lowquality.net

Some­times as a music teacher, one finds them­selves falling into the famil­iar pit­falls of their stu­dents. I am the worst offender of the “do as I say, not as I do” teach­ing phi­los­o­phy. I am try­ing hard to over­come my per­sonal hang-ups in order to be more of the “lead by exam­ple” type of instruc­tor, but it’s eas­ier said than done.

One sober­ing les­son for any musi­cian is real­iz­ing that the answers to all of our musi­cal prob­lems lie in the music itself. Some­times, we look every­where but the music. We look in method books, music schools, bizarre tech­ni­cal exer­cises, hand-strengthening gad­gets– we look every­where but the record­ings. If some­one said they wanted to learn how to solo like Char­lie Parker, the Omni­book would be a good marker stone on your way to accom­plish that task, but you have no busi­ness read­ing down those solos until you’ve actu­ally lis­tened to them. I mean really lis­tened to them, over and over again. The answers are all on the records.

Since I began teach­ing at the Governor’s School, I have been on a per­sonal mis­sion to really improve my Jazz play­ing. In the past, I’ve fallen into the same pit­falls: giv­ing myself aca­d­e­mic assign­ments like writ­ing out bass lines or ana­lyz­ing charts. These tech­niques have proved valu­able and have worked for me in the past to achieve a greater under­stand­ing of Jazz, but they have not directly affected my abil­ity to play the music com­petantly. A cou­ple of nights ago I just sat down with my bass, put on “Speak No Evil” by Wayne Shorter and, just delib­er­ately, played along like I would do with James Brown or The Meters. I did even­tu­ally take the real book out to help with some of the changes, but because I was relat­ing them directly to the music my sense of form was being chal­lenged by the nat­ural push and pull of the rhythm sec­tion. I found myself lis­ten­ing more the the phras­ing of the musi­cians and the dialouge between them — not just the act of play­ing the right notes or know­ing how one chord works with the next, but how every­thing works with every­thing. Thats what Jazz is all about. Jazz is about self-expression to the fullest extent of the word.

Let me make some­thing clear, this isn’t the first time I played along with a Jazz record­ing, it’s just the first time it made sense to me. I’ve played Jazz with peo­ple, in bands, in front of audi­ences, and it didn’t make sense. I thought it made sense, but now I know that it didn’t. The light­bulb was on, but it wasn’t very bright. I was still think­ing like an R&B guy, or a Rock guy, or a Latin guy, like an over­in­tel­lec­tu­al­iz­ing musi­cian who places one style of music way above all of the others.

The truth is that all music is work­ing from the same lan­guage. There are dif­fer­ent con­texts, under which you would use dif­fer­ent phras­ings, rhythms, and note choices (much like the dif­fer­ence between writ­ing a let­ter to grandma and writ­ing a cover let­ter to a resume– same lan­guage, dif­fer­ent con­text). This is evi­dent to any­one who plays the bass and notices that “root-fifth” con­cepts are ram­pant through­out lit­er­ally every style of music but slightly dif­fer­ent in each.

I would not have come to this rev­e­la­tion with­out lis­ten­ing to record­ings, but I may not have found the answers in the records if I had not been play­ing in bands and prac­tic­ing on my own. These approaches are all valu­able and essen­tial in the progress of a musi­cian, but we have to remem­ber to be sen­si­ble about our dis­ci­pline. A musi­cian plays music and lis­ten­ing to music pro­vides all of the ques­tions and answers we could pos­si­bly need.