Monthly Archives: September 2011

Easy Precision

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One sure fire way to get somebody to tense their bodies up is to tell them to hold a particular position. As soon as you say, “Good! Exactly like that. Now don’t move a muscle”, you can bet that they’ve stiffened themselves up and stopped (or at least significantly interfered with) their breathing, in an attempt to hold the perfect position. This clearly is never helpful for optimum musical performance.

Yet this is the same kind of mental direction many musicians employ when trying to play with a certain preconception of precision. You can even see in performance sometimes as a musician transitions  from playing the “easy” parts in a piece to the ones that he or she perceives as difficult.  From balanced, present and mobile, to tense, anticipatory and held. All because of a shift in thinking.

There’s no single thing, no single stimulus, that puts musicians in that “precision” mode. It could be fast tempos, challenging dynamics, elaborate articulation, breathing demands, or a host of other things.

For an improvising musician it can also be such things as unfamiliar or challenging time signatures, asymmetrical (or otherwise non-conventional) forms, harmonic complexity, etc. In these moments you can hear an artist go from intuitive and expressive to unyieldingly craftsman-like and mechanical (and that’s often when it goes “well”).

If you observe their bodies, you’ll likely see lots of holding and bracing as they try to “make the changes”, or whatever else they might be distracted by.

But if you ask most musicians (whether improvisers or interpretive musicians) about their best performances, they’ll often convey a different experience. You might hear talk about being in the zone, having an effortless freedom to play with remarkable precision. 

From a neurobiological point of view this makes sense. What happens in these “in the zone” situations is that the player is simply letting all the training and practice fall into place unimpeded by the often distracting over-desire to play everything precisely. This allows the brain to most effectively send out the right messages to the body to carry out the demands of a highly skilled activity such as music. The music almost seems like it plays itself when this happens.

There are, in the simplest sense, really only two things necessary for this to happen: an intention to play the music (obviously), coupled with the clarity in thinking to send the most helpful messages from your brain to the rest of your body to fulfill this intention.

In Alexander Technique jargon we call this good direction. Specifically, using your thinking in the best way to support the best outcome.

When you ask a musician (or athlete, or any other type of performer) what they’re thinking when they’re in the zone, you might hear something like, “That’s just it! I’m not thinking at all.”

But that’s not quite true. (As long as you’re not unconscious, you’re always thinking). What these people are really talking about is that their thinking is seamlessly integrated into their performance. In essence, they don’t notice their thinking. More important, they’re not distracted by it.

Now of course, any good performance is dependent upon good preparation. And even in practice (or especially in practice!) this issue of rigid precision is a challenge that must be dealt with. It’s a matter of how you think when you play. And a key principle in helpful thinking is this: Ease supports precision.

When people say the masters make it look easy to play, they’re quite right. To the masters, playing music is easy, precision and all. It mostly involves, balance, release and clear musical intentions.

Here are a few things to aim toward in helping you find your easy precision:

  • Notice your thinking and notice your reaction-When you are trying to play something that seems to demand from you great precision, take note of your thoughts. Where does your attention go? What is your self-talk like? What are you aiming for specifically? Then notice your bodily reactions. Do you stiffen your neck and shoulders? Do you hold your breath? Do you lock your knees? Do you tense your hands? What happens to your balance? Whatever your habit is, remember that it is preceded by your thoughts. Change your thoughts, change your habits.
  • Let yourself move-If you’re playing something that tends to put you into that “held” precision mode, see if you can change your response from rigidity to release. If you watch the great classical virtuosi, you see this time and again during performance. Let yourself move. That doesn’t mean you have to move in any particular way. Just allow for the possibility of movement. Allow yourself to respond to the demands of the music, to the ebb and flow of the music. You might move a little, a lot, or hardly at all. It’s all good as long as you’re not bracing yourself into place.
  • Take in the bigger picture-If the precision demands of the music seem to involve one particular part of your body (like your fingers for example) don’t fall into the trap of putting all your attention there. Sure, you need to be cognizant of the particular part, but you also need to expand your awareness to take in other things: the rest of your body, the sound of the music itself, the response of the other musicians you’re playing with (or the click of the metronome), etc. As a musician it is imperative that you actively practice building an inclusive, expanded awareness as you play (as opposed to a compartmentalized hyper-focus that works against your brains best functioning).
  • Don’t try to get past the precise part-Don’t let yourself get wrapped up into trying to get to the end of the difficult part. That should never be your intention. That just takes you out of the present moment, out of the zone. Always stay with process. Process means putting the quality of how you make the music at top priority. The process that will help you the most is what I’ve outlined above: managing your reactions, aiming toward release and easy movement, and utilizing an inclusive attention. If you practice staying with the process, the end result will always take care of itself in the best possible way. Always.
In reality, it might seem like this so called easy precision is elusive, inconsistent and difficult to find. In principle, it is available to you at any moment. And it’s all starts by changing your thoughts.

