PlayJazz

The blues scale is a standard part of the vocabulary in jazz and rock music, as well as the blues.  Its distinctive sound makes it instantly recognisable and idiomatic but it can also get boring very quickly if it's overused. However, used in conjunction with other approaches, it is hugely effective and should be in every aspiring jazz musicians' vocabulary.  Here is a basic blues scale in C.

The notes of the scale that do not belong in the key of C major scale (i.e. the b3, #4/b5 and b7) are often called 'blue notes' and it's these dissonances that give the scale its distinctive sound.

We'll look at this scale in more detail in a future article, but as a quick tip, you should learn this scale in all keys - you will use it a lot!

To get to even a basic level of competence in jazz, there are so many things that we need to practice. Unfortunately, day to day stuff can eat up a lot of time and there can be a temptation to think that if you can't devote as much time as you want to your practice sessions then it's not worth bothering with. 

Have you ever wanted to do a couple of hours practice but found that you only end up with half an hour? Have you ever then not practiced at all because you told yourself it wasn't worth it? I know I have. Unless you are a student or are independently wealthy, chances are you'll have to fit your practice around work and other commitments.

However, if you can make yourself take advantage of the time that you do have, even if it's not what you hoped for, you can still do some very useful practice...if  you can focus on a specific enough thing.  If you haven't already, you might want to read my earlier post entitled How To Practice as it gets into this in a bit more detail.

So, today I'm introducing another new section of the blog called Quick Tips. These will be short, bite-sized chunks of information that you can grab in a hurry to take advantage of those free five minutes with your instrument. The first Quick Tip will be devoted to the Blues Scale.

Watch this space...

This is one of my all-time favourite ‘Hidden Gems’. Packed full of great playing by a stellar band and featuring some fantastic original compositions, this album caught my attention from the opening track and has been one of my most played CDs ever since.

Sweet Soul was recorded in 1991 and released under Erskine’s own Fuzzy Music label. The rhythm section features the leader on drums with Marc Johnson on Bass and Kenny Werner on Piano. Front line duties are handled primarily by Joe Lovano on Sax but the album also features appearances by John Schofield on Guitar and Randy Brecker on Trumpet.

The first track, ‘Touch Her Soft Lips and Part’ is an arrangement of a piece originally written by the English composer William Walton in 1943 as part of his film score for Henry V. Under Erskine’s direction, it becomes a lush and understated jazz ballad with Joe Lovano caressing the melody with great restraint and beautiful phrasing while the rhythm section provides a simple, yet musically perfect approach to accompaniment. Kenny Werner’s piano solo always gives me goose-bumps and there is a fragility and ephemeral beauty to the whole piece that is deliciously captivating.

This minimal, thoughtful and delicate approach to the group sound is the rock on which the rest of this album is built. The title track ‘Sweet Soul’, an Erskine original, is an unbelievably slow, yet somehow ultimately almost funky track with gorgeous horn parts contrasting with John Scofields’ biting guitar sound to provide both Sweet and Sour.

‘Press Enter’, a Kenny Werner composition is unusual in that it alternates between 5/4 and 4/4 and ‘To Be or Not to Be’, the other track written by the pianist, is a more up tempo swinger featuring a killer trumpet solo by Randy Brecker.

As well as compositions by band members and a couple of standards, Sweet Soul also features a few originals by Vince Mendoza with the hauntingly introspective 'Angels and Devils' being a highlight.

The album finishes with a trio version of Dave Brubeck’s ‘In Your Own Sweet Way’ and this sounds like it started life as an incidental bit of fun in the studio as Kenny Werner manages to shoe-horn a whole host of quotes into the solo and the general arrangement – everything from the theme from ‘James Bond’ to ‘Sleigh Ride’.

What sets this album apart for me is sense that all egos were left at the studio door and these great players focused simply on great ensemble music making. Nobody overplays, the music is given plenty of room to breath and the compositions are both interesting and inventive.

Add to this some great production (the cymbals in particular sound gorgeous) and you have an album that is truly worthy of mention. It is no coincidence that this album is the first to feature in my ‘Hidden Gems’ series; I absolutely love it and I highly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in good jazz.

Despite all the great music in your collection, just occasionally you come across an album that really gets under your skin and won’t let you stop playing it.  Any jazzer will have had this experience with a whole host of classic albums – Kind Of Blue, A Love Supreme, The Koln Concert and so on.

