Practice
and
Performance Goals
Hal
Galper March 2003
"Learn it,
then forget it." - Charlie
Parker
The
ultimate goal for any artists in any medium is to gain
control of their internal and external creative environment. The
reality of an
artist's internal life takes precedence over the external.
To this
day I remember
walking down
I have
looked for the
answers to this mystery from the point of view that most of the tools
we need
to develop to be a jazz improvisor are internal processes, a
difficult
concept to grasp since it is natural to focus our attention on such
external
processes as hands, lips, the instrument, written music, or the like.
Supported
by the latest
neurological research on how the brain functions, Robert Jourdain makes
a
convincing case for the idea that humans are "hard-wired" for music
from birth, that the source of all music stems from the way we all are
physiologically constructed.1
Learning
how to
improvise and perform jazz music involves understanding not only the
technical
and mechanical elements of jazz but also the relationship between three
interlocking and interdependent physiological elements on an intuitive
level:
the mind, the body, and emotions - as well as understanding how this
complex of
elements works together to produce the improvised experience. (See Example 1.) It's
generally assumed that these physiological elements are fixed
as givens that are immutable. To the contrary, the mind, the body, and
emotions
are malleable; they can be trained as tools you can control to work for
you.
They are the basic tools of any artistic endeavor!
Mind
In a presentation before an October 2001 symposium on music and
neurology, Dr.
Gottfried Schlaug "made comparisons between the brains of professional
musicians and those of non-musicians. His findings indicate that
professional
musicians tend to have larger motor cortices than non-musicians and
that years
of repetitive practice can strengthen existing synapses and even lead
to the
formation of new ones."2
Body
Seymour Fink describes the experience of playing rhythm as a
"kinetic" (the motion of bodies) experience which occurs in continuing
"wavelike beats.... This is fully perceived only by the body; it is not
a
mental concept." It is "the life force of the music, the performer's
internal engine that propels the music forward in an unstoppable
flux.... We
respond physically to this living, pulsating organism that is music...."
Emotion
Dr. Anne Blood described a "significant aspect" in how the brain
responds to music: "almost all of the brain's response to music takes
place at the subcortical level, that is, in the nerve centers below the
cerebral cortex, which is the region of the brain where abstract
thought
occurs.... It looks like the emotional part of music is getting at
something
more fundamental that cognition." Her study "also revealed that the
brain processes consonant and dissonant sounds in very different ways.
Dissonant sounds affected areas of the brain involving memory and
anxiety,
while consonant sounds stimulated pleasant emotional responses. The
results of
Dr. Blood's study may be validating what composers and performers of
music have
know for centuries."
Margaret
A. Boden
quotes psychologist Phillip Johnson-Laird, "It has been known for some
time that aesthetically pleasing melodies tend to involve a succession
of small
intervals followed by a larger one, and visa versa. For example (using
* for
the first note, R for repeat, U for up, and D for down), the opening of
Beethoven's Fifth has the contour *-R-R-D-U-R-R-D; and Greensleeves
opens with
*-U-U-U-U-D-D-D-D."3
It is
realistic to
assume that jazz performers, with the proper training, learn how to
control the
mind, body, and emotions on an intuitive level.4 These tools
can be
further understood as the interlocking functions of External Behavior
and
Internal Behavior. (See Example 2.)
Practicing
is external
behavior that affects internal processes that in turn affect the
external
behavior of performance. The three functions interact. If one takes
this idea
to its logical extreme, playing a musical instrument is fundamentally a
process
of mind over matter. "The imagination can manipulate ivory, felt,
steel,
and spruce to sublime ends. [Bill] Evans called it putting emotion into
the
piano, and he proved that it can be done," said author Peter Pettinger.5
Most
students give
primary consideration the external, technical and mechanical aspects of
study:
notation, theory, the instrument, mechanical technique, all those
aspects of
playing music that are visible to the naked eye. Your instrument,
whichever one
it may be, is not the instrument! It just looks that way. The
external
aspects are an illusion.
Seymour
Fink states,
" By restricting our instruction to teaching the mechanical (getting
around and pushing the right levers) and teaching notation (lines,
spaces,
rhythmic subdivisions, and the like), we ignore - or worse, might even
obstruct
- the true musical development of a studeent." He further suggests that
"the essence of music making...is found in inner hearing with its
linkage
to the body, and in a deeper grasp of musical values and their
relationship to performance....
Along with teaching notation, we must also teach its limitations,
namely that
it is an approximate, pictorially inadequate representation of those
live and
vital sounds that started in the composer's head. That music exists
only in
live sound, not on the page, is too quickly forgotten."6
The
musical realities
you have to deal with are internal processes. The conclusion that
follows may
be difficult for the student to grasp at first. You are the
instrument!
A musical instrument is merely a machine. It is an input and output
device. It
is worth stating twice. The mind, the body, and emotions are the basic
tools of
any artistic endeavor! They can be trained to do the improvisor's
bidding.
The goals
of practicing
are to develop one's internal processes. The goal of playing is to use
these
processes as performance tools. An instrument is an input device used
to train
internal processes, like the keyboard of a computer. When performing,
an
instrument acts like a computer's printer - it is the output device.
The
internal processes can be compared to software code that you're
constantly
writing and rewriting.