Melody And Clear Intention

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When is a musical idea melodic? What makes it so? These are questions that musicians could debate for an eternity. If you’re an improvising musician these questions are particularly pressing because they not only reflect how you play, but also, what you feel, hear and imagine. They bring your deepest aesthetic impulses into the light for all to know.

There is a conventional wisdom in jazz circles that certain artists were/are more melodic than others. For example, many would say without a doubt that Stan Getz was a far more melodic improviser than John Coltrane. (These very same folks might revere both artists equally, or might even prefer Coltrane over Getz.)

I personally don’t think Stan Getz was any more, nor less, melodic than John Coltrane. I think both of them provided great melodic content in their respective improvisational work. It’s just that their melodic conceptions were different from one another. If Coltrane wasn’t melodic, I don’t think he would have ever touched people as deeply as  he did.

But you might say, “What about Coltrane’s ‘sheets of sound’? What about all that harmonic and sonic exploration? What about all those patterns? What about all those notes he played?”

To me, that was the melodious John Coltrane. Why? Because Coltrane improvised with the very quality that makes all great improvisers sound melodious to me: Clear intention. He simply took the materials of music he’d studied and let them come through him in purposeful self expression.

Sure, Coltrane was always pushing the bounds, working things out on the spot as he improvised. He even apologized in an interview once that his music wasn’t “more pretty”. But like human speech, where there is intention, there is meaning (even if it’s not so apparent to everyone listening).

So I guess the question is, How do you hear his music? Do you hear melody?

In a rather remarkable book by musicologist, composer, and advocate of contemporary music, Nicholas Slonimsky, titled The Lexicon Of Musical Invective, you can find evidence that melody doesn’t always sound like melody when people first hear it.

In The Lexicon, Slonimsky presents various reviews by respected critics from different periods in classical music. Here you can find such great composers as Beethoven and Brahms being skewed for their lack of melodious work. “Barbaric” is the way one critic described Beethoven’s conception of melody.

Yet nowadays you’ll be hard pressed to find anybody (even if they don’t like classical music) who would say Beethoven’s work is not melodious. They might call it boring, but they could still easily hum the themes to his symphonies.

When I first started playing jazz in the 1970’s I remember being dumbstruck when meeting several older jazz fans who thought Charlie Parker permanently ruined the music, because he destroyed any semblance of melodic expression. “I only like jazz that’s melodic”, said one of them. (Charlie Parker not melodic!?! Seriously!?!)

All melodic content follows certain laws of nature. There is the building of tension, the sustainment of tension, and the release of tension. Yet there is no order, formula or rule that this necessarily follows. Even the perception of these elements is hightly subjective to the listener. But it rarely is to the great improviser. As time goes by, it’s often a matter of the listener finally being able to hear the melodious intentions of the improviser.

One of my favorite jazz improvisers of all time is the tenor saxophonist, Warne Marsh. I always find it interesting what other musicians say about Warne when they hear him for the first time. If they don’t like him, then of course it’s because “he’s just playing notes, not making any melodic sense”. Or, “his sound is just weird.”

But even some of the folks who respect Warne don’t find him to be a particularly “melodic improviser”.

One of my dear colleagues once told me, “His harmonic and rhythmic explorations were incredible..not particularly melodic, but highly interesting, and clearly demonstrating a high degree of discipline and skill.” I had to chuckle to myself when I heard that, because to me, Warne played nothing but melodies. That’s sort of all he did, letting one beautiful idea influence and flow into the next. Sometimes at lightening speed, but melodies no less.

Maybe the role of the great improviser, of the innovative improviser, is to lead us into new ways of hearing melody, of comprehending meaning in this human endeavor.

So how can you become a more melodic improviser? Simply clarify your intentions so you can broaden your own definition of melody. Here’s two things you can do to help you with this:

First, stay on a continuous quest to explore the elements of music (rhythm, harmony, tonal organization, intervalic shapes, genres, forms,etc.) and to expand your conception and command of them. Always strive to find new ways to organize the musical material…new patterns and new approaches. Build your own language in a way that makes melodic sense to you.

Second, learn to clearly hear everything that you practice. Make singing a big part of your daily practice. Every time you start to study a new pattern of any sort, make sure you spend enough time learning to sing it easily, readily and clearly. Strive to hear the patterns you create as melody, as something you draw upon with intention. As I get older, I find myself singing more and playing less when it comes to exploring new material.

So let’s keep those questions about “what makes a musical idea melodic?” open to exploration and interpretation. And maybe, ultimately something sounds melodic because it sounds familiar enough to seem so. No matter the reason, aim for learning to play whatever you play like you mean it.