However, from time to time, you stumble across an album that blows you away and is not that widely known. Sharing these kind of discoveries with your friends can be hugely gratifying – especially when that album becomes an indispensable part of their collection.

In recognition of the joy of these kinds of discoveries, today I’m introducing a new feature called Hidden Gems where I’ll share some of my favourite, but lesser known albums with you in the hope that you will enjoy them as much as I have.

Ok, ok...I know I said this before but PlayJazz is now definitely up and running again!  Following my recent house move, it took an interminable amount of time to get connected to the internet again and that, coupled with a particularly busy time work-wise and some random personal stuff, meant that I didn't have the time to Blog.

Fortunately things are more settled now and I'm delighted to be able to return to my scribblings here.  It was very frustrating to have to stop before things had really got started and this blog is still very much in its infancy.  I did have some cool ideas for topics while I was absent and these pages will no doubt continue to change and evolve as time goes on. 

However, one of my goals in starting this blog was to make it as interactive and communal as possible so if there is anything you would like to see a post on, any topics you would particularly like covered or any questions on playing jazz that I can help you with please do let me know.

Welcome back, let's PlayJazz!

Two pieces of good news for me today - I am FINALLY back online and I've discovered this blog has it's first comment from a reader! Hurrah and a big thanks to Tom for his input!

I'm grateful to anyone who takes the time to share their thoughts on this blog and I started to reply to the comment. It started to get a bit long so I thought I would turn it into a post. Tom's original comment is below to save you scrolling down:

I've just read your first few posts and I shall probably read your future ones too. But I would just like to say that I don't think jazz is necessarily any more difficult to do well than other musical forms that require many years of practice. I don't think you could objectively prove that playing jazz piano is harder to do well than to play reggae bass to the standard of (say) Robbie Shakespeare, or classical cello to the standard of Heinrich Schiff. They all take 20 years to get to the top of the game.

Tom.

I do take the point about the top level in all music being equally difficult to reach, but I guess that the reason I claim that jazz is the most difficult kind of music to play is that you have to get to a reasonably advanced level before it starts to sound even remotely plausible.

If we took your example of guitar playing, when you start learning blues, learning three easy open chords of, say, A7, D7 and E7 will have you bashing out a basic 12 bar pretty soon. There are plenty of guitarists playing (and gigging) in blues bands with just a few chord shapes and a single minor pentatonic/blues scale shape in their musical armoury.  They may not be great, but they're good enough for the Dog & Duck on a Friday ni

However, in order to get around even a basic jazz standard and to improvise at a very basic level you're going to need to know a lot more about how music is put together and which notes can be played on which chords.  Sure, there is modal jazz, which has relatively little harmony but that's a tiny area of the music (and creates its own problems!).  Most standards will contain several key changes which need to navigated successfully simply to stay in tune.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that jazz is any way superior to other forms of music - my degree is in classical music and I have a CD collection full of just about every kind of music there is; it's just that I think that the level of knowledge and ability required to play even passably authentic jazz is higher than that of other kinds of music.

Having said that, I do agree that great musicians are equally great regardless of the genre that they play in. Is it harder to play like Pat Metheny than B.B. King? Absolutely not - nobody phrases like B.B.!

To get to the top of the tree is damn difficult and requires equal dedication in all kinds of music. All I'm saying about jazz is that it's probably harder to get to the lower branches in the first place!

...as the old song lyric goes. Sorry to anyone who has taken an interest in this blog, only to find a sudden halt to any new content.  Unfortunately, I've just moved house and it's taking an inordinate amount of time to get a broadband connection sorted!

Rest assured that there will be new posts here within the next couple of days as soon as I'm back online.  As a sneak preview, the next post will be a discussion of that elusive, but essential element in jazz - swing.  I'll be dicussing what it is, why it's so important in jazz and how you can develop it in your playing.

I hope you'll bear with me at the moment and continue to check back here when you can.

Many Thanks  

Amongst the most common questions asked by people learning jazz are 'what should I practice?' and 'How should I practice?'

These questions often arise because the student feels overwhelmed by the sheer number of things they need to learn to be able to play this music, and they think that the best way to improve lies in a disciplined and structured framework that will let them improve in all areas simultaneously - and what's wrong with that!?