The
internal life of an
artist takes precedence over the external life. It is within this
internal life
that the richness of creative and controlled musical experience can be
discovered, developed, and enhanced. Being somewhat ephemeral in nature
and
initially difficult to grasp, this inner life is often ignored in favor
of the
external life. All practicing is dedicated to the development and
control of
inner processes.
The
Practicing Attitude
Quite often students don't have a clear understanding of the difference
between
practicing and performance and how the two interact. There is a
practicing
attitude and a playing attitude. Each is different.
The main
contributor to
the confusion between these two attitudes is that students spend more
time
practicing as compared to the amount of time spent playing. Without
realizing
it, they are developing a practicing attitude. They then mistakenly try
to
apply this practicing attitude to a playing situation, becoming
frustrated when
it doesn't work. The main challenge most students face in developing a
playing
attitude is having the opportunity to gain enough playing experience
with
musicians of a high enough caliber to get to hear how to do it right.
The
Playing Attitude
Simply put, the playing attitude employs a process yet to be codified
in
western music education - "faking it." Although the name has a
slightly disreputable connotation, as if faking it were somehow
cheating, it is
a highly sophisticated process that can only be self-taught.
When
studying music as
a child, most of us (especially those with exceptional capacities for
hearing)
share the common experience of our teachers discouraging us from
memorizing and
playing music by ear. I know I did. I remember my first piano teacher,
Mrs.
Olivier, yelling from the kitchen, "Harold, you're playing from memory!
Read the music!" I never knew how she could tell that I was playing by
ear, but I suspect it was because I was over-interpreting the pieces,
perhaps
playing them with too much feeling. Our early teachers implanted within
us
guilty feelings when we played by ear, as if it was wrong to do so.
However,
in his book The
Art of Playing The Piano, George Kochevitsky's impeccable
scientific
research on how the mind and nervous system function when playing music
proved
that all music is played by ear! You can't play anything until you can
hear it
first. In scientific terms he's talking about developing a strong
"brain-to-hand"
signal. Kochevitsky proved that if the signal from the brain is strong
enough,
the hands will do anything to get the sound out.
The
process of
"faking it" is implemented by bringing these highly developed
internal processes to the bandstand and just "going for it" without
worrying about making a mistake. During a recent study by neurological
researchers at the University of Tubingen, Germany, Dr. Gabriela
Scheler (a
former violinist with the Nuremberg Philharmonic Orchestra) said, "the
findings suggest that professionals have 'liberated' their minds from
worrying
about hitting the right notes. As a result, they are able to listen,
judge, and
control their play...."7
Learning
how to
"fake it" can't be learned in the classroom and practice room. It can
only be learned on the bandstand, doing it over and over, performance
by
performance until right. It's a process of experimentation, of trial
and error.
The player is constantly trying to train and use these inner processes
through
the direct experience of using them.
My first
experience
with "faking it" was during my early student years. I'd take
commercial music gigs to make the rent, playing the classic standard
songs at
weddings, dances, and Bar Mitzvahs. As I didn't know all the tunes by
memory,
I'd bring my fake books with me to the gigs. Unfortunately, the tunes
segued
from one to the next; and the bandleaders never gave me enough time to
look the
tunes up. They'd usually say "Fake it, kid; fake it. You'll learn it in
a
couple of choruses." By listening hard to the bass or guitar player,
I'd
eventually learn the tunes by ear.
Practicing
is work
directed toward developing internal processes. Playing is learned
through
direct experience, applying these internal processes until they work
for you on
the bandstand.
Internal
Processes
Historically, the practicing attitude is linear, intellectual,
goal-oriented,
and mechanical. The playing attitude is just the opposite. It is
holistic,
process-oriented, and intuitive/emotional in nature.
Seven of
the major
internal processes that one must develop are a "vivid" aural
imagination, the ability to concentrate in a highly focused and
uninterrupted
stream, a sense of musicality, a musical vocabulary, rhythmic
syncopation,
physical control, and emotional control.
Aural
Imagination
I suggest, "First, learn how to hear everything and to play everything
you
hear, then hear everything and play as little of it as possible."
When I ask
my class
members to raise their hands if they 're having trouble playing what
they hear
in their ears, most raise their hands. The truth is that they hear what
they
want to play but don't hear it vividly, in an intense manner. They hear
it
pale, more as "Do-be-do-be-bop" instead of
"DO-BE-DO-BE-BOP!"
A TV
documentary showed
Dizzy Gillespie backstage after a high school concert talking to some
budding
high school musicians. Trying to make his point about the degree to
which vivid
hearing must be developed, he sang the above scat syllables first
softly
("Do-be-do-be-bop") then shouting very loudly ("DO-BE-DO-BE-BOP!")
This brings up another concept that bears much contemplation to
understand:
what's going on in your head comes out on your instrument on a
direct
one-to-one basis! There's no hiding. Everybody plays exactly the
way they
hear. If you want to change the way you play, you have to change the
way you
hear. You can't have an action without a thought that precedes it.
Consequently, all actions describe a person's thought processes. To
change
one's actions, one must first change one's thought processes.
Kochevitsky's
point
about having to hear music before playing it was further confirmed for
me by a
later experience. While touring with the Phil Woods band, I was in my
motel
room very early one morning, packing and getting ready to get into the
van for
a drive to our next gig. The TV was tuned to the morning kids' show
"Mr.
Rogers" and the great classical pianist Andre Watts was his guest. I
heard
Mr. Rogers ask, " Well, Andre, how do you play music?