 

Be Wary Of Good Advice

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One of the biggest challenges that arise when I teach the Alexander Technique to musicians is to get them to consider ideas about playing their instrument that seem to be contrary to what they believe to be absolutely true. Some of these ideas were imparted to them by well-meaning teachers.

Unfortunately, a certain amount of those  ideas are adding to (or causing!) the problem that motivated the student to seek my help in the first place.

I try never to directly contradict the advice that they’ve taken from their teachers. Rather, I aim at helping them have a different kinesthetic experience by not following that advice. (I of course am using my hands and words to direct them into a more efficient, natural use of themselves. This helps significantly.)

After they’ve experience this different, seemingly new way to play, I usually tell them something something like this: “So now you have a chance to go home and experiment. You can do it the way you’ve been doing it, or try it this other way. Then you can choose which you prefer, which way seems to help you the most.”

And that’s pretty much it. Far more often than not, the student chooses this newer, clearly less strenuous way to play. But it’s the student’s choice, not my insistent command.

For us as musicians, it’s natural to seek out advice from someone who has already solved the problems of playing our instrument that we still struggle with. And to be clear, most of the advice that master musicians give their students regarding pedagogy is immensely helpful, often saving the student years of misunderstanding and frustration.

But you always have to come back to this one question when taking advice from a great instrumentalist: Is this musician playing well because of what he or she is doing, or despite  what he or she is doing? (I ask my regular visitors here to forgive me for raising this question so often, but it really is fundamental.)

For example, you can play saxophone quite well if you curl your toes and grip the floor with vise-like effort. But this doesn’t help you play well. It doesn’t help you produce your sound. It’s not necessary at all to playing the saxophone. (In fact it actually interferes with your ability to play your best.) It’s a simple matter of the principle of cause and effect. Curling your toes is an effect  of your habit, not a cause  of your good sound.

But if you believe that you need  to do that to play well, it’s likely you’ll pass that advice on to one of your students as gospel truth. And this is often how bad advice is passed on from teacher to student.

Here are three guidelines you can follow when given advice about playing your instrument (from me or anyone else) to help you make better decisions for yourself:

1. Does it make sense with the laws of nature? Part of my job when I teach is to help my student better understand the music making process with respect to their bodily structures, and basic principles of physical science (mechanics, gravity, acoustics). I want them to have a clearer and more accurate body map, and want them to understand how their overall general coordination affects the specific coordination of playing music. I also want them to understand what it takes to produce sound on their instrument from an acoustic point of view, then always ask themselves if, or how, their habits might be affecting the production of sound. Again, the “because of/despite of” question. So many myths of pedagogy can be dispelled by simply cracking a book on human anatomy, or reading up on the acoustical princples of your instrument.

2. Does it mostly involve adding, or subtracting strain? This is an important question to ask, especially if you feel pain or fatigue after carrying out the advice you’ve been given. I’ve never yet taught a student who wasn’t creating enough  muscular effort to play. In fact, it’s usually a matter of getting them to stop working in such a strenuous, misdirected way. So when advice has lots “doing” words, as in, “pull  your shoulders down”, “grip  the floor with your feet to ground yourself”, “push  from your diaphragm”, “tuck  your chin in”, etc., go back to asking if, and how, these kinds of things work with respect to the laws of nature. Many times, well-meaning teachers are describing the perceived effect of what good playing looks like, as opposed to the bigger picture of what the cause of that visible bodily change is. For example, as a saxophonist, if I let my neck release my head into an upward balance off the top of my spine, my chin will appear to move inward toward my throat. But here’s the thing: muscular release is what is causing the change. That’s something entirely different than me trying to tuck my chin in toward my throat (muscular tension). Generally speaking in my experience, the more the pedagogical advice has to do with release and expansion (as opposed to added effort and contraction) the more effective the result.

3. Do you clearly understand the advice in the same way the advice giver does? This is quite often where things start to go wrong. I’ve many times encountered students who are not understanding and carrying out the advice the way the teacher understands it and carries it out. This has to do with the limits of language. I often find myself saying to my students as I teach, “You’ve just done what I’ve asked you to do, but it’s not what I want you to do. So, let’s see if I can ask again in a different way.” There’s no such thing as one ideal way of expressing your own movement experiences so that another person will experience them in the same way you do. This is where the art of teaching becomes fundamental. If you get advice and it seems to defy the laws of nature, and/or mostly involves more muscular effort, make really sure (in the most respectful way) that you ask your teacher to help you better understand.

And on that note…of course, any time you take a lesson or seek advice from someone, proceed with the utmost respect. Never argue. Simply ask genuine questions until you understand. But ultimately, you have to decide for yourself if the advice given is helpful or not to you, no matter what anyone says. It’s your choice.