If a question like this gets posted on a jazz forum, there'll inevitably be replies like this:"I'm a pianist and I usually practice for 2 hours a day, 6 days a week. My routine looks like this:

Scales - 20 minutes
Chord voicings - 20 minutes
Transcribing - 20 minutes
Taking things through all keys - 20 minutes
Learning new tunes - 40 minutes"

This is all very sensible, very admirable... and absolute rubbish! I'm going to let you in to a secret: NOBODY practices like this every day.

These posters reply with what they THINK a good practice schedule should look like, rather than what they actually do. Nothing holds students back more than a simple lack of practice.

This doesn't mean that they never play their instruments. The reality is that there is a distinct difference between practicing and playing. It's also important to remember that pretty much everybody hates practicing and loves playing.

The verb 'practice' is defined by the free online dictionary as:

To do or perform (something) repeatedly in order to acquire or polish a skill.

This means that when you start to practice, you don't have a skill. In other words you can't do something. This is why practice is painful; you have to do something you can't do - a lot! Nobody likes to do things that they can't do. It is human nature to enjoy things that we do well and do more of those and abandon those things that we aren't able to do.

Playing is essentially the opposite of practicing. Playing is doing something that you can already do. This means that it's human nature to want to play more than you practice. This is why people stagnate. Once you have the ability to play a little, it's more fun to play what you know than practice the things you can't.

Here's an example. Most people would agree that if they practiced everything in every key, they would improve beyond all recognition very quickly. If this is true, why don't most people do it? Because, once you can do something, it's no fun to put yourself back in the position where you can't do it again - i.e. playing it in a new key. Even if you tough it out, the best you can hope for is to make pretty much the same sound as you were already doing - and where's the fun in that? Most of time, you stumble through two or three keys and then give up and just play something you already know.

You see if most beginners and average players were really capable of sitting down and practicing for 2 hours a day, they'd be giving the pros a run for their money in no time. However, whilst it's easy to play for 2 hours, it's very difficult (and no fun) just to practice things you can't do.

I hope you're starting to see my point. Practice is essentially doing something that you can't do until you can do it. Playing is the reward for what you have achieved in practice. It's a pretty good reward but once you have attained the reward for your initial practice, and can sort of play a little bit, it's all too easy to plateau and stay at the same level.

This is because you may have good intentions when you start to practice, but it's no fun doing all that stuff that's too hard for you at the moment. It's so much easier, and much more fun, to play the things that you can already play. This means that you don't improve.

So what's the answer? The answer is to do less practice and more playing of course! The trick comes in making the two dovetail to allow you to improve.

My suggestion is to pick one thing to focus on each time you touch your instrument. It absolutely must not be a Big Difficult Thing, but you should aim to master that one thing completely by the end of your session.

For example, don't set your practice goal as 'learning to play pentatonic scales in all twelve keys' and sit there and try and plough through them, one after the other. Instead, pick one key and focus on that in a session. It doesn't take long for most people to be able to play a scale up and down reasonably fluently. Then you have to turn that practice into playing straight away. Once you can get your fingers around the scale, improvise over appropriate chord progressions (playalongs, sequencers or programs like band-in-a-box are really useful for this). As you get the hang of the scale, you move from being unable to play it and having to force yourself to learn it (practice) to being able to use it musically (playing).

Whether you pick a single scale, one lick, a chord voicing, an arpeggio, four bars of a tune or anything else doesn't matter. What matters is that you turn the unknown into the known very quickly and start making music with it.

The only downside of this approach is that it doesn't really feel like practicing! Practicing is supposed to be difficult and requires discipline doesn't it? If you only spend 5 minutes learning something and 55 minutes playing with say, a single pentatonic scale, you've hardly accomplished anything have you?

Let's just think about that for a minute. If you've truly mastered that scale in an hour, it will be part of your musical palette forever. Next time you practice, you may pick one arpeggio - and it will be part of you musical palette forever. The five minutes spent learning it take you away from the practice stage, and the rest of the time you spend playing with it reinforces that ability, makes it really stick and is a lot more fun than moving onto something else you can't do!

If you're still not convinced, answer this question. If you learned to do one new thing, every time you sat at or picked up your instrument, how beneficial would that be to your musical development?

Give it a try for a little while, I hope it works for you and feel free to let me know how you get on.

It was a couple of weeks after his tragic scuba-diving accident that I heard about the death of Esbjorn Svensson. Having been a fan of E.S.T. (Esbjorn Svensson Trio) for several years now I was both shocked and saddened to learn that the pianist and composer had been cruelly taken from us at the ridiculously young age of 44. I didn't have this blog at the time but would like to take advantage of it now to write about my experience of Esbjorn's music.