I had the
good fortune
to have studied piano technique with Madame Chaloff (jazz baritone
saxophonist
Serge Chaloff's mother) while living in
Someone
had sent me a
bootleg Italian recording of air-checks that Art Tatum had made when he
was in
his early 20s, young and showing off. It was the fastest piano-playing
I'd ever
heard. I put the record on and listened to it for three hours straight.
Immediately afterward I went to the piano and started playing. For
about a half
hour I was playing as fast as Tatum. As I continued on for another half
hour,
my playing got slower and slower until I was back to my own technical
level.
What had
happened was
that by listening so long to Tatum playing fast, I had put the sound
of
playing fast in my ears. It was at that point that Madame Chaloff's
point
became a revelation. Tatum didn't have faster hands; he had faster
ears! How
fast you can play depends on how fast you can hear. Everyone has an
upper limit
of hearing speed that they work on extending over the years.
In another
perfect
example of the power of musical imagination, Oliver Sacks cited the
well-documented case of Blind Tom, a slave child born on a southern
plantation
in the mid-1800s.8 "Tom would listen intensely to the
colonel's
daughters practicing their sonatas and minuets on the piano." When the
four-year-old sat at the piano, he'd repeat what they played
note-for-note, at
speed! Because of this unique talent, he was subsequently sold to a
promoter
who took the child on tour. "
At 11, he
played before
President Buchanan at the White House. A panel of musicians who thought
that he
had tricked the President tested the child's memory the following day,
playing
two entirely new compositions to him, 13 and 20 pages in length. "He
reproduced them perfectly and without the least apparent effort." How
could he do that without any musical training? It is too easy to
dismiss this
as only another case of an idiot-savant. If we accept Kochevitsky's
premise that
all music is played by ear, then the only conclusion one can come to is
that
the child's aural imagination was extremely highly developed. This kind
of
hearing is commonplace among the great musicians.
Entrepreneur
Todd
Barkin told me a story about jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal that further
illustrates
this point. Ahmad was visiting Todd in his office one day, and Barkin
played a
Bill Evans recording of the composition My Story. Much
impressed, Ahmad
had Todd replay it three times. A week or two later Todd and Ahmad were
hanging
together at a piano, and Ahmad played the song from memory - with
Bill's exact
changes and melody. As Todd related to me, "it's only got a million
sets
of changes to it!" Jazz pianist Red Garland was also purported to be
able
to memorize a song after three hearings of it.
The ears
have their own
independent way of working. Their own dynamics and tendencies can be
used and
manipulated to your advantage. Practicing and playing without
understanding how
this most basic tool of your art works is inefficient and largely
nonproductive.
It is a
commonly
mistaken conclusion that improvising musical ideas is a matter of
making a
series of conscious decisions. "I think I'll play this, and now I think
I'll play this; now I think I'll play this." This is just not possible.
Conscious decisions of that type are too slow to use during the process
of
improvising. Have you ever practiced a musical idea, then to interject
it into
your solo while playing only to find that it completely stops your
solo? Conscious
decision-making is an intellectual process that is too slow to use
while
improvising. Decisions about what to play when are made on an intuitive
level,
the intuition being able to make decisions at a speed approximately
20,000
faster than intellectual thought.
Mitch
Haupers quotes
from Howard Gordon's Creating Minds, "...intelligence and
creativity are not the same. Intelligence is measured in terms of convergent
thinking - the ability to give the 'correct' answer on an IQ test -
while
creativity stimulates divergent thinking - the tendency to
respond to
problems by searching for a wide range of possible interpretations."9
There is
only one way
you can play a musical idea; because you have to! The idea
lives so
intensely, so "vividly" in your aural (ears/hearing) imagination that
you're compelled to play it. Your hands have no choice; they are
compelled to
respond to the intense brain signal. It is compulsive behavior in its
finest
form.
When
practicing music
ideas we tend to think that it is the idea itself that we are trying to
learn
when in actuality the idea functions more as a tool to develop the more
sophisticated process of vivid aural imagination. It's not the idea
itself that
is important; it is the effect that practicing the idea has on the
process of
hearing vividly. It is not the practiced idea you take to the bandstand
with
you, it is the process of vivid aural imagination you take to the
bandstand as
a performing tool. You don't want to improvise using only practiced
ideas,
anyway. You'll find it extremely boring and mechanical. Your goal on
the
bandstand is to make up ideas you never practiced before and hear them
so
intensely you that are compelled to play them.
The human
imagination
is the most powerful tool in the universe. It is the source of all
civilization: nothing created by mankind exists without it being first
imagined. Some eastern religions even go so far as to postulate that
the
observable universe is actually a product of our imaginations. No
matter the
art form, harnessing the power of your imagination and concentration
are what
being an artist is all about.
Concentration
People switch mental states thousands of times a day without realizing
it. One
minute you'll be aware of everything going on around you; the next
minute you
can switch to an introspective, self-absorbed state. Sometimes you have
to
concentrate on more than one thing at a time, as a juggler would have
to do.
Mental states can eventually be controlled and mastered to be used as
tools of
your art, and concentration is a mental state.
In the
human organism,
"work" is measured by the amount of calories one burns during a task.