The Problem With Studying The “Jazz Language”

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The other morning I was giving a first lesson to a jazz guitarist ( a university student) and was struck by something I notice quite often: Young jazz students spending a seemingly disproportionate amount of practice time learning and memorizing jazz lines and improvised solos.

When I asked this musician what he practices, he said that most of his practice time is spent learning new tunes, heads (like Donna Lee, Milestones, etc) and transcribing and playing improvised jazz solos by the “masters”.

This is all good stuff to do if you’re studying jazz. It lets you go deeply into the  heart of the jazz tradition, giving you perspective and context. It gives you insights about how the musicians formed their ideas. It helps you develop technical skill that you can use as an improviser. It improves your ear. All good stuff.

But then when I asked my student what else he practices, his face went blank. He said, “That’s pretty much it. I want to really absorb the jazz language. All my teachers tell me this is the best way to do that.”

Then I listened to him play. He was very competent, very fluent, had a nice time feel, clearly showing how much, and to whom he had listened.

He was also stunningly unoriginal, and rather disconnected from the improvisational process. Everything he played sounded like an excerpt from one of the lines or solos he’d memorized. I don’t mean he was copying things note for note. It was…well, as if he weren’t really feeling at all what he was playing. It was as if it came from some external source, foreign to him.

As I pressed on in my questioning, he said that he already knew his scales and chords thoroughly. As I sort of tested him on this, he showed great competence with his scaler and harmonic knowledge. So why the disconnect?

Well, as we went further into the lesson, it became clear: He wanted everything he improvised to sound as if it came squarely from the jazz language, the jazz tradition as it were (or at least his conception of those things).

That got me to thinking about what exactly that might mean. Especially, the jazz language. Is there a jazz language? If there is I don’t know how to define it.

Is it certain harmonies used in modern jazz? Nope. All those extended harmonies are found in many different pieces of 20th century classical music.

Is it the chromaticism? No. There’s plenty of chromaticism from other forms of music. Beethoven used it to great effect.

Is it the types of rhythms that are predominantly used in jazz? Not that either. There’s no such thing as a “jazz” rhythmic figure. Even syncopation has been around forever.

Is it the time feel? Now at least were getting close. Jazz musicians have a certain way of feeling time and expressing it rhythmically that is immediately palpable.

But what is it exactly? The so called “swing” eighth note feel isn’t even close to being codified. Some musicians (I’m thinking of Clifford Brown here) play jazz eighth notes virtually “straight”. Yet when you hear them play, you can easily tell it’s jazz.

And that’s usually the case. You might not be able to define what the jazz language is, but you can sure recognize it when you hear it. But the bottom line is that for every rule or principle of the jazz language there are countless exceptions. So why all the “learning the jazz language” emphasis?

If you examine the work of the great innovators in jazz they all had one thing in common: They redefined, edified and expanded the so called jazz language. Sure they might have spent quite a bit of time copying other players and learning tunes and heads and so forth.

But they also did one other very important thing. They spent the vast majority of their time improvising (truly improvising) to find what they had to say as artists. In fact, many had to actually ignore the jazz language of their time. They needed to free themselves from it in order to find a more personal expression.

Miles Davis was famous for this. As was John Coltrane. So was Lester Young for that matter. They were constantly pushing back against the established jazz language of their day. And they were consistently finding newer, more innovative ways to express themselves through what we still call the jazz tradition.

How did they do this? Well, if we take Coltrane as an example, he spent a huge amount of time re-mastering and exploring the materials of music: new ways of stacking chords; new ways of thinking about scales and modes; new ways to imagine rhythm and its relationship to harmonic tension. He in essence stopped looking at jazz and started looking at music in the much broader sense.

It’s important to keep in mind that, if you’re an improviser, your also a composer. You compose spontaneously, but you compose nevertheless. So follow the path of great composers. Study the tradition. Absorb and understand what has been created before you. But get down to the business of finding out who you are.

In my experience both as teacher and performer,  I’d say you’re best off giving this top priority, even when you’re at the stage of development where you’re mimicking and studying others. Don’t wait for some magic moment of creative maturity. You’re ready right now. Cultivate those moments every single day, no matter what level of proficiency you’re at. Make the music yours.

For you this might mean spending a great deal more time creating and learning  your own distinctive scalar, intervalic  and harmonic patterns, building your own language. It could mean spending the next few years of your practice life devoted nearly exclusively to broadening your rhythmic conception (polymeter, odd meters, time feel, etc.). Explore the materials of music deeply.

Use your imagination, intellect, musical knowledge and ear to find (as the great jazz pianist and teacher Lennie Tristano would say) “your own melody.” Don’t let an over-emphasis on language limit your self expression.