PlayJazz

Ok, to get the new Power Tips series underway with a bang, we'll start with something controversial! Power Tip Number one is:

Don't practice everything in every key

Nearly every instructional book I've ever read has talked about the importance of practicing everything in every key and whilst it's true that doing so will eventually yield you a fluency and competence that you won't get any other way, the reality is that you will play in some keys more that others.

The time you're most likely to play in unusual keys is when you're working with singers, but even then their arrangements are likely to be written in as 'sensible' a key as possible. For example, if they can comfortably sing a tune in B major then Bb or C Major are also likely to work equally well, being only a semitone away.

The other reason given for practicing in all keys is that jazz tunes modulate a lot through many keys, and you're likely to encounter every key at some stage. This is true, but again, there are certain keys that you just don't spend much time in.

Whilst there are some tunes that will modulate to the less common keys, they tend not to stay in these keys for very long. This means that you have to be able to play something effective in these keys but, to get by, you don't need the same fluency and number of options in these keys as you do in more common keys such as Eb and Bb.

With this in mind, if you're in a hurry, you're probably better off concentrating on the more common keys. For example, if your goal is to learn the 'A Train' ending so it's always an option on the bandstand, just concentrate on the keys that standards tend to be written in for now and then move onto something else. After all, practicing it in all keys when you'll only ever play it in half of them may not be the best use of your time if you want to show an improvement immediately.

My personal experience suggests that the most common keys for standards are:

Major

• Eb
• Bb
• F
• C
• G

Minor

• Cm
• Gm
• Am

If you're learning endings or intros then these are the keys to focus on. Whilst the other keys may crop up in the middle of of a tune for a few bars, there are very few tunes written in those keys so for noticeably quick development then concentrate on the most common keys.

This isn't to say that standards are never written in the less common keys, for example 'Stardust' is in Db, 'Triste' is in A and 'Wave' is in D - but these are definitely exceptions to the rule.

The same goes for improvising. In addition to the common 'home' keys, Ab, Db, Gb, A, E and D do occur regularly in standards but they tend only to modulate to these keys for a short time. Be able to cope in these keys, but focus your efforts on the others for quick improvement.

Remember, your goal is to develop quickly here so by focusing on the keys you'll spend the most time playing in, you'll be developing a fluency that will be more noticeable to the audience and your peers straight away.

Finally, it's important to point out that you will eventually need to practice in all the keys as true instrumental facility is developed that way. However, if you want to work on something you can use on your next gig or session, whether it's a voicing, a lick, an intro/ending phrase or anything else, concentrating on the common keys will let you start using it straight away in real musical situations.

Every jazz student I've ever met (myself included) is in a hurry. We all want to get better – and fast. In the last two posts, I've talked about the way this can impede our development by causing us to flip-flop from one thing to the next, driven either by the fear that we're practicing the wrong thing, or that what we're doing isn't working. If you want to check those posts out first, you can do so here and here.

Because everyone wants to be better now, I'm starting a new series called Power Tips. Like Quick Tips and Hidden Gems, these posts will pop up from time to time and they'll focus on things that will yield an immediate improvement in your playing.

(btw I am aware I haven't written any Quick Tips or Hidden Gems for a while, but rest assured there are some in the pipeline for the coming weeks!)

Before I post the first Power Tip, let me first make a point about instructional methods. Most students, even if they're teaching themselves, are following some kind of method. Whether the method comes from a teacher or a tuition book, the goal is likely to be to help you develop as an all-round musician in the long term.

This is a very sensible approach and if you follow the advice and put in the work, chances are you'll eventually end up as a monster player. However, if you're in a real hurry to see big improvements in your playing, it's important to realise that all methods are developed with the benefit of hindsight.

In other words, the person developing the method, didn't follow that method themselves to become the player they are. What they have done, is looked at all the skills they have developed over the years and tried to codify them into a linear and logical method.

There's nothing wrong with this but the reality is that most musicians' development isn't linear but organic and often sporadic. With this in mind, if you're patient and looking to develop solidly and completely as a musician then stick to the methods – they'll certainly do that for you.

However, if you’re looking to make improvements that will be immediately noticeable, and by that I mean on-the-next-gig kind of noticeable then Power Tips could help you out. I'm going to post the first tip immediately after this to get the ball rolling. I hope you find them useful.

Last time on the blog, I talked about the frustration caused by being afraid that you're practicing the wrong thing. In that post, I also claimed that any practice you do will help you get better as a musician's improvement is very rarely linear and there is a basic relationship between the amount of time spent practicing and the level of musicianship reached.

However, what most emerging players are looking for is the key to improving faster. As promised, I will be posting some hints and tips on how to take your playing to the next level in the shortest time, but first I think it's important to talk about attitudes to practice and outline a couple of things I feel are absolutely vital for students to remember if they're going to improve.

The first is all about dedication. To put it simply:

Never Give In

Winston Churchill once famously said:

"Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense."