A scientific study compared the amount of calories burned by someone
digging a
ditch for eight hours to that of a classical cellist playing a
three-hour
concert. Though all the cellist was doing was sitting and moving a bow
back and
forth, they both burned the same amount of calories. The ditch-digger's
work
was physical; the cellist's was concentration. Concentration is the
"work" we do as performers. You've had the experience of having
practiced very intensely for an hour or two and finding yourself
exhausted
afterward. There's no denying it, it's work.
We are
unaware that we
are developing concentration when we practice. Concentration comes in
more than
one form: it can be narrow, wide, or distracted. Exercising control
over these
types of concentration and using them as tools is another of your
goals. Not
only does a practiced idea shape one's hearing, it also develops your
ability
to concentrate. This ability, like vivid imagining, may take years to
develop.
Narrow
Concentration
Narrow concentration focuses on a narrow point, as in meditation. How
many
times while playing has your mind drifted off to think about what
someone said
to you earlier that day, or what your dog did that afternoon? Your flow
of
concentration is interrupted: you can concentrate but only in spurts.
What
remains to be developed is the ability to concentrate in a continuous,
uninterrupted flow.
When
practicing a
particular musical idea, we are focused narrowly on it, focusing in a
manner
that excludes all extraneous thoughts. Our general awareness of things
around
us recedes until the idea is the only thing we are aware of, becoming
almost
all-consuming. In that way we are practicing narrow concentration
without
realizing it.
Wide
Concentration
This type of concentration is used when playing in a group so that the
player
can listen to the group sound as a totality, listening to oneself last.
I
became aware of this type of concentration during my stint with
trumpeter Chet
Baker, my first "big-time" jazz gig, in the early 1960s.
Chet was a
master of
playing soft and swinging hard, a rapidly disappearing art. It seemed
that I
could never play soft enough to satisfy Chet, especially when he was
singing.
I'm a rather large person, with big arms and hands, and I would try
everything
I could to play softer, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, one night
on the
bandstand of the Plugged Nickel in
It was
Saturday night,
and the club was packed with a hushed audience. A blue spotlight
focused on
Chet, who was sitting on his trumpet case, microphone in hand, singing
a ballad
(I believe I Fall In Love Too Easily). At about the bridge to
the tune,
I hit one chord just slightly too loud. Chet stopped singing, turned
around,
pointed at me, and yelled, "You've got it, Hal!" Everyone in the club
turned around; I had 200 pairs of eyes looking at me!
Back in my
motel room
later that night, I went over the experience and realized a basic
truth. We
spend a large part of our time doing individual work on our
instruments,
subjectively self-involved with our own individual musical concerns.
Without
realizing it, we bring that self-involvement to the bandstand with us,
so we're
only thinking about our own role in a group-playing context. I realized
that
that's what I had been doing.
The next
night on the
gig I decided to listen to myself last and listen instead to the whole
group
first. The light came on! By listening only to myself (narrow
concentration) to
control my volume, I had nothing to which to relate my volume. By
listening to
the whole sound of the band (wide concentration), I could finally hear
myself
in relation to the total sound the band was creating and thus adjust my
volume
accordingly.
Distracted
Concentration
Distracted concentration is focusing on something other than music to
in a
sense "get yourself out of the way of yourself." I stumbled onto this
type by accident while playing a solo piano gig one night in a
restaurant. The
piano was on the floor, at the same level as the diners; and a
blue-haired old
lady approached the piano and started talking to me while I was
playing. While
we conversed I noticed what I was playing - things I'd never practiced
before!
As the ideas flowed smoothly from my hands my reaction was "Man, I
didn't
know I could play that!" New ideas were just pouring out. I was not
"trying" so hard as I normally would but rather letting the music
come out.10 As pianist Roger Kellaway said, "You are told in
the arts that you have to get out of your own way."11
This
refers again to
the "work" we do as performers. You may never have been told this,
but playing music is supposed to be easy! Most of us think it's
supposed to be
hard to play, but truthfully, you can't play music well if it's hard to
do. If
you can't do it easily you can't have fun and project that feeling of
fun to
your bandmates and listeners. Anything you can do to make the music
easier to
play is okay; it's not cheating.
Most
students over-work
when they play. So in my private teaching I have quite effectively
turned my
over-working students on to distracted concentration by having a
conversation
with them while playing together. They may not get as much of a
personal reward
as they usually experience from what they are playing, but they do
begin to get
the point about the disastrous effects over-working can have on one's
performance level.
This
concept of
distracted concentration was later reinforced by something saxophonist
Sam
Rivers said to me. I found him at his apartment one day walking around
the
house playing his horn with the radio, TV, and record player all
playing at
once. Why he was doing that? He replied, "It helps me to
concentrate."
A Sense of
Musicality
One's sense of musicality, what I often term "the big picture," is
achieved through a ubiquitous understanding of how the all the various
elements
of music relate to each other as a whole, through a complete and
intuitive
understanding of musical relationships or "how things work." This
includes how harmony relates to melody, how harmony relates to rhythm,
how
melody relates to rhythm, how these aspects relate to form, to name
just a few
aspects. This element of our musical development also grows without our
awareness,
but we take it onto the bandstand allowing us to improvise cohesive
musical
statements that make sense.12
All
practicing is
directed toward the developing these inner processes of vivid hearing,
focused
concentration, and sense of musicality. These are the most basic
fundamental
tools we take to the bandstand with us when we play.
