PlayJazz

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!

Hello and welcome to PlayJazz! This blog is dedicated to learning to play and appreciate what I consider to be the most demanding and creative form of music ever created - Jazz.

These pages will feature a wide range of articles ranging from hints and tips about playing jazz and articles on music theory to reviews of jazz records and gigs. If you're a student of jazz in any sense of the word then I hope you'll find this blog of interest.

I've been studying jazz both as a musician and an enthusiast for many years now and, although relatively new to the world of blogging, it seems a perfect way to document my knowledge and experience of jazz without having to stick to one particular structure or set of criteria.

So, in a nutshell, PlayJazz is going to be a pretty random, but hopefully useful and interesting collection of all the jazz-related flotsam and jetsam floating around in the dark, smoky, late-night corners of my musical mind. And to all of you who share my passion for jazz and making music, I dedicate this blog to each and every one of you and simply say - let's PlayJazz....