There will be times when you just don't seem to be able to master a certain aspect of playing, even though you feel you are doing all the right things. When this happens the temptation is to second-guess yourself and give it up as a bad idea.

For me, the key in what Churchill said that makes the attitude applicable to musicians was never to give in 'except to convictions of honour and good sense'.

If you feel sure that you're doing the right things but it's not happening for you, stick with it - chances are you're right on the verge of a breakthrough. What many of us don't always realise is that improvement often comes through a combination of persistence and the knowledge encapsulated in the next point:

If you can't see it immediately, it doesn't mean you're not improving

After studying jazz for around a year or so, I had learned enough to realise that my playing really lacked an authentic swing feel. I asked a couple of musicians I admired and turned to some tutor books and they all seemed to say the same thing – "The answers are in your record collection".

Most of the advice was to play along with records and try to emulate the phrasing of players I admired. I had always admired the way Oscar Peterson swung and decided to go to school with him. For weeks, I would put his recordings on and busk along with them. I wasn't trying to transcribe the notes Oscar was playing but merely trying to mimic the swing-feel he epitomised in his improvised lines.

Well the results were inconsistent to say the least. I would have false epiphanies and think I had it down, only to find that after a half hour break, I was right back to the start. I was so tempted to give up and try and find another way to progress. I must admit, I did try a lot of fairly useless things, like playing about with minute rhythmic variations in swung eighths in sequencers, trying to come up with a mathematical formula that I could apply to my playing.

Of course, it didn't work and I still wasn't swinging. Nevertheless, I carried on playing along with Oscar because so many people had told me it would help and the approach itself made sense to me – even if it didn't appear to be working out. I had read so many times that the greats of the past had learned from playing along to records that I believed it had to be the right way to go.

And then, one day everything just seemed to click and I found that I was finally playing eighth notes that actually swung.! What's more, I could do it all the time, it didn't evaporate if I had a break from the instrument.

Looking back, I realise my mistake was thinking that the rhythm of the eighth notes was at fault when I wasn't swinging because I wasn't accenting the off-beats correctly. A good teacher would have sorted that out for me fairly quickly but I didn't have money for lessons at the time.

Yet all those hours playing along with OP were invaluable in laying a solid foundation for my appreciation of the way a swung line should sound. It was only persistence and my belief that I was doing the right thing that finally allowed me to succeed.

There was nothing different about the day it all came together but it was the cumulative effect of the work I had done that helped me to achieve my goal. If I had abandoned my approach when it didn't immediately yield results I would never have got there. I couldn't see it at the time, but every hour playing with those records was improving my playing.

This brings us nicely to the third thing it's vital to remember when practicing:

Plateaus are natural

Have you ever gone through a phase where you practiced and practiced but your playing seemed to be stuck in a rut? This happens to EVERY musician at some stage and, whilst plateaus are both frustrating and frustratingly unpredictable, it helps if you can accept that they're just a natural part of learning and not beat yourself up about it.

As in the example above, sometimes it takes a while until the cumulative effect of practice leads to a tangible improvement. The key is to make sure that you are working in ways that you feel confident will improve your playing in the long run and just keep putting in the hours. You will go up to the next level eventually.

________________________

The advice in this post could realistically be summarised in a couple of main points:

• Never give up
• Don't demand instant results
• Trust your methods

The last point is particularly important as trusting your methods will allow you to keep working when the improvement doesn't seem to be happening.

This does mean you need to pick your methods carefully. If you have a teacher with a method you trust that's great, but if you're teaching yourself, don't be drawn by fads or experimental approaches if you're in a rut.

It doesn't mean that you should stick blindly to something that's clearly not working but confidence in approach really helps when it all seems like an uphill struggle. Remember Churchill qualified his 'never give up' with 'except… to good sense'. Trust your own judgment and instincts – if any approach just doesn't feel right to you then find one that does and go to work on that.

Whilst this has been quite a philosophical post, developing the right attitude to practice is vital if you're going to stick with it through all the undulations, peaks and troughs that are an unavoidable part of learning to play. Developing the right mindset will do more to help you improve quickly than anything else.

In the next post, I'll be returning to those practical tips I promised to speed up your development, but for now I'll leave you with some words of wisdom from Bill Evans about the power of persistence and dedication in practice:

"I believe in things that are developed through hard work. I always like people who have developed long and hard, especially through introspection and a lot of dedication. I think what they arrive at is usually a much deeper and more beautiful thing than the person who seems to have that ability and fluidity from the beginning. I say this because it's a good message to give to young talents who feel as I used to."

Like many musicians, I am constantly trying new methods and approaches in my personal practice. If I hear a new sound on a record or come across a new way of approaching something, I'll often try it out in the practice room to see if it's going to suit me. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.

These days I'm fairly sanguine about trying different things, but I remember a time when I lived in fear that I was practicing the 'wrong thing'. What to practice is the question that torments jazz students on a daily basis.