A Musical
Vocabulary
Dizzy Gillespie, in an interview with Mike Longo, said, "I keep one
hand
in the present and one hand in the past."13
There are
many ways to
learn how players conceived their ideas. One is to have a complete
grounding in
the theoretical aspects of jazz music so you can understand everything
they are
playing. Another is to work backwards to an understanding of players'
concepts
by copying their solos. Note that I use the word copying, not
transcribing. By
copying I mean playing the solo by ear, over and over again until it is
memorized so that the rules of music are learned through experience
rather than
theory. The operative philosophy is that if it sounds good, the rules
must have
been used correctly. After all, all rules are optional, their use
depending on
the situation of the moment. When a rule becomes inoperative, another
rule
becomes operative.
Jazz
educator David
Baker once stated, "If you copied and learned one bebop head a month,
in
all 12 keys, for 12 months, you'd have enough of a jazz vocabulary to
improvise
successfully."
All the
great players I
had the good fortune to apprentice with over the years played by ear.
They also
learned their vocabulary the same way. They could not describe what
they were
doing theoretically. This often brings up the question, "Did they know
what they were doing? There are two kinds of knowing - the intellectual
kind
and the intuition/hearing kind. The former is self-limiting; the latter
has no
boundaries. The ears and the intuition always "know" more than the
intellect.
Jazz is a
music that
has historically been learned by copying, by imitation, handing
information
down from generation to generation by the oral tradition. Copying gets
you
directly into the sound and feeling of the music without any
intervening
intellectual theories.
So what
use is theory?
The one limitation of copying is that you learn only what you copied.
It can
thus be one-dimensional. Theory can be a valuable tool for expanding
what you
copied. In other words, copy first, theorize and analyze second.
Theory's
limitation is that it is intellectual. This doesn't mean that the two
processes
are mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they support each other quite
effectively. The problem is the over-importance that is given to the
intellectual over the intuitional side of the coin.14
Since its
inception,
one of the most predominant aspects of jazz music has been the
acquisition and
expansion of a common musical vocabulary by its players. This common
vocabulary
allows us all to play and communicate with each other because group
jazz
improvisation, in its truest sense, is conversational in nature. We
cannot have
a conversation, musical or otherwise, if we don't have a common
language. We
can't have a conversation if one person speaks only English, another
only
Spanish, another French, and another Japanese. Only by absorbing the
history of
the jazz vocabulary can one communicate with other members of a band.
A student
studied with me for a year and then went off on
his own to practice and absorb what he had learned. A year later he
called me
to play a gig with him and offered a ride to the engagement. In the car
after
the gig we were rather silent until he asked me, "So, what did you
think
of my playing?" He wanted an evaluation of how well he had absorbed his
lessons. I said, " Man, you play great. You've developed your own,
original vocabulary. The problem is that it has none of the aspects of
the
traditional vocabulary in it, so I didn't know how to comp for you.
That's okay
with me, but you should call players to play with you who have a
similar
vocabulary with you - or learn the traditional vocabulary." We've since
played together occasionally over the years, and his knowledge of the
jazz
vocabulary has increased dramatically. I assume he did so because he
couldn't
find other players with his vocabulary.
For the
same reason - a
common basis for musical communication - one has to learn the jazz
repertory of
compositions that are part and parcel of jazz's history. The jam
session, an
integral component of the jazz education process, is founded on the
principle
of a common and extensive knowledge of jazz standards as well as the
classic
American standard tune.
Rhythmic
Syncopation
The most pervasive difficulty western jazz students face is a true
understanding of rhythmic syncopation. According to Dizzy Gillespie (in
Mike
Longo's interview with the master), this difficulty stems from the
difference
between the African and western concepts of rhythm. "...The African
concept of rhythm is polyrhythmic, and we are mono-rhythmic." Mr. Longo
clarifies Dizzy's statement, "Polyrhythm is a combination of several
independent rhythmic melodies that agree vertically as well as
horizontally.
That is to say, that even though these are horizontally independent
melodies,
they also mesh with each other from a vertical point of view, in what
would
seem like a form of rhythmic harmony."
As
children in western
society, we are taught to learn time as being executed as a series of
quarter
notes. One can't play western music without mastering quarter-note
time, the
first musical element we must learn if we are to be able to read and
perform
western music. We eventually become conditioned to conceive all time as
being
played in this manner. Yet this is one of many aspects of childhood
musical
training that become impractical for the adult jazz musician.15
Quarter note time is unsophisticated and mechanical, what Dizzy called
"clock time." Rhythmic syncopation is sophisticated and complex, what
Dizzy defined as "human time."
It was the
African
invention of syncopation that transformed western music into jazz. It
was a
rhythmic innovation. Yet rhythmic syncopation is the least understood
aspect of
jazz music. Syncopation is the lifeblood of the music. It has magical
qualities: of all the inventions of the human mind, none can be found
comparable. Syncopation is a unique construct that allows individuals
to be
part of a group experience while at the same time retaining each
participant's
individuality. In most group endeavors it is usually either one or the
other,
either emphasizing part of a group with a consequent loss of
individuality or
the opposite, retaining members' individuality to the detriment of the
total
group experience. Only in jazz music, through the concept of rhythmic
syncopation, do both successfully co-exist.16
I learned
syncopation
by playing at the feet of the masters, hearing how it should go night
after
night, doing my best to emulate it. I had the good fortune to spend a
week with
Dizzy when he was a guest artist with the Phil Woods Quintet in the
1980s. I
was never the same after that week. All Dizzy talked about for that
week was
rhythm, rhythm, and more rhythm. When an inventor of the music puts so
much
emphasis on one particular aspect of jazz, I got the point that jazz
is, at
root, a rhythmic invention. If you don't understand the rhythm, you
don't
understand the music.
