060 Part VI

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Part VI

How And What ToPractice

Pedagogy Right and Wrong

The Best Way to Practice

Use Transcribed Solos - but Use Them Properly

Use Playalongs

A realistic ‘broad-fronted’ practice regime

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How And What to Prac t ice

Part VI How And What To Practice

Jazz can’t be taught insofar as it’s an aural art form, but you can be steered in the right direction and

away from the wrong. Studying scales, sitting down for seven hours at a stretch, didn’t do anything for me

- it messed my mind up. The best thing is to learn solos by people you like and integrate them into your

playing. For a while, you sound as if you’re imitating those players, but eventually you’ll come out with

your own voice. Vaughan Hawthorne.

I didn’t invent the English language, but I’m sure that I sound like me when I use it . Mike Gibbs.

n this chapter I start, in Pedagogy Right and Wrong , by offering some good reasons for not havingconventional ‘music lessons’ and then suggesting what the basis for jazz teaching ought to be. I look at

the distorting effect WEAM notions can have on your approach to jazz, especially about what

'improvisation' is thought to be. In other words, I show why WEAM lessons can actually hold back

your development as an improviser. Then the section called The Best Way to Practice is devoted to the

things you have to do (as well as some of the things you don't have to do) in order to work directly on your

skills as a jazz player: how to think about the material you play, and how to develop coherent solo lines.

Then there is Use Transcribed Solos - but Use Them Properly. This tells you how to make best use of your

own or other people's transcriptions. (The question of starting to make and/or improving your own

transcriptions is dealt with at length in Part VIII More Things To Think About .) Use Playalongs tells you

how and why to use those valuable aids. And finally, the main points of the chapter are pulled together to

offer you some advice about your daily practice in A Realistic Broad-Fronted Practice Regime.

Pedagogy Right and Wrong

Horses for courses: why WEAM music lessons won’t do for jazz

This is a health warning. Music lessons can seriously damage your jazz health.

Read on, and consider the facts.

WEAM is not the same kind of art form as jazz

It cannot be stated too often that WEAM is substantially different from other world musics. Leaving asidethe question of the notes it tunes to, the most significant difference is that from the artist’s viewpoint

WEAM is not a performance art. It is a literary art like verse drama. It is of course intended to be

performed, but what the originator of the work, the composer, does, is to write a score. In Copyright

Royalties above, we saw how this difference actually prevents jazz players from being paid.

Naturally, for WEAM to exist in performance it has to be played. And before it can be played it has to be

read from the score. And so players have to be trained to read and play. Because of the score, unless they

are featured soloists, they don’t have any choice about what they play. And even soloists don’t have much

latitude, when compared to, say, jazz players.

WEAM players never know what a score may throw up in the way of difficulties. Potentially therefore,

they have to be ready for anything, whatever level of imagination they themselves possess.

So they must be able to read anything capable of being written, and they must be able to play anythingtheir instrument is physically capable of sounding. All questions of individuality and interpretation are

I

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predicated on first achieving mastery of sight-reading and the instrument. Otherwise there could be no

WEAM.

WEAM is a music where the musician not only does not choose what to play, but must not make mistakes.

Put like that it is the opposite of jazz, where you always choose what to play, and your ‘mistakes’, asMingus said, are a way of proving your qualities by the way you get out of them. A WEAM performance

of a work is the event - a set piece. So you sacrifice anything during the preparation to get the quality of

performance you need.

A jazz performance, by contrast, is much more like a live report on work in progress, a direct, one to one

communication from artist to audience.

WEAM performers don’t (necessarily) have to know anything about composing music, or understanding

the artistic and creative judgements that were the composer’s prime concern. WEAM music lessons are

thus naturally and properly dedicated to making sure a musician can read and play whatever a composer

has decided, without mistakes. A performance with mistakes is unacceptable.

What jazz lessons should be like

On the other hand, to play jazz, you must be well versed in the idiom: you must know its ‘wordshape’ (to

quote Webern quoting Karl Kraus). And the practical side that accompanies study of the idiom is not very

much like the standard WEAM notion of music lessons. Indeed, in some ways it goes completely against

it.

Jazz music lessons should be dedicated to the personal development of your expressive powers. You can

begin to perform long before you have acquired (if you ever do) a virtuoso technique. Provided you have

enough taste. So acquiring the requisite taste is the priority . That is what playing jazz is predicated on,

not sight-reading and mastery of the instrument.

That, incidentally, is why people like Coleman Hawkins and Billie Holiday could go on moving audiences

long after their lack of overt control would have disqualified them from WEAM performance.

In learning jazz, ‘theory’ has to be integral to practice from the outset. Progress in technical ability on theinstrument has to be led by the imaginative probings of the improviser. Students have to acquire the degree

of mastery they actually need. After all, having ‘limited’ technique in no way diminished the talent of

Miles Davis, or diminishes Jackie McClean, to take only two of hundreds of possible examples. And with

examples like that, we should pause before subjecting ourselves or our pupils to meaningless daily

callisthenics. What make Oscar Peterson so boring, for instance, is that the brilliance of the technique

predominates in performance over a merely adequate sensibility.

We all know this really, but because of the power of the WEAM mindset, the guilty feeling lurks that if

you are not doing it the WEAM way, you are not doing it ‘properly’. Especially in the early days, a jazz

beginner will sound worse in performance than a WEAM beginner, and will be tempted to produce

publicity stunts by practising technique.

Shortly before his death, Nureyev made the following observation to Gore Vidal:

‘Two kinds of dancer. Perfect steps. Perfect technique. Then there is music dancer. Not so perfect.Make mistakes. But music go right through body and onto audience.’

That says it all. As a jazz player, the beginning and the end of it is to make the music go right through your

body and onto the audience. How good you are is simply a matter of how well you do that.

‘Surely it’s OK to learn your instrument?’

I get asked this a lot. My answer is that the only thing which is OK is to get better at playing jazz. Think

of jazz as a language, and you will see that you have to become more fluent in ‘speaking’ it. And the

nearest WEAM lessons come to helping you is as near as the old public school method of teaching live

modern languages as if they were dead ones like Latin. By all means get some help with embouchures, and

physical things like that (although remember that the physical approach to holding the violin in Indian

Classical Music differs totally from that in WEAM, so you still might not get what you want).

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The different strengths of jazz beginners

The irony is that any properly taught beginning jazz player can easily do things after the first half hour of

the first lesson which the majority of WEAM players even at undergraduate level still find daunting. Like

playing any Church Mode instantly and accurately on any starting note you ask them to. So you do havesomething demonstrable with which to fight back.