I have talked before about how the enormity of topics that an emerging jazz musician has to study can be overwhelming. So many developing players continuously flip-flop from one topic to the next, from one instructional method to another, desperately looking for the 'right' approach – in other words, the one that's going to make them a better player overnight.

If this is you, even though you might be logically aware that such a method probably isn’t out there, there is something beguiling about the lure of the new. Maybe, just maybe, you'll stumble across something that makes everything fall into place and you'll suddenly be the monster player you always dreamed.

The bad news is, of course, that the magic pill, the golden method or the secret jazz scale does not exist, and musicians only improve by putting in the hours at their instrument. Anybody who tells you differently is selling something.

There is a basic and obvious correlation between the amount of practice done and the degree of improvement. It is rumoured that Charlie Parker used to practice 14 hours a day and John Coltrane would practice so much that he often fell asleep with the saxophone in his mouth.

It's not really surprising that these are the two most influential saxophone players of all time is it?

Charlie Parker has always been a source of encouragement to me because, unlike some players, there is a lot of documented evidence about a time when he couldn't play.

It can be easy to imagine the great players simply springing from nowhere, fully formed as musicians and just waiting for the world to catch on to their genius.

This is primarily because they sound great on all the recordings – even early ones where they may not have found their unique voice yet. However, the reality is that they were only allowed to record when they had reached the stage of sounding great. Nobody gives recording contracts to musicians who can't play (well, not in the jazz world anyway!) and they were only allowed into the studio after years of hard work, study and practice.

It can be so easy to forget that even the great musicians had to spend years in the obscurity of the woodshed. There isn't much information on most players about these years for the simple fact that they weren't famous yet. And why weren't they famous? Because they couldn't play!

That is why Bird's story is so encouraging. There are stories of him turning up at Jam sessions in Kansas City and being terrible. And I mean in an only-knowing-two-tunes-and-not-realising-there-were-different-keys kind of terrible. There are many musicians who remember him when he didn't have a clue what he was doing. It's hugely inspiring and reassuring to know that even someone as great as Charlie Parker used to suck!

If we accept that there is a direct link between practice and improvement then, finally, here's the good news:

It doesn't matter what you practice.

Honestly. As long as you are spending time with your instrument you will get better. Musicians generally develop in organic and non-linear ways and every moment you spend making music on your instrument will contribute to your development.

This means that there's no need to worry while you are studying one thing whether you should be studying something else - because anything you do study will contribute to your development as a musician.

Whilst there may be those who initially disagree with that statement, look at this way: If you practiced anything for 14 hours a day for the next six months, would you be a better musician at the end of that period?

Now having said all that, the question that musicians ask most often is not "How do I get better?" but "How do I get better faster!?"

Everybody's in a hurry to improve quickly and the amount of things you need to master to play jazz even competently is huge. Sometimes it feels like it will be impossible to get through it all in one lifetime.

Unfortunately, impatience alone will not make you into a better player – if it did we'd all be masters by now! Next time I'll be sharing some tips on things you can focus on to try and maximise your development and speed up the process as much as you can.

Until then, please don't worry about what you're practicing – just make sure you are. If you're practicing, you're getting better. It's as simple as that.

Confidence is an important part of being a performing musician. I've recently been thinking about the things that can build or diminish our confidence as performers and the effect that can have on our playing.

Unless you're a complete beginner, chances are you've experienced a day where you really felt you could do no wrong on the piano; you were 'in the zone'.

On days like this, everything seems to fall easily under our fingers, we're full of ideas and we manage to nail everything we attempt. These are the days we live for!

Unfortunately, for most of us, days like this seem to be the exception rather than the rule. It's not that we play terribly on other occasions, but from time to time we experience a gig or a session where we really feel like you're flying.

The question is, if this can happen sometimes, why doesn't it happen all the time?

Unfortunately, I don't know the answer but I have been becoming increasingly aware that the differences in quality in musical performances are noticed far more by the performer than the audience.

Bill Evans once described professional playing as having a minimum performance level. Through practice and dedication, you reach the stage where, even if you are having an off night, the music never sinks below this, perfectly acceptable, minimum level.

This is a great attitude to have, and if you're at the stage where you're good enough to gig regularly, you've probably developed an acceptable minimum level in your playing. This means that it's always going to sound OK. Sometimes, an audience won't even be able to tell the difference between your minimum level and when you're 'in the zone'.

This isn't because audiences are intrinsically uneducated or ignorant, but because the difference between your worst and best performance probably isn't anywhere near as extreme as you might think.

I was at a gig last played by a couple of local musicians I know. Afterwards, I was chatting to a couple of the players and I mentioned to the sax player that I had enjoyed a solo she had played on 'Night & Day'. She looked surprised and asked 'Really?' It was clear that she didn't think much of it herself.

I went on to explain that it was her tone that I had really appreciated on this song as she had produced a really nice 'Stan Getz' tone. At this she broke into a smile and said 'Oh yes, I love Stan Getz's sound'.

