendencies that I’ve observed in the recordings of my heroes. Of course, your personal observations would result in different conclusions, which is why I highly suggest you transcribe and find tendencies that you observe. One thing to remember as well: These are not rules. They’re just things to be aware of and experiment with.

To illustrate the techniques, I’ll use the following example:

This is not a “bad” line and you will find similar lines throughout the jazz vocabulary, however, what we’re concerned with today is how to phrase in an exciting way and this line in isolation, as depicted, is quite boring. If you were to tag on an idea in front of it, or connect it to something else, immediately it would take on a new life, and that’s exactly what we’ll be talking about: how to take the ordinary and use it like a pro.

Avoid starting phrases on beat one

Amateurs constantly start phrases on beat one. This common way of starting a line allows the listener to easily predict where the next line will start. Consequently, there’s no interest to hold their attention and they stop listening.

Pros, while occasionally starting phrases on beat one, will more often than not start phrases on beats other than one. Instead of the original line, they … 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

In an instant, musical ideas spring to life. You might be transcribing and stumble upon something you like, or perhaps you suddenly play an idea that seemed to come to you from nowhere. I bet this happens all the time. In fact, I’ll bet you come up with something you like nearly every time you practice. What do you do when you discover or create ideas you like?

I used to just play the idea a bunch, thinking, wow…this is a great line. The next day, needless to say, I’d have difficulty remembering the line, and a week later, I’d forget the line entirely.

Keeping a line journal is not only a great way to remember the lines you pick up from transcribing or create yourself, but it’s an essential tool to keep track of the knowledge-base you hope to expand throughout your life.

Whatever it is, write it down

When you’re practicing, you’re in the zone. You don’t want to interrupt it for any reason. This is your time and you want to spend it playing, not writing. That attitude kept me from writing down a lot of things that could have potentially been gems. Sometimes I’ll play something and think, hmmm, that’s kind of nice, but is it nice enough to write down?

Whatever it is, write it down. During your practice, keep manuscript-paper and a pen handy at all times. Consider this your scratch paper where you’ll jot down anything that comes to mind. Knowing that this … 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

A reader writes:

It seems like everyone is taught the standard “off beat” articulation of swing eighth notes, but I feel that swing is really much more complicated. Why is it that some players seem to swing so hard while others do not? What’s the secret to swinging hard?

Yes, everyone is taught the standard “off beat” articulation of swing eighth notes, and you’re right, swing is much more complicated than that. It’s not even that it’s more complicated. It’s that swing cannot be defined by anything that you can write down.

Let’s try to write some swing down

Listen to Cannonball and Trane play over Grand Central: Cannonball swings so hard! He even comes right out of the gates with an incredible swinging line. Here it is notated below:

No matter what you do to better notate this example, add any articulation marking you like, there’s no way it will ever resemble the hard-swinging-in-your-face concept performed on the recording. The magic of swing is an aural experience and that’s where it will stay. Trying to write down swing and learn it from paper, or trying to learn it from concepts and exercises described in a book is a fruitless pursuit.

Variables in swing

Listening to different players swing, you can observe a number of variables that each player uniquely expresses with respect to their style of swing:

• The ratio between the lengths of adjacent notes.
• The accent of specific notes.
• The articulation of adjacent notes.
• The precise placement

… Read More