The fact that you couldn’t necessarily give a jazz concert at the end of your first term (whereas the recorder

band can!) doesn’t mean you are less ‘advanced’ than the recorder band, whatever parents and teachers

may say to the contrary.

Being able to play anything you think of, in any key, from the outset, is a sine qua non in jazz. And

beginning jazz players can always do it. But to begin with they don’t need to be able to read anything at

all.

This sounds subversive to WEAM teachers, but when the time for reading music comes, it is prompted by

the student’s discovering the need to write down tunes and to transcribe solos. The student thus becomes a

user of the notational system, rather than a victim of it. And mastery of the European notational system

becomes that much easier, and more quickly acquired.

The malign norms at work: the outside-in approach

Failure to recognise, let alone understand, the idiomatic nature of jazz has led to some serious problems in

education. The ‘malign norms’ really come into play here. With its semantics neither recognised nor

acknowledged, jazz is perceived merely as a set of musical elements, existing in a context which contains

recognisable WEAM elements, such as notes from the ‘octave’, and harmony.

Looked at objectively this is complete nonsense. It is like saying that a language consists of a set of

phonemes and you talk by using them in an improvised order. (Of course, not only will your own talk be

gibberish on such a basis, you won’t understand a word that is said to you either) So a kind of ‘outside in’

approach to teaching it has developed, even among jazz teachers who should know better.

Improvised phrases are thought to contain notes derived from the scales that go with each chord. And thatmeans that if they contain other notes, they must , (logically enough from the WEAM perspective), be

derived from more complex versions of those chords. The Myth of Complex Chords, as well as having a

section to itself in History is Bunk , in the Perspectives and Polemics section, is one of the things this book

sets out systematically to destroy.

When there is no conception of the semantic intentions of the jazz player, this quasi-mechanical way seems

the only possible one. So the pupil’s attention is directed to these mechanical aspects. This approach has

given us two major fallacies. It is a significant part of this book’s mission to kill these stone dead. Let’s

look a little closer at them.

Improvising is Not Painting by Numbers: the note-choice fallacy

Now we can begin to see why it is that so many amateur players, not all of whom are beginners, sound so bad. It is because they think, (because they have been told by books and by teachers), that they should

derive their phrases from the scales that go with the chords. If this were really true, improvising would be

little more than a musical permutation exercise, easily programmed on a computer. Yet because many jazz

teaching books spend a lot of time on scales and modes, by implication (or, alas, more explicitly) they are

saying that for each chord, first you consult the notes in the scale and then choose some of them to play as

your ‘improvisation’. This leads to people actually asking themselves questions like ‘Can I find anything

interesting to play over a major?’. And yet this is a completely wrong approach. It focuses on the wrong

end of the problem. Above all, your improvised line needs to have idiomatically convincing rhythm and

dynamics, without which, even a ‘good’ choice of notes is no use at all.

The big lie

In fact much ‘proper’ jazz education takes the note choice fallacy to be so axiomatic as not even to discussit. So you go to a jazz class and find that you are taught patterns on the scales which go with the chords.

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And so as not to frighten you off beginning this daunting task, you get come-ons like ‘If you can play a

scale you can play jazz’ and ‘Anyone can Improvise’.

This book, in the interests of jazz itself, is dedicated to the systematic rubbishing of stuff like that.

The plain truth

To make my own position crystal clear, let me rephrase those two absurd propositions to bring out the

truth. They are not about playing jazz. They are not even about improvising. They are about noodling. If

we just substitute that word, we get the facts.

If you can play a scale you can noodle.

Anyone can noodle.

Jazz is the opposite of noodling, and if you learn to improvise by noodling, you will never get to play jazz.

So if what you want to do is noodle, this book is not for you. There are plenty of others which are.

You can’t play jazz unless you know what it sounds like, and want to play it.

The lick fallacy

It is still widely assumed that improvisers have a mental library of ‘licks’ and construct solos by putting

them together in what they hope will be an interesting order. Nothing, it seems to me, could be further

from the actual practice of the great improvisers. And I am relieved to see that recent psychological

research (such as that by P N Johnson-Laird) bears this out. The process is much too complicated to be

done like that in real time. In any case, the received ‘library’ notion ignores the fact that while everyone

plays stock phrases some of the time, the great players don’t do it much, and even those stock phrases must

have started out as someone’s creation.

HATE is not the way for jazz

To encapsulate the assumptions behind this ‘outside in’ approach, where the harmony dictates what the

improviser does, I use another acronym, HATE, which stands for ‘Harmony As The Engine’. This simple

term enables me to refer succinctly, at other places in my text, to the whole, and heavy, set of luggage

which overbears upon jazz players trying to find their way.

The basis for a proper jazz pedagogy

In his wonderful book Lester Young , in the chapter called I Try Not To Be a Repeater Pencil , Lewis Porter

says:

‘We may state the task before the jazz musician as follows: Given some predeterminedmaterials - usually a harmonic progression, chorus structure, tempo, and mood - and a

knowledge of jazz styles, compose a coherent musical statement spontaneously. The

musician prepares for his spontaneous effort by hundreds of prior attempts and by a

thorough study of the given materials. Only then is it possible to create at a high level

while improvising.’

A way of getting close to how this ‘thorough study’ works as preparation for high level creativity is to

consider the practice of the practitioners of certain sports, like horse trials and car racing, when faced with

a circuit. Always, before beginning to practice for a race, the participants walk the circuit, so that in ‘slow

motion’, entirely at their own pace, they can see what is there on the ground, and thus what their options

are. The car-drivers, for instance, then, in the non-competitive practice they go on to do, going

nevertheless at racing speeds, is the equivalent of practising a phrase with pre-recorded accompaniment.

And the race itself is like actual performance, where the exact route through the bends is governed by what

else is happening on each lap (other drivers, weather, the condition of the car etc. affect this), and so cannot

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be either pre-ordained or identical. And to get to the next place, you always have to start from where you

are.

So it is for the entirely practical reason that beyond a certain tempo the conscious brain cannot handle the

‘computation’, any improviser should learn in such a way as to reduce as far as possible the conscious‘processing’ of musical ideas during performance.

This book helps you directly to acquire the necessary framework ‘off-line’, so that the ideas and feelings

you have lead directly to the notes you play.

The Best Way to Practice

You do want to be a better improviser?

This section is about practice. It is about how to get to the book’s declared goal of enabling you to handleyourself on a bandstand in world-class company. Don’t set your sights any lower than that: you owe it to

the music to have that as your objective.

You may think you know what practice is, and you may already practise a lot. Let me make clear that I am

not about to discuss developing your technique here. What I am going to talk about is how you practice

jazz: what it is you have to do to sound like a jazz player, and how to get better at it by working on the

right things.