So why was she so surprised by my compliment? Presumably it was because she was thinking about some of the mistakes she had made in the solo or the couple of moments where things hadn't gone quite as she intended. She hadn't even thought about the quality of her tone as it was an intrinsic part of her 'minimum level' playing that she took for granted.

The thing is, it wasn't that I didn't notice any mistakes in the solo; I did, but I just didn't care. Overall, through a combination her sound and the good lines that she did nail, the solo was an enjoyable one.

As musicians, many of us somehow automatically focus on what goes wrong in a performance and not what goes right. It's easy to take so much of our ability for granted and to focus on the negatives.

The reality is that music without mistakes is not jazz. Sometimes those mistakes will be obvious to the audience, sometimes they won't, but I'll guarantee there isn't a jazz musician who has ever lived who has played a gig without making a single mistake – even the greats. That's part of the nature of improvisation.

When a musician is feeling particularly on form, he or she probably doesn't play too differently from when they're a bit nervous or lacking confidence. They'll probably attempt more things and take a few more risks but it's my contention that the key difference between whether they think of their performance as good or bad is one of attitude rather than a dramatic difference in the quality of playing.

Put simply, when musicians are playing confidently they're focusing less on mistakes.

If we can accept that mistakes are inevitable in improvised music and learn to focus on the overall picture created by our playing, we can start to quiet that nagging inner voice that judges us and bring us down when anything isn't executed perfectly.

It's important to recognise all the skills and attributes we have developed that make up our minimum performance level and it's also important to recognise that the audience appreciates a performance on an overall impression, not note by note.

I've never heard anyone say "What an incredible solo, so full of passion, originality and technical excellence. What a pity it was ruined by those couple of bum notes in the second chorus".

Equally, I've never heard anyone say "That was a great gig but when the bass player got lost in the third tune of the second set, it just ruined my whole evening".

Focusing on the minutae of your playing is like concentrating on grains of sand on a beach and ignoring the sea, and the sky and the general beauty of the natural landscape.

So, if you would to play with more confidence, you need to assess your musicality as a whole and give yourself credit for the things that you can do – after all, so many of them were only made possible through hours and hours of practice.

Try and keep the big picture in mind and experience the music like the audience does. Think about the solo, or the tune or even the gig as whole and don't get bogged down with judging every single phrase that you play – because nobody else is.

Confidence is simply a state of mind and whilst it's not always easy to control, it helps enormously to remember that if you have developed an acceptable minimum level of performance then you have earned the right to step on to that stage secure in the knowledge that even if you don't have a great night, it's still going to be fine.

Play with confidence, play with passion, play music you believe in and you'll never go wrong. Until next time…

Here’s some bad news: The process of learning jazz is a constant, life-long endeavour and you’ll almost certainly die before you are 100% satisfied with your playing.

Here’s some good news: You don’t need to be technically perfect to make good music and entertain your audience. Sometimes you can turn your limitations into strengths.

Learning jazz is hard; and as time goes on, new players come along and develop another raft of stylistic conventions to learn and absorb.

A great emphasis is placed on the assimilation of ‘the tradition’ in jazz education and I’ve often felt jealous of guys like Bird and Diz in the past because I think ‘those guys were so lucky, they only had 40 years of music to absorb when they were learning and I’ve got over a hundred!’

Clark Terry, the famous trumpet player described the process of becoming a successful jazz player as follows:

• Imitate
• Assimilate
• Innovate

Just think, when the bebop guys were starting out, all they needed to absorb was blues and swing styles and they could set about creating something new. Latin jazz was rare, Miles’ modal excursions wouldn’t be on the horizon at least another decade, the concept of Fusion didn’t really exist and Free Jazz was when the club didn’t charge a cover or the musicians from the club across the road had come over to sit in on their break.

The weight of ‘the tradition’ is now so heavy that it’s hugely intimidating for the emerging jazz player – and it will only get worse as the music continues to expand and develop.

Nevertheless, one thing that has always been true in jazz it that it is the players with their own unique sounds that stand out and move that tradition along. Put in its simplest terms; you have to find your own voice. This is so important that I’m going to say it again, in big letters:

You have to find your own voice.

And why is it so important that you find your own voice? Well two reasons really; firstly, if you imitate someone else, you’ll never be as good as them anyway. Have you ever heard any John Coltrane copycats? Have you come across any Charlie Parker wannabes? Have you ever seen anyone trying to play just like Oscar Peterson? Of course you have, there are a lot of clones out there. But have you ever heard one of them who sounded as good as the musicians they're slavishly copying? I’ll bet my hat you haven’t.

No matter how much they have developed their technique; no matter how much of the vocabulary they had down, these kinds of players will only ever be pale imitations of the Real Thing. That is why Trane and Bird and Oscar still shift albums by the bucketload. Charley Mingus had it right when he wrote a tune famously entitled ‘If Charlie Parker Were A Gunslinger, There’d Be A Lot Of Dead Copycats’ (later shortened to 'Gunslinging Bird).