I first came across E.S.T. when I bought the album 'Strange Place for Snow' on a whim whilst browsing through a pathetically small jazz section in the local HMV. I had heard about this trio in the jazz press and knew that they were rapidly making a name for themselves and it was that, coupled with the stickers on the CD listing awards the group had won, which made me put my hand in my pocket and take a gamble.

I'm very glad I did. What made me warm to this trio straight away was the fact that it had a unique and instantly recognisable sound. I always thought the mark of a really good player or group was that you could tell who you were listening to in just a few bars - and E.S.T. certainly fitted that description. If you aren't familiar with the music, I would recommend the excellent album E.S.T. plays Monk as a great place to start.

Although hundreds of groups have combined jazz harmony and improvisation with elements of pop and rock music, few have managed it as cohesively and with as much originality as this trio. The groove-based approach it adopted was always musical and it never struck me as being gimmicky or a blatant attempt to be populist.

Like all the best trios, each individual member made a distinct and irreaplaceable contribution to the group sound; Magnus Ostrom's driving rhythms and Dan Berglund's huge (and often pyrotechnic) bass sound provided the perfect framework for Esbjorn to weave his original melodies and improvised lines across.

I had the privilege of seeing E.S.T. play live at the Royal Festival Hall for the opening of the London Jazz Festival a couple of years ago and they produced an absolutely electrifying and mesmerising performance that left me grinning like a cheshire cat for days afterwards. It was so exciting to hear a new sound in Jazz as it's sometimes easy to feel that pretty much everything has already been done. Every now and again, I come across an artist or group who reminds that there's still a world of new musical discoveries to be made and I'll always be grateful to Esbjorn and his trio for reminding me of that.

As a pianist, to my ear, Esbjorn's melodic lines owed perhaps a little too much to Keith Jarrett at times and I did feel that E.S.Ts last few albums had become a little predictable and formulaic. Nevertheless, the Esbjorn Svensson Trio stood out as a highly original and exciting voice in jazz and their lyrical tunes and relentless grooves reached out far beyond the normal audience and inroduced a lot of people from the rock and pop world to jazz improvisation.

Many jazz musicians don't reach their prime until much later in life and at 44, I think there was much more to come from Esbjorn. His tragic death is a great loss but I'm sure his music will continue to inspire and influence people for years to come.

In my introductory post, I mentioned that I think of jazz as the most demanding and original form of music ever created. That's a pretty big claim so I think I'd better explain my reasoning behind that stament. Basically it comes down to one thing - improvisation. Although I have heard jazz described without mentioning it, there aren't many definitions of this music that don't include mention of this vital element.

Jazz is music of the moment. It is ephemeral and elusive. It disappears as soon as it is created and, not only is it impossible to reproduce a jazz performance exactly, to do so would be of no value. The value of jazz lives entirely in that moment of creation; jazz music is bound inexorably to the moment of it's conception and how it sounds will depend as much on where and when it is being played as it does on the notes and rhythms that the players will use.

Recordings of jazz are brilliant - especially when they allow us to hear the great players from the past or musicians from the other side of the world. However, nothing beats hearing this music in person. Because the players are improvising, they are affected and influenced by the environment around them. This means that the audience becomes part of the performance and everyone in the room contributes in some way to the music made on a jazz gig.

It's true that performers of other kinds of music will also be affected by their environment. However, the fact that they will have decided in advance what pieces they will be performing and how they will play them places constraints on their ability to react and respond to their environment in a musical way.

When a jazz musician takes a solo, he is free to take that solo in any direction he chooses. He can choose to make it complex or simple, angry or sad, dissonant or consonant, traditional or modern or pretty much anything he likes. At it's highest level, a jazz solo is like a snapshot of all that the soloist is feeling and experiencing at that place in time - in many ways, it is a refelection of all he is in that moment. It is this changeable, ephemeral and immediate nature of jazz improvisation that sets jazz apart for me as the most original from of music making I know.

As well as being original, I also said jazz was the most demanding musical form I know and, in a future post, I'll talk a little about what the prerequisites are to perform jazz and why I think the jazz musician needs to possess a wider range of skills and be more adaptable and versatile than any other kind of player. Watch this space!