Physical
Control
Musicians are athletes of the fine (smallest) muscles. Controlling
finger
actions, lip actions, and breathing actions all require the development
and
control of these fine muscles. Excess body motion during performance
has a
disastrous effect upon your control of these muscles. The goal of a
performer
is to be physically "quiet." Take a look at the videos of some of the
masters performing. Notice how little they move. (At this point someone
usually
brings up the case of Keith Jarrett. Well, when you can play like him,
you can
move like him!) The point is that you don't hear "the body" in the
master's playing. Overuse of the larger muscles slows your reaction
times and
makes your playing "heavy."17
Emotional
Control
Rather than repeat myself on this subject, I recommend you read the
article Stage
Fright, Relaxation, and Energy.18
How
Improvising Works
The ability to improvise is a naturally built-in human process. We do
it
intuitively, all the time, mostly without thinking about it. At its
most basic
level, it is problem-solving, and so is jazz improvising.
Predictable
and Unpredictable Elements
All art is the projection of an illusion created by the artist.
Journalist Gene
Lees quoted his first painting teacher as saying "Art is a process of
elimination." For a student learning jazz through listening and
imitation,
this creates certain problems, as 90% of what is going on in a
performance is
not being played, is being hidden from the listener. One of the
illusions that
jazz musicians create is that of "space." There is no such thing as
space,
only the illusion of space, created by the player leaving out most of
what can
be played. The use and control of space must be as organic as the use
and
control of the musical sounds that occur within that space.
In any
improvised event
there are organizing factors that give the event form and content. In
jazz it
could be anything from one note (a pedal tone) to a scale (a mode) or a
set of
structured harmonies (chord changes) that must be used. What ever the
organizing factors are, they are predictable, mutually agreed upon by
the
group, and hidden from the listener. The commonly heard question "how
do
they know where they are?" is a perfect example of this process. The
group
knows where they are because they utilize the agreed-upon common
factors that
organize the music. The listener doesn't know where we are because to
show
these factors to the audience would destroy the illusion that we are
making it
all up on the spot. Musicians spend the most part of their student
years
learning how to internalize and use these predictable elements on an
intuitive
level.
The
predictable
elements may vary in number and complexity, but for the most part they
fall
into four categories: rhythm, harmony, melody, and form. These elements
are
internalized by each performer and are used as guides by each
individual
player. The internalized elements repeat in a continuous flow of
rhythmic,
harmonic, melodic, and form information that are utilized for content
and
inspiration. Because of their predictability, these elements allow
performers
to know where they are at any particular moment and can be used to
understand
what may be coming up in the future.
From this
point of
view, the growth in sophistication of jazz music from its inception to
its
current state could be defined by its continuous modification in the
degree by
which its organizing elements are not being articulated during
performance - by
how much of these elements are not played but left out!
Mathematics
and Elegance
Mathematics and music are intimately related. Mathematicians use the
term
"elegance" to describe the beauty of a mathematical formula that is
basically simple but has infinite possibilities for complexity. If an
idea or
concept appears complex, one is looking at the results of its potential
for
complexity, not its basically "elegant" simplicity. In other words,
if an idea appears complex, you're looking at it wrong. To understand
any
complex process, it must be reduced to its most simple and elegant form.
To the
student, jazz
improvising appears complex and hard to do. The truth is, one can't
play unless
the processes used are simple and easy to use. You can't have fun if
it's hard
to do; playing must be easy to do it well.
Douglas
Hoffstader, in
his Pulitzer prize-winning book Godel,
A short
digression into
the area of melodic improvisation might demonstrate this elegance.
Every
chord has four
basic chord tones.20 Contrary to much current
improvisational
pedagogy, improvising a melody is not a matter of synchronizing scales
with
their matching chord symbols. It is facilitated by utilizing the
infinite
possibilities of guide-tone melodies that are inherent in the passage
of a
series of chords and their chord-tone from one to the next - what
pianists
generally describe as "voice-leading."
For example, if one measure of music contained a ii-V series of chords
for two
beats each, the chord-tone of each chord would fall on beats 1 and 3 of
the
bar. Any chord-tone of one chord can go to any chord-tone of the next,
creating
16 possibilities of chord-tone moving from one to the other. (See Example 4.) A
ii-V-I can have over 70 possibilities of chord-tone motion!
For
example, the third
of one chord can go the fifth of the next, to the seventh of the next,
to the
root of the next. These possible combinations of guide-tone melodies -
created
by the simple device of a chord having four basic tones - give the
concept of
melody its elegance. Any of the chord tones may be connected to each
other
using any combination of the four components of tonal melody: scales,
arpeggios, chromatics, and intervals larger than a fourth.
For
the purpose of the following discussion, we'll use the format of the
classic
AABA song format in 4/4 time:
Though in essence elegantly simple, each individual element combined together exponentially increases the potential for complexity. If you played every possibility inherent in these elements, you'd have cacophony. Consequently, through the training of one's intuitive selection process, an improvisor leaves out most of the possibilities. What are eventually articulated on an instrument are the intuitively selected, unpredictable choices one made while wending through the predictable elements of a song. As Dizzy Gillespie said, "It's not the notes you play, it's the notes you leave out."