The second reason for trying to find your own voice is that the world doesn’t need clones of great players to keep their styles alive – that’s what we have CDs and MP3s and DVDs for. If I want to listen to something that sounds like Miles Davis, why would I want to listen to somebody who has spent years copying Miles' sound, his tone, his technique, his phrasing, when I could just listen to the man himself with the touch of a button or a click of the mouse?

The pursuit of instrumental technique has become one of the holy grails of jazz performance with an unbelievable procession of virtuosos seemingly setting the bar for the level of technical facility required to play jazz.

However, when I think of players like Monk and Miles, I am reminded that technique in itself is no substitute for an original conception of the music. That's not to say that facility on the instrument is not a worthy goal but the development of that facility should be dictated purely by the player's musical conception.

Could Monk play like Art Tatum? No, he couldn't. Some would say that Monk didn't have the technique to play like Tatum but I think it's truer to say that Monk conceived the music in a different way than Art did. Look at it this way, could Art Tatum have played like Monk? Undoubtedly not, nobody plays like Monk!

Could Miles Davis play like Clifford Brown? For me, his recordings with Charlie Parker show Miles to be a competent rather than exceptional be-bop trumpeter. If Miles had stayed in within the be-bop genre for the rest of his career, I think it's fair to say that he wouldn't have gone on to become the most famous jazz musician in the world.

I believe the reason that Miles didn't excel at be-bop was that he was never truly enthralled with the be-bop idiom. He sought Bird out because he was the biggest name in jazz but as soon as he went out on his own, Miles ditched the acrobatics of be-bop and started developing the style and conception that would eventually result in the seminal recordings on 'Birth of the Cool'.

Perhaps the most interesting question of all is this; Did Miles and Monk conceive the music in the way they did because of a limitation in technique? Would having the technique of Art Tatum have made Monk into a different player? Would Miles still have had such an unmistakeable sound if he had developed the facility to play like Dizzy Gillespie?

Of course, we can only speculate at the answer. The one thing that does seem undeniably clear is that Monk and Miles are rightly revered as two of the greatest jazz musicians of all time, not because of their technical mastery of the their instruments, but because of their originality in musical conception and the distinctiveness of their musical voices.

Bill Evans once said "Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument" and if this is true, it should always be remembered that ideas are more important than technique; technique is merely the vehicle that allows the expression of ideas. With this in mind, it would seem that Monk and Miles had every ounce of technique that they needed.

I am great believer in the liberating power of instrumental facility and I wouldn't want to give the impression here that I don't believe that technical development is an important part of learning to play jazz.

Nevertheless, what I do want to stress is this; you don't have to wait until you have great technique to try and develop an original voice.

Earlier in this article, I quoted Clark Terry's Imitate, Assimilate, Innovate formula and discussed how overwhelming it can be when trying to absorb the history of jazz. I think there is a real danger that jazz players can get so caught up in imitating and assimilating, that they never get round to innovating.

I would encourage all jazz musicians, whether they're beginners or advanced players, to strive to develop their own sound and their own way of playing the music. Study the tradition and learn from it, it is the basis of all that we do. Develop the facility on your instrument to express yourself without limitation, but don't ever be a slave to technique or beholden to convention and the perceived wisdoms of the past.

Whether we're talking about the all-time greats or the musicians at your local club, the players who truly stand out are not necessarily the ones who have the best technique, but those who have an individual sound and a unique way of conceiving the music

I know in the past, I have made the mistake of thinking that I would eventually start to develop my own sound once I had learned to swing like Oscar, play be-bop like Bud Powell and developed Herbie Hancock's harmonic mastery.

Of course this was mistake. Eventually I realised that no matter how much I study and practice, I'll never be able to play like any of those guys – which was kind of a depressing thought until I figured out what it really meant.

It meant that all I that was left was to try and play like me.

There's been a lot written recently about a new study that claims that the jazz audience is dying and it looks clear that the music is going to face a challenge in finding new listeners in years to come. Now, more than ever, it is vital that there are players that have something original to say if jazz is not going to become a museum piece with an overwhelming past and no future.

Now I don't believe for one second that jazz is dead and I remain utterly convinced that it is a music that anyone can enjoy. I agree with Terry Treacher in the article I linked to that the challenge is how to market the music to a new generation.

However, I am also equally convinced that 95% of jazz gigs are derivative and boring and not helping the situation at all.

You know those gigs you see, the ones you probably play (I know I certainly do) where you turn out with a scratch band and plough through a load of standards in the usual mainstream way, in the way that you and every other jazz musician on the planet has done a million times before? The gigs where all the arrangements are more or less the same, where the endings of tunes are always either a cliché or a bit of a train wreck? The gigs where mixing it up consists of interchanging swing tunes, bossas and the odd ballad? The gigs that are basically just jam sessions but with the same line up for the whole night?

Those gigs are just boring; and they're killing jazz.

And just in case anyone reading this has been playing these gigs and is having a defensive, knee-jerk reaction that says I'm wrong, let me ask you this: when was the last time you told a load of your friends and family that they should come along to your scratch gig because it was going to be a great night?