The basic rule is : Study the music closely and try things out constantly.

Having got this far, you already know everything you need in order to start practising effectively! But

what you still need is experience; experience of what it is like to be in a playing situation. You need to

know the kinds of things that happen in your head while you play, and what you do about them. You need

to know how to handle problems, pressures, and mistakes. You need to know how to capitalise on thingsthat go right! You need effortless know-how under your fingers so that they carry out your unconscious

thoughts as you play.

You already know about the map and the mean streets. Now you need to put in the mileage to make

yourself street-wise!

You will have gathered by now that this book resolutely sets its face against any kind of mechanical

approach to improvising. Everything that you play must make sense in a jazz context, and that is just not

going to be the case if you look at the changes and use the list of ‘available’ notes (the scales or arpeggios)

to determine what you play. Any more than either making French-sounding noises or articulating

grammatically accurate French phrases in an English accent means you are speaking French.

All your knowledge should be put at the service of the phrases you try to play. It should never be used togenerate them. So, right from the outset, it is phrases you should practise.

The Rainbow’s End

You’re supposed to sound bad when you practise. James Moody

Sadly, I have seen many would-be jazz players devote hundreds of conscientious hours to practising the

wrong things in the wrong way, and become disheartened as a result. And these are only the ones who

stuck at it! They are far outnumbered by those who, finding that the point at which they would be able to

play something worthwhile seemed too far ahead, just gave up. This was particularly sad in the cases of

those who came to playing after a lifetime’s listening (and who therefore had already done all of the really

hard work), bought a method book and found it too obscure.

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The only respectable thing about the ‘if you can play a scale you can play jazz’ method is that it is a way of

convincing absolute beginners on their first day that they are not intrinsically unable to play. Beyond that

it is worthless, because its focus is the material not the music.

If you have never improvised jazz before, or if you want to start again and get it right this time, this chaptertells you the sorts of things you should be doing.

By definition (since a rainbow depends for its mirage effect on you being where you are) you can never get

to the end of the rainbow any more than you can ever reach the horizon.

So there is nowhere to go. But there is the going, and the going should be good!

If you approach your development in this way, you come to terms from the outset with the fact that you can

always see further than you can currently do, and it will never be any different.

Some people see this as their own failure, but actually it is simply the result of the ‘rainbow’s end’ effect,

and it never goes away! This is why, to the end of his life, Charlie Parker genuinely thought himself an

inadequate musician. But it is neither necessary nor helpful to see this as inadequacy. The process will

always feel much the same locally, to you, no matter how good you get. If you need a little objectivereassurance, you can contrive to make ‘touchstone’ recordings of yourself at, say, six-monthly intervals, so

that you can convince yourself how much progress you have made.

Practice is about setting yourself relevant local challenges, and learning to deal with them.

There are a lot of practical things you can do.

Don’t Practise Scales (ever)

We’ll start with a don’t. Don’t practise scales: ever. Your real goal is to be able to play any song in any

key. How do you achieve that?

Most people assume that they should diligently practise scales in all keys. They know they won’t enjoy it,

but they believe it is good for them.

For WEAM players, where objective technique - being able to demonstrate control over the instrument

ready for anything a composer might throw at them - is a pre-requisite to an active life in the music, this is

easily the best way.

For jazz players it is an utter waste of time. As I have said many times already in this book, a jazz

player should acquire skills on a need to know basis. What you can do must always be related directly to

what you want to do. And playing scales isn’t part of that.

Even being totally fluent on your instrument on all the scales in all keys is not necessarily any help at all in

playing jazz in those keys. You are still back where you were, at square one, but you have wasted a lot of

time you’ll never get back again on something that turns out not to have helped you at all.

You need to know what the relevant scales are, of course, or else you won’t see clearly enough what the players are doing. But you are never going to need to play them. Nobody in jazz plays scales. What you

have to do is, to begin with, much harder. You must be able to take any phrase you think of or come

across, and be able to play it fluently and expressively starting on any note, and understand the context in

which you are doing it.

All time spent on scales at the expense of this is totally wasted.

You do need that ‘any key’ fluency, but it is not a fluency of the fingers only.

You need to have in your head a clear vision of the songs you play, one which will hold up in ‘real time’ on

the bandstand while you play, and you don’t ever want your fingers to ‘lock up’ because they come across

a chord where they don’t function freely.

This section is about developing a practice regime which will accomplish these real and important jazz

objectives for you.

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And it has nothing to do with practising scales, although everything to do with playing what is in your

head in all keys.

Let’s go to work.

Can’t I just practise a few?

If you are desperate to practise scales, I can’t stop you. But I can make a couple of last requests.

• Never practise anything you can’t ‘see’ in your head. If you have to try to read it out of a scale manual,

you really are wasting your time.

• Practise the real jazz parent scales and the Church Modes. Don’t be limited to what’s in WEAM scale

manuals.

If you were being taught to improvise North Indian Classical Music, one piece of homework you would be

given would be to take a given tetrachord, and learn all the permutations it has: every possible order you

can play them in without repetitions. In the case of a tetrachord (four notes), there are twenty-four

sequences. (For five notes there are one hundred and twenty, for six notes, seven hundred and twenty, and

for seven notes, five thousand and forty!).

A jazz related form of tetrachord practice would be to play the possibilities in ascending sequence only,

taking the most ‘compressed’ pattern first, the chromatic one, and play each in progressive order of

opening up. If we just allow half and whole steps in the tetrachord, then there are eight possibilities, and

we get the following sequence:

C Db D Eb

C Db D E

C Db Eb E

C Db Eb F

C D Eb EC D Eb F

C D E F

C D E F#

Heads you Win

You aren’t going to become competent in a vacuum. What you learn to do is done for a purpose, and that

purpose is playing songs. At the outset, and forever, you must learn the melodies, what musicians call the

heads of the songs you are going to play. And the best songs to play are the ones you really like! If you

are starting from scratch, sort out a couple of gigs you might like to play. Choose, say twelve songs per

gig, each arranged into two sets of six songs each. If you think about programming the songs in aneffective order, you will have each set deliver its own dynamic, with a mixture of different types of song.

Make them the sort of gig you would be overjoyed to have come across. Make all the songs ones you

really want to play.

You find as many good recordings of performances of these songs as possible, and you also check the

JAZZWISE catalogue, so as to get yourself playalongs for all of them too.

If the published heads, or any copies of them you encounter are not written four measures to a line in open

key, (if you are puzzled about what that is, check out Reading and Writing Sheet Music in Part VIII More

Things to Think About ), and/or if they don’t have Grigson’s changes, you should make your own fair

copies. These lead sheets will become your own personal ‘pad’.

