October | 2015 | Bill Plake Music

Jazz writer Whitney Balliet famously called jazz, “the sound of surprise”. It is this thrill of unpredictable, yet cogent, musical communication that is the essence of jazz (and many other genres of improvised music, too!)

And to this day, there are those artists who are still consistently able to surprise us each time they play.

What makes their playing so surprising to us?

Well, many things of course.

But from moment to moment, the main thing that keeps us on the edge of our seats as we listen to a masterful solo unfold is the soloist’s use of rhythm.

Rhythm is a huge topic. It is vast and endless; there could never be such thing as a comprehensive “rhythmic thesaurus”.

Rhythm is also at the heart of our spoken language. Every language has a distinctive use of rhythm to nuance and emphasize meaning.

Yet rhythm is too often the most neglected sub-discipline within the larger discipline of jazz improvisation.

Don’t get me wrong. There are many exciting ways to use melodic sequence and harmonic substitution when improvising over chord changes.

But listen to even the most adventurously harmonic jazz musician express these harmonically novel musings with nothing but an unending stream of eighth notes, chorus after chorus, and the novelty soon wears thin.

It simply becomes predictable.

To stay adventurous, spontaneous, flexibly expressive, exciting and wonderfully unpredictable, you’d be wise to devote a serious amount of time exclusively to rhythmic study.

In playing and studying jazz, rhythm actually encompasses these four things:

Feel (including articulation)
Rhythmic content (whichever rhythms you’re using at any given instant)
Space (the silence that is in contrast to the sounds you create, which becomes part of your “phrasing”)
Subdivision (how your choice of rhythmic content and space are used to imply meter, also another component of your phrasing)

Most moderately skilled jazz improvisers already have a good use of feel: clear, solid articulation and time feel (it swings!), all wrapped within an expressive sound. It is obvious that some conscious effort has been spent developing this very important component of skill.

Yet it is still confounding to me that so many of these same musicians seem so underdeveloped with their skill in using the other three things I’ve mentioned:

Rhythmic content is often 95% eighth, sixteenth and quarter notes/rests. Polyrhythms (with the exception of the ubiquitous eighth-note triplets) rarely, if ever, appear, other than by pure accident. Quintuplets, septuplets (both which can be used to great effect to create tension against a swing feel) are virtually non-existent.

The consciousness of space (silence) in creating a solo is often lacking to a point where it is considered novel when used to great effect. (I’m thinking of Miles Davis’ playing here.)

The other thing that makes a solo sound highly predictable (besides a highly homogenous rhythmic content) is subdivision. Just because a composition is in 4/4, and the chord changes fit nicely within the 4/4 form, doesn’t mean you have to play everything as if it were emphasizing both the time signature and the form. If you listen to Lester Young (his solo on Lady Be Good is a great example), you’ll hear how he shifts the meter within the form, sometimes implying 5/4 and 3/4. This use of polymeter not only adds to the swing feel, it also keeps the listener in an engaged state of surprise.

So what can you do to make your playing more exciting, more spontaneous, and less predictable? Well, you can’t go wrong by devoting lots of time to developing your rhythmic conception and skills. For starters, become more conscious of the four skills I’ve mentioned above. Then, get to work.

Here are some specific things you can do:

Expand your time feel-Even if all you like to do is swing, there are so many different ways to do this. Listen to how differently Art Farmer plays eighth notes in contrast with Coleman Hawkins. As an exercise, try to imitate both. Then explore different ways to swing the eight notes when you improvise.

Study polyrhythm-There are so many great resources available to increase your rhythmic vocabulary these days. I’ve written an e-book that I think serves as a simple, yet highly practical method to feel/imagine/hear triplets, quintuplets, septuplets and their syncopated subdivisions. Also, when you do learn new melodic patterns/sequences, make a point of doing them with a wide variety of rhythms, not just as a slew of continuous eighth or sixteenth notes. Use your imagination.

Listen (and study) outside of your discipline-I studied Balkan music some time back (lots of odd meters, like 7/8, 11/8, etc.), which significantly expanded my rhythmic conception and skill in playing jazz. Find a kind of music you like that is rhythmically exotic and unfamiliar. Listen, study, analyze and apply.

Explore silence-Practice improvising over a song form as you consciously let lots of time go by between phrases. It’s harder than it sounds at first, and will probably seem unnatural and awkward. But if you persist, you’ll find that you “hear” silence just as clearly as you hear sound. This will profoundly change the way you improvise. I could (and just might!) write an entire blog article about how best to approach this topic alone.

Study polymeter-Learning to hear odd-metered subdivisions within even-metered song forms opens up an entire new universe of phrasing possibilities to you. (I’ve also composed another e-book that methodically addresses this discipline specifically for the jazz musician.)

You’ll rarely play beyond what you can imagine and what you’ve practiced. By making the study of rhythm a daily, conscious (and conscientious!) discipline, you’ll keep your listeners (and band mates) more consistently and joyfully surprised and engaged in what you do.