Another equally valid question: when was the last time that you saw one of these gigs full of musicians who were there just to listen? Unless there is the opportunity to sit in or a big name is playing, even other jazz musicians can't be bothered to go to gigs most of the time. If the people who love jazz enough to dedicate huge chunks of their lives to absorbing and learning to play this music don’t find most gigs interesting enough to attend, then why should anyone else?

Look, I know as well as anyone how difficult it can be, especially if you're trying to make a living as a musician. So many of the venues are really booking background music and the pay is so bad for many of them that you can't afford to rehearse with a band for a one-off gig that pays you about minimum wage when you factor in travelling time, setting-up and packing-down gear and so on.

So I'm not saying that we shouldn't do the restaurant, function, background, 'wallpaper' gigs - after all, they're bread-and-butter for many of us and put food on the table. I understand all too well that we've got to earn money and pay the bills and, like most working musicians, I'm not in a position to turn away paying work because of some flighty delusion of my own worth as an 'artist'. But that doesn't mean that I have to sell my musical soul, it doesn't mean that I have to surrender my whole musical life for a pay-check, it doesn’t mean that has to be the only music I play.

What I am saying is this: if we want jazz to have a future, we all have a responsibility to pull our fingers out and start trying to come up with something worthwhile that's going to put bums on seats and create an audience. And just to be perfectly clear, this doesn't mean that we have to dumb the music down even further and turn it into bland jazz-pop or 'smooth' jazz. It means we have to start playing music we believe in and it means we’re going to have to start believing in ourselves.

I know too many good players who only ever play generic mainstream gigs with scratch bands – and it's such a huge waste. I do firmly believe that jazz has a future and I also firmly believe that we have the musicians with the creativity and passion and potential to take the music in new directions. I am also equally convinced that we can't just leave it to the 'big names' to do it for us.

Brad Mehldau may well be one of the most unique jazz voices to emerge for years and he has deservedly become a massive name in the music world; E.S.T. were a trio with a unique sound that started to bring jazz to an audience more familiar with rock and pop.

Does it then follow that the success of these artists should automatically make people want to come and listen to me going through the motions on the 'The Girl From Ipanema' in a local wine bar with a load of other jaded musicians who idly dream of getting a 'decent' gig, but who wouldn't have a proper band or any material to play even if they did?

If we are going to find a new audience for jazz then we all need to take responsibility and start playing some music that we are truly passionate about, that moves us and that sounds, not like a pastiche of every mainstream band the world has ever seen, but like us.

Now if it's the case that ploughing that well-established furrow of standards with scratch bands is what really gets your musical juices flowing, if that's what lights your spark and makes you glad to be a musician then you keep doing that and do it to the very best of you ability. But if that doesn't fill you up, if it doesn't satisfy your deepest creative desires then start playing something that does.

Rank-and-file jazz musicians have been musical prostitutes for too long. We have been watering down our music for an imagined audience we perceive as too ignorant, uneducated or uncool to appreciate the Real Thing. The irony is, not only are people who would be blown away by the Real Thing not coming to the gigs anymore - the people we assumed we were pandering too aren't coming either.

We've got to make a change, and as a global community of jazz musicians we need to do it together. We need to start making music that we would want to go and listen to ourselves. We need to show the world what's so great about this music that we love and we need to start doing it from the grassroots up. We need to get in front of people in our home towns and cities and start playing music we believe in. We've got to get some fire in our bellies, curb our cynicism and frustration and start believing in ourselves and the power of our music.

In other words, we need to start playing proper jazz. And we need to do it now.

The last couple of posts on blog have looked at overplaying as one of the most common pitfalls that jazz musicians of all levels should be wary of. If you want to catch up with those posts before reading this one, first click here and then here. The links will open in a new window so you can come back to this post when you're done.

I’ve mentioned before how ego can impair a musical performance. One of the most common causes of overplaying is a need to impress and demonstrate technical ability to other players.

This isn’t necessarily ‘showing off’, it can often be born out of feelings of inadequacy, or a lack of confidence in phrasing. Either way, if a player can learn to remove (or at least control) these impulses, he will produce a more musical and rounded performance.

Here are a couple of things I try and keep in mind to help keep the ego out of the equation:

Play for the music

A musician I admire a lot said this to me when I was first starting out - and it still ranks as one of the best pieces of advice I have ever been given. It means that every note you play should be in service of the music.

Have you ever been at a gig where somebody is playing or singing the melody of a tune and another player is putting fills in all around it, to the point where it overpowers the melody? Have you ever heard one player in an ensemble playing too loud? Have you ever heard somebody trying to force ‘cool’ licks and tricks into somewhere they really don’t belong?

Anyone doing any of the above isn't playing for the music. Instead they're focused on themselves, about how they sound and about what the audience thinks of them. Unfortunately for the player, this often backfires and has the opposite effect on the audience than they intended!