Warne Marsh used to refuse to take on improvisation students until they could play a head in an

emotionally convincing, idiomatic jazz way. You know you can tell who anybody is as soon as they start

playing the head. So you too should practise your jazz by playing heads!

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I have just proved to you that you can be your own individual self without ‘improvising’ at all! You must

learn the head first.

Make it a rule never to appear on a bandstand and read a song off a copy. To do so is lazy and

shallow, and what you play in those circumstances will reveal that all too clearly. You must own thematerial. You must make it part of you. And that starts with you learning the heads. Then put your lead

sheets away and forget about them.

Away from the lead sheets, you can begin to explore the playing of these songs in the other keys. Take it

slowly, use your ears, see in your mind’s eye how the song fits its background, and you will be richly

rewarded. Furthermore, you won’t ever be doing anything so sterile as transposing.

Now we can turn to setting yourself up to practise as a jazz improviser.

Context is more important than content

A little revisionStarting to work on any song by learning its head puts you in the right place to consider starting to

improvise.

In seeing the song whole, right from the beginning of this book, we have seen that, for instance, while the

A section of an AABA song certainly repeats, each A has its own character, and to see it only as a repeat

disconnects you from the context of the song. For a player this would mean that the improvised line is

disconnected from a prime source of its meaning.

The same is true at all levels of a song. If a song has a cadence to C in several different places, it does not

mean that they are the same. And nor does it mean that your view of the possibilities when you get to the

second occasion is the same as it was the first time!

If you take the reductionist view that there is no whole, there is just a collection of component parts, you

won’t see that. You may insist that you don’t take such a view, but let me assure you that most people(mistakenly) do.

They take a vertical, ‘scale at a time’, approach where you see a chord, remember its scale, and play

something from the scale. This is much advocated by jazz teachers. But as well as virtually guaranteeing

that what you play won’t make, in jazz terms, any sense at all, this also militates against you seeing the

sense in the context. But the essence of any song is the context. A chord in such a context gets its effect

only partly by just being itself. Far more important is the context.

It is worthwhile proving this, because part of this section is about having the courage to practise dealing

with jazz problems in a jazz way, and not being bullied into doing it in a way which will impress WEAM

teachers.

So I’ll take two examples. Both have the same four measure sequence repeated. That is, not just the

pattern, but the actual changes are repeated.

In What’s New, the phrase ‘you haven’t changed a bit’ is over identical chords to ‘lovely to see you I must

admit’. But it doesn’t sound or feel like a repetition. Why? Because the first time through the song is

arriving back home from somewhere quite far away. The second time starts from home and comes back

home, and so asserts the fact of being at home. So unless you are a computer, or are trying to play like

one, you won’t play the same thing, or even have the same agenda for what you play over the two

‘identical’ sequences.

In Blue Bossa, which is a sixteen measure tune, the second four measures of each eight are exactly the

same cadence. And both are ‘coming home’ from having been away. They feel different because where

they come from is different. The end of the first eight is coming back from ‘just down the road’. The end

of the second eight is coming home from abroad, and so is different.

A prime reason for people getting lost when they solo is that they think vertically. They see each chord or

group of chords as self contained, and see ‘repeats’ as just that, repeats. So a small lapse in concentration

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and they think ‘did I play the repeat?’ Thinking context, using the words to help you will prevent you

getting lost, and make what you play more coherent. Play the song not the chords!

Moving across a changing backgroundWhat most jazz texts and courses now do is to get you to practise improvising over each of the chord types

you know, individually. This seems to me to miss the essential point, which is that when you improvise, a

musical phrase or ‘line’ suggests itself to you and you set out to play it. And the harmony moves as you do

so. What effect does this have on your line? You want to continue your phrase to its natural conclusion,

but the background shifts as you do so.

The River Trip Explanation

Take George Russell’s advice.

One of the best ways I know to represent this idea of how harmony relates to the choices an improviser

makes in performance is at the back of George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization

for Improvisation. He calls it ‘The River Trip Explanation’. On the contents page, this explanation is

given as ‘ ..of Improvisational Styles’. On the picture itself it is ‘ ..of Horizontal and Vertical Melodies’.

Both descriptions give the general idea. Without offering a complete explanation here (buy the book and

see the picture for yourself) it is possible to give the idea.

Russell pictures the first eight measures of All the Things You Are as a journey down the Mississippi from

St Louis (just before the trip gets underway) via Memphis, to New Orleans. Each of the towns mentioned

is a stop along the way - i.e. the movement temporarily ceases. The text includes an explanation of various

ways of making the same trip, and I have no intention of reproducing it here, except to say that Russell

offers by way of example four possible ways to do it.

• The ‘Coleman Hawkins Local’, the ‘Lester Young Express’, both of which are boats

• Two rocket ships in different orbits, labelled respectively ‘Coltrane’ and ‘Ornette’.

Do not be put off by the title of Russell’s book, or the apparently intellectual nature of his text. Think

about the fact that in order to express what goes on in harmony he lays it out graphically like a piece of

landscape, in his case the Mississippi.

His analogy has each change of sound in the background as a town along the shore, some of which are to

be stopped at. The four major soloists he selects as examples to explain improvisational styles have

differing degrees of relationships with the river, but all make the same journey!

The jazz phrase comes first

When you sing or whistle an improvised phrase, it comes out pretty well jazz like, and the phrases have a

shape. You might for example come out with a descending swoop to a really effective low note. The main

thing is the shape and rhythmic feel of this swoop. In order to make that effective you don’t have to think

about chords or scales at all!

And when you come to play that or any phrase on your instrument, your starting point should still be to

find and play the notes that you hear in your head.

It is far more important to practise being able to play (without thinking) any note you or someone else

sings, than it is to get bogged down with scales.

If Kurt Weill had been thinking about chords and scales when he wrote Speak Low, he would never have

come up with the last phrase of the song. As published, the song is in F, and so the last four measures are,

unsurprisingly, a straight cadence to F. There is exactly one melody note over this cadence. It is a D, and

it is played nine times. That is the whole melody. Think about it.

Your formal practice needs to pay formal attention to jazz resources. Jazz phrases are those resources.

Listener collect

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For each of the type of LEGO brick, you should have a collection going. A Cadence collection (sad and

straight), a Turnaround collection (classified into kinds), and a Hover collection (sad and straight). You

should only collect phrases you respond to. The deeply subjective nature of a selection process based on

your own preferences means that your consciously controlled practice will engage with your unconscious

predilections. In other words, you have a flying start, and will get further faster!

Try to transcribe for yourself the phrases you like. If you can sing them, you can transcribe them. (So

once again, it is your ears you trust).