And speaking of the “sound of surprise”, I’ll leave you with this masterpiece of rhythmic/thematic development by the great, always unpredictable, Sonny Rollins. Enjoy!

One of the things I emphasize when I’m coaching a musician is the importance of regularly redirecting thought whenever practicing or performing. It is this “redirecting” process that is an essential element of constructive change.

It is quite easy to fall into an autopilot frame of mind when spending any length of time with your instrument, letting yourself run on unconscious habit. Yet whenever this happens, you’re missing out on opportunities for improvement.

Each time you start a phrase, or even just begin to play a single note, you will have the greatest chance for success if you affirm and clarify two things in your consciousness:

Intention
Direction

Both of these are things that you wish for, things that you would like to have as you play.

Let’s start with intention. The way I define it, your intention is simply what you’d like to have happen musically.

Now, to be clear, intention has nothing to do directly with the mechanical aspects of executing the music, and has everything to do with how you imagine the music.

Your intention includes, but is not limited to:

What you feel, what you’d like to express, what you’d like to communicate. It’s about the meaning of the music.

How vividly you imagine your sound, including color, dynamics, articulation…even pitch.

How your imagined expression will manifest itself in time (rhythmic clarity).

The “bigger picture” of your imagined expression, the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

How this whole will interface with the other musicians (where applicable).

The more detailed your wish is for the musical expression, the more likely your brain will speak to your muscles in an effective way to carry the wish out. As one of my students (an outstanding professional French Horn player) says:

“Let the ear lead everything else.”

You’ll notice that I didn’t mention things like “embouchure”, “breath support”, “hand position”, “fingering”, etc. These things are not part of your musical intention. They are simply things that serve your intention. These are mechanical elements, not expressive ones.

Now, of course, it is fine to have some of these “mechanical” components in your thinking as you play. Just remember that they are not part of your musical intention. Rather, they are part of your overall direction.

Your intention is nested into your direction, but your direction is primarily about how you are going to carry out your intention. It’s about how you’re planning to coordinate your entire self to realize your imagined expression.

Your direction includes, but is not limited to:

What you are doing with your head, neck, shoulders and back (letting them work together in an integrated, free way).

How you are maintaining balance (and finding support and stability).

The mobility of your joints (including your hips, knees and ankles).

Your breathing (including the mobility and freedom of your ribs).

What your eyes are doing (and your facial expression, in general).

How you attend to the mechanical details as you express the music (fingering, support, embouchure, etc.)

Even the clearest of musical intentions won’t necessarily overcome a poorly directed, overly tense, and uncoordinated effort. To optimize your chance of success, you need to see to both. Intention and direction.

A key benefit of studying the Alexander Technique is in learning to improve how you use yourself in activity. It’s about learning to consciously and constructively direct your energy to most effectively serve your intentions.

The reason a good Alexander Technique teacher is so essential to this process, is that it is possible that you might be:

Unclear about the best, most efficient and effective way to use yourself. (Unfortunately, some of this could be a result of poorly prescribed pedagogy.)

Or,

Unconscious of the habits of use (movement, posture, reaction) that are interfering with your music making intentions.

(And of course, you might be challenged by a combination of both these issues.)

The aim of the Alexander Technique is to help you clearly understand how to use yourself in accordance with your design. By consciously subtracting habits of unnecessary tension, you learn to make music with greater ease, efficiency, clarity, consistency and satisfaction.

It’s about directing your efforts to help give you what you want.

As you become clearer and more detailed about your musical intentions, along with becoming more effective at directing your effort, you’ll find that you spend less conscious energy managing the specific mechanical details (what your tongue, fingers, etc. are doing) as you play.

You’ll learn to gradually trust that your brain knows quite well how to carry out your intentions, and does so best when you leave yourself alone enough for it to happen. This allows the music to flow from you more freely and expressively.

So next time you’re practicing, see if you can notice how clear you are with your intention and your direction. If you’re like a lot of reasonably skilled musicians, you might find that your intention is sometimes muddled by too many mechanical instructions (embouchure, air support, fingering, etc.), and that your direction does not include your entire self in a constructive way.

Notice how and where you create tension as you begin to play. Notice if/how you begin to take yourself out of balance. Notice where you begin to brace yourself. Notice where your attention goes. (Does it become narrow, inward and exclusive, or expansive, multi-directional and inclusive?) Then, consider how some of these things can impact the quality of your music making.

Notice how clear you are with the details of your intention. How vividly do you hear what you’re going to play before you play it? How clear are you about the meaning of the music? How clear are you about what you wish to communicate?

It takes time, curiosity, and persistent practice to effectively couple intention with direction in this way, but it is very much worth the effort.

Start each note, each phrase, each time you begin to play, with clear intention and constructive, inclusive direction, and you’re on your way to continued improvement and greater satisfaction.