If you always try and serve the music, if you always keep the sound of the ensemble uppermost in your mind and play to make the group sound better, you should find yourself less prone to overplaying.

Make musical decisions

This goes hand in hand with the last point. Always ask yourself if you’re making a musical decision to play something. Are you playing those cool fourth voicings because they’ll sound great in this context and support the style of the soloist, or are you playing them because you can and everyone should know how hip you are? Are you switching to double time passages because it will take the musical direction of the solo to another level, or do you just want everyone to hear how big your chops are? Always second guess yourself and ask if you are making a decision for musical or egotistical reasons.

Listen

I mean really listen. And not just to yourself! It’s too easy to be aware of what everyone else is playing on an almost subconscious level. This is a particularly easy trap to fall into if you have done a lot of practice with playalongs or band-in-a-box.

When you use backing tracks in your practice, it’s natural to focus mostly on what you're playing but it’s vital you don’t do this on the bandstand. You need to keep your ears open at all times and try and give equal weight to all the instruments in your mind. This way, you’ll have a much better conception of the ensemble sound and will be much closer to perceiving the music as the audience does.

This is also just as true when you’re soloing. Truly listening to the musicians around you will suggest musical ideas and help to shape your solos. Remember, even if you’re soloing, it is still a group improvisation and working in harmony (no pun intended!) with the rhythm section will make you sound a million times better than if you close your ears and blithely try and impose your own, pre-determined musical agenda on the band.

Don’t peak too soon!

If you’re on gig, remember that there will be plenty of tunes and plenty of opportunities to demonstrate your prowess. A common mistake is to try and pack everything you know, all your best material into every solo. You don’t have to get it all into every tune and on a gig you will have ample opportunity to showcase everything you’ve got.

If you nail all your best tricks in your first solo, what will the audience listen to after that? Sometimes it’s wise to hold something back so that your whole set, just like a good arrangement, has a structure and a deliberate climax that the music can build towards. Try and think about your set as a musical whole and see the bigger musical picture outside of one solo in one tune.

Let it go

This is easier said than done, but before you hit your first note, try and let go of all your fears, your hopes, your insecurities, your need to impress, your need for respect and recognition and your desire to play well; all of these things will only hinder you on the bandstand. It can sometimes help to picture all of these things being formed into a ball in your mind, which you can mentally throw away before you play.

However you do it, allowing yourself to acknowledge all of the psychological factors that can get in the way and letting them go before you play, can result in a much more musical performance.

These are just a couple of tips that I’ve found have helped me to control some of the negative psychological factors that can stop me from playing to my best, but this is as much of an ongoing battle for me as for everyone else.

If you have any suggestions of your own for controlling your ego when playing, it’d be great if you could write a comment or send an email so everyone can benefit. If I get enough good tips I might collate them all into a reference-post containing all the best advice.

Until next time…

In my last post, I talked about the widespread problem of overplaying in jazz and suggested some tips for things to do in practice to help us play less but say more. If you didn’t see that article, you can check it out here.

As I mentioned in that post, overplaying has a lot to do with the way we practice when we're trying to remove any musical constraints caused by technical limitations. However, I’m also convinced that a large part of the problem is to do with psychological factors – perhaps most notably our egos.

There is an innate desire to impress when jazz musicians get together. The first question good players ask about another musician is ‘can he play?’ If you’re playing with musicians for the first time, you want to let them know that you can play, that you know what you’re doing. This often results in overplaying as you try to prove your worth and ability to the rest of the band.

Jam sessions are another minefield if you’re trying to avoid overplaying. They may have a long and noble tradition in the history of jazz, but they’re always full of players who are trying to impress each other as well as the audience. It’s inevitable that overplaying happens when the primary goal of the soloist is to showcase how good he is.

Even if you’re playing with a regular band, the need to impress, to prove your musical worth is never very far away. Have you ever had to take a solo after another player has really torn it up with a lot of high/fast/loud, technically amazing passages?

This is the situation that spawned cutting contests and though they’re unfashionable these days, cutting contests played a hugely important part in the development of jazz improvisation by making players focus on technical mastery and developing new vocabulary.

Many innovations in the music arose from players looking for new sounds to help them ‘cut’ other musicians and these contests no doubt contributed to the standards of technical excellence that modern jazz musicians must reach if they want to be taken seriously.

(Incidentally, the history of classical music contains many examples of similar contests and virtuosos like Pagannini and Liszt were probably involved in as many cutting contests as Oscar Peterson and Louis Armstrong. It’s no surprise that technical excellence is also mandatory in classical music.)

If you have ever followed a particularly brilliant solo, how did that make you feel? Didn’t you feel under pressure to match, or even top the brilliant pyrotechnics your colleague produced? Even if you decided you weren’t going to try and beat them at their own game, you probably played something obviously and deliberately simple to impress upon the listeners that you weren’t trying to compete. Either way, it is highly likely that your ego was dictating what you played - not than your musical mind.