David Baker’s own monographs on Coltrane, Parker, Rollins, Navarro, J J Johnson and Clifford Brown, as

well as complete transcribed solos and local patterns extracted from them, all include at the back of the

book, a section called ‘The Language’ where the patterns are brought together under different headings, all

transposed to the same key. So you can see what a collection of phrases looks like.

If you want to be challenged by a (for practical purposes inexhaustible) external source of material, then

get hold of two more books by David Baker. Improvisational Patterns - the Bebop Era Volume One, and

Modal and Contemporary Patterns.

The ‘Bebop’ book contains over 1000 two measure phrases. These are anonymous, but are transcribedfrom real solos by masters like Parker and Rollins, and you may recognise some of them. They are all

transposed to the same key, and all present the same problem to the improviser, viz to play one measure on

D- followed by one measure on G7. They are carefully arranged to reinforce your learning process: all

phrases which start on the same note are grouped together, and within that, phrases whose beginnings are

the same are grouped together too. The ‘Modal’ book, while it covers much other material too, has a large

number of patterns over the same chords.

One significant difference between the books illustrates the way jazz education is evolving, and vindicates

the decisions I have made with this book. In the (earlier) ‘Bebop’ book, Baker frequently qualifies the

parent scales with WEAM-type extensions - e.g. Dmi9(M7) or G7(b9). This reflects the age of the book

and in every case should be ignored. In the ‘Modal’ book, which is much more recent, and where the use

of colour notes is much more extensive and systematic, he now simply puts D- and G7 at the top of the

page.

Putting the light on in your head

Do not even for a moment view these collections of phrases as the ‘library of licks’ from which it used to

be supposed that improvisations were built. Their purpose is quite different.

They are there as a source of material which challenges your preconceptions, and stretches the limits of

what you can do. Always of course this is primarily listening either to records or live. But you can use

your brain too. And a good place to start is to practice improvising over Cadences, Turnarounds, and

Hovers. They are short admittedly, but they raise most of the problems you will meet, especially if you use

the systematic presentation of separate and joined cadences on the Harmony with LEGO Bricks

playalong.

Working through your collection will, if you do it right, open up the world of jazz harmony to you, and atthe same time introduce your mind and fingers to the necessary rhythmic structures of good jazz phrasing.

It isn’t just (or even mostly) the note choices that make what you play dull or interesting: it is principally

the rhythm of the phrase. This includes aspects of rhythm like emphasis - and don’t forget the value of

rests as rhythmic elements! The finer nuances of timing are pointless to attempt to notate, so don’t take

any transcriptions as literal. Use them to alert yourself to the musical situation, and then listen to as much

as you can. This listen/play/listen/play is an iterative process which will continue for the rest of your life.

In each activity you make discoveries which you can take to the other, and enrich the experience.

All of the phrases in your collection are there to ‘put the light on’ in your head. That is to help you make

sure you know your way around equally in each key. Having to play someone else’s phrase means you

can’t cop out when you get to a place you’re not so sure of.

How you do it

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Take a phrase from your collection, and using the sheet music if you have to, play it slowly until you have

‘got it’.

The process of ‘getting’ it consists in seeing what pattern the phrase has. How it relates to the parent scale,

and what colour notes it uses. You should mentally convert each note as you play it to Roman Numerals,to indicate the degrees of the scale. Take your time as you do this. The idea is to let the pattern sink in,

not produce some kind of a stunt!

If you are playing the approach chords to a cadence, e.g. from one of the Baker books, in order to make the

phrase sound good, it will usually be best to pick a note from a C scale to ‘end’ on. So you should mentally

add two measures of C major to the end of each phrase, so turning it into a proper cadence.

Having established the phrase in your mind as a line traversing a cadence, you should proceed to play it in

all the other eleven keys using the same mental process. If you mechanically transpose each note by a

given amount you will miss the point entirely. What you do is, when approaching Eb for instance, picture

the parent scales for F- and Bb7 and play the phrase over them. Don’t worry about keeping exact time

(which is why you shouldn’t use a playalong yet). What you are doing is making sure that there are no

‘foggy bits’ in your head, and that your view of the territory is just as clear in F# for instance as it is in C.

If you do find a foggy place, stay with it and use your concentration to burn off the mist. Once gone, it willnever come back.

There is nothing better for your knowledge of the possibilities, and for your confidence and fluency in all

keys, than to incorporate a few phrases dealt with in this way into your daily practice schedule.

If you have a friend who is prepared to learn with you, you can do what Lionel Grigson and I used to do. It

is the same procedure as just described, except that instead of using a written down transcription as the

source of the phrases, you each take it in turns to come up with a phrase. One of you plays a phrase, and

the other one ‘gets it’, then you go around all the keys in an agreed sequence, playing the phrase in unison

together.

When, and only when, you feel solid enough, you can try the phrases out against the regular metric

background of the playalong. This is more of a step than you may think (until you try it). The time-frame

you are playing in is no longer under your control: it feels relentless, even though it is not fast, and your

newly found knowledge may seem to slip away entirely.

This is the single, significant reason why the Harmony with LEGO Bricks playalong gives you a separate

track for each cadence. You have 12 goes to get it right. This is the real practice: space in which to think,

sweat, and -fumblingly at first - play.

Thinking on your feet is the essential skill you need, and this is a ‘safe’ way to learn what you need to

know. That’s why you won’t learn anything if you write out or learn transpositions in advance: that’s not

jazz, it’s being a performing animal in a circus.

You can then move to the cadence join tracks, which have their own relentless aspect too: they only ever

give you one go at a cadence before moving on to the next one. But they are kind to you too, since each

track only has one join - so there is only one thing to remember. All of this is discussed more fully in Part

IX The Harmony with LEGO Bricks Playalong .

It will be hard work to begin with, because you do not know the territory. But it does get easier as you go

because the cyclic form means that there is only one lot of territory ! In other words, once the territory

is learned, you can take any phrase you like round any part of it. If you fail to put in the necessary work

now you run the risk not only of getting bogged down later, but even more seriously of not being able to

handle yourself professionally in bandstand contexts.

Become yourself

Having got it right, the work really begins. The work of personalising the material and producing

expressive music. First of all this involves playing it with different rhythms and articulations, and in

different registers. Then you should expand that to playing paraphrases of the patterns.

If you keep even a simple pattern like the first one in Baker’s ‘Bebop’ book in mind, but don’t actually play

it, you can improvise say the twelve cadence repeats not only with no repetition in what you do, but in a

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way which an audience would take to be continuous invention. If you don’t believe me, record yourself

doing it and prepare to be surprised.