Through practice and training, all four predictable elements are molded into a combined flow of internal musical information. Graphically it might look something like Examples 5a and 5b. However, one does not play every possible element. The soloist strives to play as little of it as possible! In this case the graphic might look something like Example 6 (vertical lines indicating elements that are actually being played).
To be
completely
understood, the process of jazz improvising must be considered from
both the
point of view of the individual improvisor as well as the improvisor as
part a
group event. When playing in a group situation, the above four elements
of each
individual are synchronized by mutual agreement. For example, a player
getting
lost means either that the group has lost the thread of its own
internal
information flow, its own internal components becoming unsynchronized,
or that
the components have become unsynchronized in relation to the group's
flow of
internal information.
Notice
that the flows
of information in the individual player have a horizontal aspect - and
that the
flows when playing in a group also take on a vertical aspect. These
aspects
might be best visualized as a parallel to an orchestral score. The
staffs for
each individual part move in a horizontal motion, and when looking at
the
combined staffs of all the parts, they take on their vertical aspect.
Each
individual part is
polyrhythmic and polyphonic within itself. In the group context, the
music
takes on a polyrhythmic and polyphonic character as in a fugue. The
best
example of this is the manner in which Dixieland bands improvise as an
ensemble.
Inspiration
Where does musical inspiration come from? There is nothing mystical or
romantic
in the answer to that question.
Have you
ever noticed
how many ideas you have when playing along with a recording? It's
because the
players are stimulating your musical imagination, inspiring you to
play.
However, when the record stops, so do your musical ideas.
One of the
goals of
practicing is to have established internally the uninterrupted flows of
musical
information: rhythm, melody, harmony, and form. These information flows
eventually become the internal resources from which the improvisor
derives
musical ideas. If you run out of ideas while playing, it means that
these
internal resources have gaps in them. So in the truest sense, one of
the goals
of improvisors is to internalize their own recording from which
to draw
musical ideas!
When the
point in your
musical self-education arrives at which you have developed vivid
hearing (a
strong brain-to-hand signal), the tendency will be to play everything
you hear.
You become, for lack of a better word, "notey," without phraseology.
Notey players are those who haven't taken playing by ear to the next
level,
where they would hear everything but play as little of what they hear
as
possible. It is human nature that when you've worked hard to achieve a
certain
goal, it is rewarding to keep doing it. However, the old truism
applies,
"Everything you learn has the potential to become a trap." The key to
avoiding this trap is to know when to cut something loose and to stop
working
on it. To achieve a level of phraseology you have to practice breaking
up what
your ear is telling you what to do.
The
solution to being
notey is to then begin to stop thinking melodically and begin thinking
only
rhythmically. One of the potential traps of contemporary education is
to overly
focus on the melodic aspects of improvising. You can test this
deficiency by
singing only the rhythms to the melody of Charlie Parker's Confirmation
in a monotone, without pitches. Try it with other bebop heads as well.
You may
encounter difficulty in doing so; you'll then see how well you know
them.
However,
the melodic
work invested by a notey player is not wasted. It simply needs to be
used in a
different way than it was learned - prompting another truism:
"Everything
is learned one way, then used in another way."
Dizzy once
said,
"I think of a rhythm first, then add a note to it." Improvisors can
begin to change the way they hear by thinking solely in a syncopated
manner.
One practical way to learn how to syncopate is to take the rhythms of
the bebop
heads you know and apply them to other tunes like Autumn Leaves
or Stella
By Starlight. The most important lesson you'll have to learn is
that the
rhythms pick the right notes out from your internal flow of melodic
information!
How New
Information Affects Old Information
When new musical information is acquired, it affects and alters old
information. The old information is still there but in an altered
state. As
children we have to learn the basics of quarter-note time and where the
notes
are on the instrument. As we grow musically, the newer information is
"layered" upon the old and changes it. For this reason, adult
practicing should not be linear, as if certain musical aspects have to
be
developed before you can go on to others. Don't practice when you're
bored -
you won't learn anything. Concentrating your efforts too long on any
one
particular musical aspect will create boredom. Skip around from one
concept to
another. It doesn't make any difference what you practice; there is no
particular order in which to practice musical ideas. Although we talk
about the
different aspects of music in a separate manner, internally everything
is
connected together. When you improve in one area, it affects all the
others,
globally, so that you improve in all other areas as well.
Here's an
example from
my own personal experience. I was born into the post-bop era. All my
models
were beboppers. I wanted to play bebop and worked hard for decades to
do so.
But hadn't been playing it for the 15 years before I joined Phil Woods'
group.
During that 15 years I had been focused on developing my pentatonic
playing.
If there
ever was a
bebop band, it was Phil's, and when I first joined them, I could hear
that my
pentatonic playing wasn't fitting in to the band's musical style. One
night,
before a concert at The Bottom Line, I was sitting at my kitchen table,
ruminating over this particular problem. I realized that I had been
approaching
the bandstand with a preconception (playing pentatonics) of how I was
going to
play. Taking preconception to the bandstand is part of the
self-teaching
process, but it must be kept under control. There's a time to be
working on
your new stuff and a time not to. One should never approach the
bandstand with
preconceptions, that would lower your creative abilities, placing you
into a
conceptual box. The most successful creative attitude to apply is "what
comes is what's happening."