This is the heart of the problem. Whenever ego is involved, we inevitably make poor musical decisions. We play too many notes, or too fast, or too loud, or too high; dynamic contrast is forgotten and it doesn’t normally result in us producing great art.

It’s a personal contention of mine that a lot of jazz can be pretty boring. For every truly great album in the history of jazz, there are probably 30 that are dull as ditchwater. I put this down a combination of the uniquely prolific output of the average jazz musician (nobody can be brilliant all the time) coupled with a slew of technical excellence that often belies the fact that there isn’t a lot of music being made.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting for a moment that the simple and spacious solo is by definition more musically interesting than the complicated and technically demanding one. I’m just pointing out that ego and the need to impress can play a big factor in musical decisions – usually to the detriment of the music.

Our goal as musicians should be to play music for the sake of the music itself, and to make musical decisions with no other considerations. Our ultimate aim should be to produce a performance totally unfettered by technical deficiencies or our own egotistical needs and sensibilities. It’s likely we may never get there, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do all we can in pursuit of that ambition.

The next post will focus on overcoming the psychological factors I’ve mentioned here and look for ways to free us from our egos and allow us to concentrate on making music. I’ll look forward to seeing you then.

Overplaying has got to be the most common mistake in jazz. In the overwhelming majority of jazz solos, there are very few moments when the soloist leaves a rest of more than a couple of beats. I think that overplaying is the biggest challenge we improvising musicians face – whatever level we’re at.

For the great players, overplaying is a purely aesthetical problem – i.e. would a good solo have been improved by leaving more space? However for most of us, overplaying leads to a whole host of problems when our facility doesn’t match our ambition - when our hands aren’t as quick as our brains.

Have you ever tried to execute an idea but had to pull out of it because you knew you weren’t going to pull it off? Of course, you have; everybody has. Even in fairly advanced players, this is more common than you might think – good players are just better at disguising it.

For example, a player may start a semiquaver (16th note) passage that he intends to run for 8 bars. However, he realises that he’s not going to get there and either ends the idea early or switches to triplets to make it easier to cope. If he does this competently, the listener may be none the wiser and assume that this is what he intended all along.

As improvisers, our ultimate goal is to able to play anything that we hear in our heads so, although it might not sound wrong, the player knows that he has fallen short of his original intention.

Most of our practice time is spent trying to get to the stage where our facility allows us to express anything we choose. This is why overplaying can have such a detrimental effect on our playing – and why we nearly all do it!

When we practice improvising over changes, in order to try and get to the stage where we can do anything, we often try and play everything. The goal is to get to the stage where technique doesn’t limit our ideas, our musical mind is in charge and all options are open to us on the bandstand.

Unfortunately, this means that we overplay all the time when practicing because we are trying to prepare for every contingency. However, what we play on the bandstand tends to mirror what we play in our practice time and, as a result, so many of us play too much.

I personally believe that even the great players are guilty of overplaying much of the time and that many solos would be improved with more space – it’s just that the great players are great at nailing everything they play so they still sound pretty awesome! If great players can be guilty of overplaying, and we’re all copying them, it’s not surprising that the problem is endemic.

Alas, I’m as guilty of playing too many notes as anyone, but I have been trying to address the problem recently in my own practice and I thought would share a couple of things I’ve found helpful.

The first comes from Randy Halberstadt’s excellent book Metaphors for the Musician. He suggests this exercise: When you start a solo an idea will pop into your musical brain. Ignore it. Shortly, if not instantly, another idea will occur. Ignore that one too. When the third idea pops up, that’s the one that you should play. Do this before starting every phrase. By waiting for the third idea, you automatically leave more space in your solos and the phrases are more separated.

(Incidentally this exercise is also a great one to use if you feel like you’re playing the same old ideas all the time as it forces you out of that technical autopilot that jazz musicians can get stuck on from time to time.)


My next suggestion is simply to spend some time practicing playing less. At first, it will feel really strange to leave so much space when you’re used to playing all the time, but it’s important to remember that your perception as a player of how much space you are leaving will often be very different to that of the listener. It may feel like you’re hardly playing anything at all and yet the listener will just hear some nicely spaced phrases.

This is why recording your practicing is invaluable and if you haven’t done it before you will be amazed at how little you can play without it sounding empty. For some reason, a rest always sounds longer when you’re playing it than when you’re listening to it!

Another good tip if you can record is to play a ‘normal’ solo on a tune you know well and use the recording to transcribe and ‘edit’ your solo – in the same way that a writer will go back and edit a draft of something he’s written. Throw out anything that sounds like overplaying and focus on retaining only the strongest phrases and ideas. Once you’ve done this, record the edited solo and compare the two. Chances are you’ll sound like a much better player on the edited version – even though you’re playing a lot less!

I hope that these tips are useful, but the physical causes of overplaying are only one contributing factor to this problem cropping up so often. The others are all in our minds and I’m currently drafting a couple of posts which will focus on the psychological causes of overplaying and see what can be done to overcome them.

Thanks for reading, and happy practicing!