You can also try the Jimmy Knepper ‘three phrase’ technique here. You start out with one phrase (which

may more or less be what is in the book), play another which ‘answers’ it, either by reflecting ordeveloping it, but still keeping the original in mind. Then if you feel there is more to say, ‘wrap it up’ with

a third phrase. After that, it’s time to start again with a new basic phrase. This works whatever the

background is, but is easier to get used to on the single cadence tracks.

Rude mechanicals

The way of practising discussed above will put you into a position of strength. And from that, it does no

harm at all to look at the minutiae of phrases, to see what makes them tick. In the right context you can

enrich your knowledge by proceeding from that position to think about scales in relation to chords. Here

are two simple examples.

Take a simple line for a walk

This is about modifying the note choice to fit the harmony in a phrase whose shape is already determined.

In most songs, no given chord lasts for very long, and so the ‘chord at a time’ way of considering what to

play literally doesn’t have the time to get used. When you play a phrase, it has its own shape and

direction, and the fact of the harmony moving behind in the background means that as you move over a

chord, often for only two beats, you continue the momentum of the phrase, but your choice of notes can

be affected by the effects you can get as you go on your way.

To take a basic example. Suppose you hear in your head a descending phrase of eighth notes, over a

measure of F major. You want to run down from C to the F, and stop on it. So C Bb A and G take up two

beats. If the whole measure is F major, then there is no problem, you play the F and stop. But, supposing

the second half of the measure is D7. What then?

You know that there is no F in the basic form of the chord, and so the phrase would end on an F# instead:

Everything you need to know about the process is in that change from F to F#.

You take your phrases on journeys across the background. While you are over particular chords, you can

step on (play) notes which have effects. Some of them ‘make waves’, some don’t. The only point of

studying scales is to help you find out which notes do and by how much and with what quality, and then

organise the knowledge. You have to learn to use the blue notes.

If you wanted to carry on with the phrase above, to end with a B on the first beat of a G7 in the next

measure, even then you have a choice. If you have experimented with the blue notes which go with a

dominant seventh, you will know that a bIX almost always sounds good. So as you go past the F#, you

have a choice, even within a simple phrase, to go down via an E or an Eb!

In your journey across any measure, you must know where the basic stepping stones are, but you are free to

ignore them. You can jump them, skip along next to, but not on them, or do anything which sounds rightto you! Because you know which song you are playing and where this particular measure is in relation to

the song as a whole, and all the stepping stones are present anyway whether you play them or not. You use

your knowledge of the properties of the notes when you decide where, if anywhere, to put your phrase.

And you can make gold out of base metal!

Learn to exploit the colours available to you

Like we just said, you have to learn to use the blue notes. So as you practise, you can experiment. Why

not spend the whole morning playing the same song non-stop, trying every note out everywhere. You will

be able to keep going, because at the end of every chorus you will know there is something else you

haven’t tried, so you go round again in order to have a go at it.

This need to ‘try something’ in the next chorus, which to you is part of your work, comes out to a critic or

an audience as an endless flow of ideas! So don’t worry about ‘ideas’, they are part of a listener’svocabulary, not yours. You have work to do!

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One thing at a time

As well as the kind of ‘big picture’ practice just described, you can do detailed practice on individual small

aspects too. Here are a few:

1) Those turnbacks mean so much

Ira Gitler (1975), quotes Tadd Dameron as saying the following to him:

‘Another thing so many musicians forget is what happens between the eighth and ninth bar. It’s not a

place to rest. What you play there is terribly important. It should be. It should make all the difference

between the great musician and just someone else’.

Dameron would say to Fats Navarro:

‘When you play a solo, you’re going from your first eight bars into your second eight, that’s where you

really play - those turnbacks...Look, that’s where you can tell whether a man can really blow - when he

starts playing that eighth and ninth bar and then when he comes out of the middle into the last eight.

Those turnbacks mean so much’.

The basis to this is that by concentrating on something so seemingly mechanical as starting to play your

phrase on the last bar of a section, rather than waiting for the new section to start, you can lift a

performance immediately.

2) Turn water into wine

Let us set a problem Hampton Hawes faced. Namely, ending a cadence to G. That is, playing two

measures over a chord of G major. You can find this in the bridge to the first solo chorus on I Got Rhythm

on Hampton Hawes the Trio Vol 1. If you were given Hawes’s raw material, the three notes of a G major

triad, G B D, what would you make of it? If you took the approach advocated by the know-nothing time-

servers, or the well-meaning inadequates who carefully murder jazz for schoolchildren, you would set

about trying to construct phrases with rhythmic and melodic interest using those three notes. It would

sound dire, and it would really be dire! Soon, you would be being encouraged to be more daring - to

choose from four notes perhaps, or even (gasp!) a pentatonic scale.

But what if you were Hampton Hawes? He also decides to play in effect two sequences of three

descending notes, D B G and B G D. That is all. What is it that makes it sound so wonderful, and so

utterly unlike the awful exercises I just described? Simply that Hawes knows that those are the strong

notes, and that a way of making us relish them instead of being bored by them is to approach them

obliquely. So he lines them up in his sights, using the notes on either side of them, before hitting them. So

in the second group instead of just B he plays C Bb B, and instead of just G he plays G A F# G.

That is all. No extra theory. No extra notes to learn. No nonsense about exotic chord types either. Just a

little basic psychology about the value of teasing a bit before you hand over the goods. Get the record,

listen, and meditate over the phrase.

Think about the fact that if you were scat singing, or whistling while you walked down the street, you

might well come up with some such phrase. But you know don’t you, that if you think that the list of notes

(only three in this case remember) defines what you can play, you would never come up with anything like

it.

So this typical phrase from Hampton Hawes uses arpeggios (not even scales) as the framework. And yet it

is a complete coherent phrase, with its local goals announced to you and then delivered.

3) wrap your phrases

You can develop the device we just saw in Hampton Hawes. It is another of many ‘gambits’ you can try

for yourself as you discover them through practice. It is usually called the ‘enclosure’ technique, and is, for

example, extremely common in the work of Clifford Brown. Now you know what it is, you can make sure

you can play chromatic and ‘either side’ enclosure notes to all arpeggio tones. Try to keep a flow of steady

eighth notes but interrupt them with one beat rests (randomly if you like).

4) wrap up your phrases in bebop

Try ending your phrases with two eighth notes on the first or third beats of a measure.

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5) go for it

Decide at the beginning of one measure what the first note of the next measure will be, and go for it.

So much to doRudolf Nureyev once famously remarked that the artist’s problem wasn’t to make something difficult look

easy (that way lies something called ‘empty virtuosity’) but to make something easy look interesting.