So I said
to myself,
"Okay. Tonight, I'm just going on the bandstand with no idea whatsoever
of
what I'm going to play. I'm just going to push those little black and
white
things up and down and see what happens."
Much to my
surprise
when I started playing, all my old bebop influence came out. But the
revelatory
thing was that my bebop playing had improved as if I had been playing
in that
style for those previous 15 years!
I rest my
case.
Summation
Learning how to become a jazz improvisor is a life-long task. There
isn't
enough time in life to practice everything. You'll always miss
something and
have to go back to learn it. It takes dedication and patience, and
you're never
done with the process. There are also not enough opportunities to gain
bandstand experience playing with those better at it than you. It's a
battle
that is constant.
When I had
told my mentor,
pianist Jaki Byard, that I was thinking of making my first trip to New
York
City, he offered me a piece of Casteñada-like advice. I think it
applies here,
"Hal, get your shield and your spear; and go there."
End Notes
1 Jourdain, Robert. Music, the
Brain, and
Ecstasy.
New York: William Morrow & Company, 1997.
2 Schlaug, Dr. Gottfried. "Musical Chills." Berklee
Today, Vol. 13,
No. 3, Spring Issue, 2002, p. 6.
3 Boden, Margaret A. The
Creative
Mind/Myths & Mechanisms. New
York: Basic Books, October 1992, pp. 156-157.
4 For more on this topic, please see: Galper, Hal. "Stage
Fright, Relaxation, and Energy." Jazz
Educators
Journal,
Vol. XXII, No. 1, Fall 1989, pp. 45-46.
5 Pettinger, Peter. How My
Heart Sings. New
Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, Sept. 1998.
6 Fink, Seymore. "Can You Teach Musicality?" Piano
& Keyboard, May/June
1997, pp. 40-41.
7 Kochevitsky , George. The Art of
Playing
The Piano.
Evanston, IL: Summy-Birchard Company, 1997.
8 Sacks, Oliver. "Prodigies." The New Yorker, January
1995, p. 44.
9 Haupers, Mitch. "The Musician Mind." Berklee
Today, Summer
1994, p. 19 (quoting from Howard Gordon's
"Creating Minds," Basic Books, 1993).
10 See more about "trying" in my article on "Stage
Fright, Relaxation, and Energy" as listed above.
11 Kellaway, Roger. The
Jazzletter. Gene
Lees, March
2000.
12 This aspect of a musician's mental state is more
completely
explained in: Galper, Hal. "The Development of Style, I & II." Jazz Improv, Vol. 2,
No. 4 & Vol. 3, No. 1, 2000.
13 Longo, Mike. Transcript
of Interview with
Dizzy Gillespie. Catalog
No. MO 102, $6.00. It is revelatory!
14 See my above-listed article on "The Development of
Style" for an in-depth discussion as to how to develop your own jazz
vocabulary.
15 For more information, see: Galper, Hal. "Playing In
Half-Time." LeJazz
Netzine, December
1998.
16 Regarding syncopation, I recommend: Longo, Mike. How To
Sight-Read Jazz and Other Syncopated-Type Rhythms. New
York,
Consolidated Artists/. $14.95 via the web site, catalog #1005; or call
1-880-232-6796; or send a check or money order to Consolidated Artists,
290
Riverside Drive, Suite 11-D, New York, NY 10025 USA. Until I discovered
Mike's
book, I had been depressing my classes when advising them of the
challenge they
face trying to learn jazz rhythm. After all, the masters I learned it
from are
dead; and because of the demise of the apprenticeship system, their
disciples
are not in a position to pass it on to them by the oral tradition. But
in this
book Mike has preserved the rhythmic legacy of Dizzy Gillespie and
found an
effective method to pass this legacy on. It should be on every jazz
musician's
book shelf and a part of every jazz department's curriculum!
17 See my article on "Stage Fright, Relaxation, and
Energy" as listed above.
18 See my article on "Stage Fright, Relaxation, and
Energy" as listed above.
19 Hoffstader, Douglas. Godel,
Esher, and
Bach.
New York: Basic Books, 1979.
20 For this discussion we will not consider the higher
functions.
See the section on "Melody and Embellishment" in my forthcoming book Forward
Motion. New
York: 1st Books Library,
2003, pp. 27-45.
A graduate
of Berklee College of Music, Hal Galper is internationally
known as
an educator. His theoretical and practical articles have appeared in
every
major jazz and jazz education publication, and his most recent book, The
Touring Musician: A Small Business Approach to Booking Your Band on the
Road
(Billboard Books) has entered its second printing. A faculty member of
Purchase
Conservatory and of the New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music, he
extensively travels the collegiate lecture-workshop circuit.
With over
82 recordings
as a pianist to his credit, 27 as a leader in his own right, Galper is
best
known for his work with Chet Baker, Cannonball Adderley, John Scofield,
and the
Phil Woods Quintet. He received a Grammy nomination and a Grammy for
his
recordings with the Phil Woods Quartet and Quintet, a Distinguished
Alumnus
Award from the Berklee College of Music, multiple awards for
Outstanding
Service to Jazz Education from IAJE, and has been a recipient of grants
from
the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lila Wallace-Readers Digest
Foundation, and the New School of New York.
Galper's
new book, Forward Motion: From Bach To Bebop, is being
published in 2003
by Jamey Aebersold
Jazz (in
hard copy) and by http://www.ForwardMotionPDFcom
(as an interactive PDF version).
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