Use the devices suggested here to make arpeggios (which of course are easy) interesting and idiomatically

convincing. Listen to your records and see how often the majestic sweep of Fats Navarro, say, contains no

more ‘theory’ than a set of arpeggios. Or see the way the plangency of a Chet Baker phrase comes from

his use of a VII or XI to end on. Concentrate on getting a lot of jazz mileage out of this simple resource,

and you will be practising the right things in the right way.

It is not helpful to have anything more in mind than the parent scale. Doing it this way has the corollary

that it also defines and drives home what the non-parent tones are, and what effect they have. Eventually

you will hardly even see that. Just as when you learn to drive, the mechanics of manipulating the controls

are, at first, such a conscious preoccupation that you hardly have time to look where you are going, butafter a while they become motor skills and your sole conscious concern becomes the journey itself.

Use Transcribed Solos - But Use Them Properly‘The jury is in: studying solos is the best way to learn’. (Lee Konitz to the author while waiting for a

train, Leicester 1987).

Any transcriptions you make yourself, or buy in books, are vital grist to your mill. But before you spend

any time on them, think about the points in this section.

There are by now a great many books you can buy which contain transcriptions of actual recorded solos by

jazz masters. None of them are cheap (nor should they be, considering the effort which goes into getting

the material down onto paper), and you can end up spending quite a lot of money. The question is will it

do you any good? Do you know what a transcribed solo is for, what it is supposed to teach you, and how

to go about getting the benefits?

The Etude fallacy

This is perhaps the most common fallacy about transcribed solos, and is promulgated by many music

teachers, even those with apparently some knowledge of jazz. It asserts that a transcribed solo is a

technical study, and so can be used to develop your instrumental facility. (This is why many of the books

currently available come with concert pitch chord symbols under transposed lines for trumpet, saxophone

etc. It implies you don’t need them at all. They are there so that teachers can vamp along behind you

while they criticise). Along with this goes the idea that unless you can read music fluently, and can play

your instrument well enough to reproduce the solos, then transcriptions are no use to you.

This is utterly false, for reasons which will become clear. Any transcription or book of transcriptions by

someone you are interested in will help you, no matter what stage you are at!

A jazz solo is the visible tip of an iceberg: the iceberg of the context of performance (the accompanying

musicians and the treatment of the piece itself) combined with the knowledge, experience and taste of the

player. The individual phrases of the solo are less important for themselves than for what they tell you

about what the musicians see as their musical landscape, including the routes they chose not to play.

The primary object in your studying a solo is to make this context of choice come alive.

Only in a secondary sense is it to follow a specific sequence of notes. If the context becomes living and

vibrant for you your own playing will inevitably improve. If you ignore the context and just play the notes,

the opposite will apply, so you are wasting your time.

BUT: don’t even try working on a transcription unless you have and know the recording. Without therecorded solo to listen to, a written down version is worthless.

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Without the recording, you have to be able to sight read in order to answer the question ‘what does that

sound like?’ And because of the many inflections used by jazz players, you could never answer that

question properly anyway. Take any solo, from, say Ken Slone’s Clifford Brown book, and have a WEAM

trumpeter read it. It won’t sound anything like Clifford Brown. So even with immaculate reading ability,

you won’t know what the solo is about. What a waste of irrecoverable time!

With the recording, even with no reading ability, you are much better off. You can learn the solo from the

record, and when you confront the transcription, you say ‘so that’s what it looks like’. A real investment in

developing your awareness.

It should now be clear why you need neither sight-reading ability nor technical facility to derive benefit

from studying transcriptions. Because of the recording, you can play the performance over and over, until

you have it by heart and can sing it. And because of the transcription you can impose your own time

frame on the solo, take it as slowly as you like, repeat individual parts as often as you like, while you build

up your knowledge of the context. But you should do all of that without your instrument !

When you are comfortable with the material, you can do what I call ‘meditate’ it in real time. Make a

recording of just the solo, and play it many times, following it on the page, and concentrating as if you

were the soloist, trying all the time to get the view from the soloist’s head.

Only then, with all that knowledge securely in place, you can start to use your instrument. You do this in

two ways, the first of which is highly relevant to jazz, but absolutely against what a music teacher will tell

you.

At least once a day you should play along with the solo on the tape - i.e. at performance speed. No matter

how badly you play! The tempo of the piece - the speed at which the landscape flashes by - is a real part

of the context, and you must experience that from the outset, to get the adrenaline to flow. Try to play

every phrase, even if all you seem to do is to ‘throw your fingers at it’, and nothing coherent seems to

emerge. The real work is nevertheless being done by your subconscious, which is learning to function at

the required speed.

If you don’t believe me, try this simple test. Just play the solo through once a day only, in the way I just

described, every day for a month. Don’t do any work on it between times, except for listening. At the endof the month you will swear that it isn’t as fast as it was at the beginning, and while you may not be able to

play all the tricky passages, you will have them lined up in your sights, and be sounding better when you

launch into them. That feeling that the solo got slower should tell you a lot: that your brain has speeded

up!

If your brain doesn’t speed up, you won’t survive real playing situations. It will speed up if you practice

this way. The way music teachers recommend- start slowly, and gradually work up to speed is good if all

you want to do is play that one solo as written. It is like building a one-off construction very carefully. If

you want to learn to play jazz, you arrive at the detail via another route, more like looking down an out-of-

focus telescope, and gradually bringing the picture into focus. And that way, you get a little wisdom along

the way, not just facility.

Of course, as well, you can practise the solo on your own, at your own pace. But avoid absolutely using a

metronome and going a bit faster each day. Brains don’t work in that smooth gradualist way, they work inquantum leaps. The only ‘speed’ practice you need is your daily workout, playing along with the

recording.

How to Sort out Published Transcriptions

In the section Reading and Writing Sheet Music in Part VIII More Things to Think About , I give some

guidelines about making lead sheets and transcriptions more legible and more useful. In the meantime here

are some further pointers about other people’s transcriptions.

Are they in the right key?

Don’t take this simple fact for granted. More often than you think, transcriptions are in the wrong key.

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There is a Japanese transcription of the complete Bill Evans Trio version of My Foolish Heart , from the

Village Vanguard sessions. Evans played this song in A, but the transcription has it in Bb!

Sometimes it is more understandable, like so many bebop records being issued a half step sharp. Even so, I

think that Lennie Niehaus, in his book of Dexter Gordon transcriptions should have given The Chase in Bbfor the tenor not B. (But then he also said it came from a Prestige album, when it actually came from a

Spotlite one).

And more recently, Dave Washut, in a book of Lee Konitz transcriptions, took the amazing decision to

raise the pitch of the I Concentrate on You solo from Gb to G.

In cases like these, you have no choice but to write out the solo for yourself.

Are they laid out right?

If the solo is not in the four bars to the line, and does not use key signatures, you should certainly make

your own copy anyway. (See Key signatures, and why you shouldn’t use them in Part VIII More Things to

Think About ).

In doing so, you may want to change rhythms, note values, or even notes. All of this is entirely legitimate.

The transcription is a secondary document, simply there to help you study the solo. It isn’t the solo itself:

the recording is the solo.

Watch out for published changes

You also should be highly sceptical about any printed changes. Check them against Grigson, or this book,

and always, in the case of differences, assume the ones on the transcription are wrong! Many published

transcriptions don’t put the changes under all choruses, just the first. You need them under every bar. And

when they are given under every bar, they are often different in each chorus, according to the notes the

soloist chooses. You need them to be the same in every chorus.

There are some appalling changes in published works, even from apparently reputable sources. For

example, in Leonard Feather’s 200 themes album (a mis-title since some songs are in there more than onceunder different names), J J Johnson’s Teapot is given. This is a Sweet Georgia Brown variant, and in the

key given (which is a transposed trumpet part, though Feather doesn’t say that) the correct changes would

be four identical bars, all G7.

These are the correct changes:

G7 % % %

This is what Leonard Feather says they are:

C Am F D7

Note that as well as making the chord change on every single measure, when all measures have the same

chord, not one of the measures Feather gives has the right chord anyway.

Don’t have the attitude, ‘it’s in print so it must be authoritative’. As you can see, sometimes what is

printed is just garbage! Sometimes, as in a recently published version of Coltrane’s Prestige Good Bait

solo, the changes may not be bad at all - except for the fact that they are under the wrong bars some of the

time.

It is worth taking time and trouble over solos you love. In fact, it doesn't really take that much time if you

think about it, and if you understand just one solo deeply, your own playing will be transformed.

Use Playalongs

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Playalongs are invaluable to aspiring jazz musicians, and are regularly used by jazz greats such as Art

Farmer, Lee Konitz, David Liebman and James Moody.

They can help you get ready to play by teaching you effectively, and in a realistic context, all the basic

skills that you will need to help you do the real work, which is to stay the course on the bandstand - i.e. torelate effectively to other musicians in a group context.

Playalongs are Better than a Metronome

A metronome is a device which mechanically counts the beats as they go by, but a playalong provides a

much richer resource. There is still a pulse-based context, so the basic function of counting is covered.

But you will usually have three players on the playalong, none of whom will be playing the metronomic

beat! All of them will be playing their own version of it, approaching it in their own way, modified by

what the others are doing.

If you find this complex rhythmic context distracting at first, that’s because it is! It is full of interest and

subtlety, there is lots to listen to, so much so that many of the best of them are enjoyable albums in their

own right.As you learn not to get lost or diverted, it will be because you are learning to carry your own time in your

head without having to think consciously about it.

You can practise at whatever tempo you like, either by multiplying the tempo of what you play, getting

faster playalongs, or using electronic devices to alter pitch and tempo. Playalongs may even be better for

you than playing with (some) people! The sense of your own time is very important, and it needs to be

strongly developed.

If you are beginning, and are playing with beginners, then nobody’s time-sense is likely to be very strong,

and the confusion that often results can be destructive because it won’t help you directly to develop your

own internal time.

If you are being taught by expert player(s) who accompany you, then this is easily the best way. It isn’t an

option for most people though, so we use playalongs instead. The pedagogical point is that if you get outof step with the music (i.e. if you get lost) , you know it must be you who has gone wrong, and you do

something about it. In a beginner’s group you can never be sure it wasn’t somebody else.

Playalongs put you among the changes

As well as offering you a rhythmic context, of course, a playalong offers you harmony too. There is a great

deal on offer, ranging from tracks with a single mode on them, through various LEGO bricks, to full-blown

songs.

At the beginning, what you must discover for yourself is what the ground feels like. Where the strong

points are, what the sound of any note against any background is. This isn't something you look up in a

book and remember the rule. You must do it and feel it, and then you will know just because you have

done it and felt it.To begin with, Jamey Aebersold’s Volume 24, Major and Minor is an excellent start. This has separate

major and minor tracks for each key. The major tracks are harmonic, and oscillate between major and

implied dominant sevenths. The minor tracks are modal. With these stable backgrounds you can explore,

not only the obvious chord and scale tones, but all the others too. For instance you could practice approach

notes to major arpeggios, à la Hampton Hawes. In any case, what you learn will be your own knowledge,

to use as your ear dictates. The accompanying book incorporates a great deal of wisdom, which with the

pragmatism of many years in the business, Jamey has also recorded a spoken demonstration record which

comes with it, and which also includes him demonstrating on alto saxophone some of the ways to use the

record.

To extend your familiarity with basic chord types, Aebersold’s Vol 21 Gettin’ it Together is invaluable too,

particularly as every track takes the given chord through all twelve keys.

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A realistic ‘broad-fronted’ practice regimeTaking into account what we have discussed in this chapter so far, let us now look at what this might look

like as a programme of daily practice.

What follows are the components of a serious practice regime for your jazz playing. On a good day you

will be able to do some of everything. On other days, no matter how badly you feel, there will always be

at least one of them that you can manage. They should be viewed as separate from but complementary to

any specifically technical work you may be doing on your instrument.

1) Take phrases from real solos through all keys in the way described. Play each phrase accurately

twice before moving on to the next key.

2) Learn songs by heart. Check that you are learning songs other musicians would expect you to

know, as well as your own favourites. Be aware of their ‘category’ as you learn them. On the bandstand

someone may bark ‘You! Play a ballad’, or ‘Let’s do a blues in Ab, anyone know a line?’. Don’t be

caught out.

3) Take a song you like and know by heart, and

• play an impassioned full-blooded completely solo version of it.

• play it in all twelve keys. If along the way, a particular key gives you problems, stay with it, and

maybe play some other stuff in that key before moving on.

• if you have a playalong of it, stick it on and play along.

4) Take a playalong, and without looking at what it is, simply play along, trying to sort out what the

tunes are, and what they do. A variant of this is to start the playalong at a random point in mid-track, and

see how quickly you can sort out where you are and what’s happening. That last trick is used on some jazz

courses in the States to ‘grade’ students on day one.

5) Make a recording of the solos you are working on. The recording should contain just the solos,not the complete tracks. It can be as long or as short as you like, but around 20 minutes is ideal. Play

along with this recording on every practice session (surprisingly it’s easy to do when you are too tired to

improvise yourself) and then forget about it until tomorrow. In this way you can ‘Workout with John

Coltrane’ or whoever. Think what there is to learn!

060 Part VI

Documents

Transcript of 060 Part VI