Category Archives: Practicing Improvisation

Optimizing Practice: Habit Versus Choice

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After teaching the Alexander Technique to musicians for a number of years now, one thing I can assert with confidence is that there’s never such thing as a “typical” lesson.

In fact, I usually have no idea what I’ll be working on with my student at the beginning of a lesson. My only agenda is to follow her/his needs, as I observe and ask questions.

But there is always one underlying theme to any lesson I give in the Alexander Technique: habit versus choice.

The subject of habit versus choice is always front and center in any Alexander Technique lesson. The musicians who seek my help do so because, in the simplest sense,  their (primarily unconscious) habits are creating difficulties for them as they make music.

It might be excess tension that is leading to pain and/or injury. It might be an issue of coordination that is interfering with their skills. It might be that they’re just stuck in their progress, no matter how hard they’re working to find a way forward.

Whatever the reason, it all comes down to habit. So often, what I work on with my students is teaching them how to replace habit with choice.

Because many habits are so deeply ingrained, they can tend to fall below the consciousness of even the most self-aware musician.

This is partly out of necessity. I mean, after all, a habit is really just a response pattern that you learn in order to make a particular movement/gesture/posture immediately available. In a sense, it’s your nervous system’s attempt at efficiency. For example, you wouldn’t get very far if you had to completely reinvent how to hold your instrument every day. You can rely upon habit to do that for you.

Yet “how you hold your instrument” might be the very thing that is causing some of your problems, especially if you have chronic pain, or get easily fatigued as you play, or struggle with your technique.

This is where choice comes into play. Through choice, you can learn that there is a better way to hold your instrument, a way that is not only in agreement with your desired musical outcome, but also, with your human structural design.

This begins by bringing the unconscious (habit) into consciousness (choice). In fact, once you bring habit into your consciousness, you bring it into the realm of choice.

For the practical purposes of a musician, I categorize habits in two ways:

1. Reactive

2. Strategic

Reactive habit is what you do with yourself immediately, and unconsciously, as you begin to play your instrument, or sing (as I’ve explained above). It starts the instant you think  about playing, and manifests itself into a set of bodily reactions (posture/movement).

Many of these reactions are necessary to the act of playing.

Yet many others are not…

For example, if you stiffen your neck and pull your head down into your spine as you pull your shoulders up toward your ears as you are preparing to play, that’s an habitual response to the thought  of playing that will never  help you to achieve your desired goal (no matter your instrument).

What you’re doing in effect is interfering with your gross motor coordination as you attempt to carry out a skill of fine motor coordination. It’s simply counterproductive.

Many of the problems of pain, as well as coordination, that a musician struggles with are a result of their reactive habits (how they maintain posture and balance, how they move as they play).

A large part of my job is in bringing these reactive habits into my students awareness, and then teaching them a practical way to prevent them.

Strategic habit is how you steer your practice efforts in the long run, and in the moment:

How effectively do you choose, organize and carry out your work in the practice room? How well do you regress and progress an exercise to suit your need? How willing are you to explore being “wrong” to find the possibility of a new kind of “right”? How flexible are you in your practice process in general? In your daily practice routine?

Being habitually stuck with practice strategies is a huge source of frustration for many serious musicians. Bringing habit into the light can give clearer choices about how to proceed in a more productive and efficient way.

And of course, many “strategic” habits are supported by “reactive” habits and vice versa. (Rigidity in thinking goes hand in hand with rigidity in the body.)

So if you’d like to change, start by addressing your habits. Question things. Notice what you do with yourself as you start playing. What happens in your neck? What do you do with your balance? What happens in your breathing? What about your arms and shoulders? Your legs and feet?

Once you notice something you “do”, ask yourself, “Do I want to do that?” If the answer is “yes”, then ask yourself if what you do is helping you along, and is accordance with your human design (this is where a good Alexander Technique teacher can really help), and in support of your desired outcomes as a musician.

If the answer is “no”, you’ve just moved habit closer into the realm of choice by opening up the possibility of changing  how you respond. You can choose to rethink what you do.

When you choose, you make yourself free to improve, free to move toward optimizing your potential, free to believe in your ability to change and adapt, free to step with confidence into the unknown.

Four Skills Every Beginning Jazz Improviser Must Develop

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One of the unfortunate things that beginning students of jazz improvisation often face is frustration. To create music spontaneously can seem like such a vast, daunting, almost shapeless subject.

As a teacher, many of the novices I encounter have already started practicing improvisation. But because they are working on it in an illogical, or inefficient way, they don’t seem to get past square one:

I can’t seem to make any music out of it all when I try to improvise. Just random, seemingly unrelated attempts at stringing notes together.

Exasperations such as this are quite common from the beginner, especially if she/he has lots of experience (and reasonable skill) playing notated music.

How do you approach such a discipline as jazz? Where do you begin?

You begin with having a genuine passion about the music, and with the thrilling process of spontaneous creation we call improvisation. Without that, nothing really happens.

Improvisation is a process of self-expression. It’s not a “right/wrong” type of skill like engineering or grammar. You can’t really learn it in a sterile, “test tube” kind of way. It’s more of a “I want to say it like this, because that’s how I feel” kind of thing.

If you’re passionate about the music, you can then commit to regular serious study (regardless how limited your time is).

So what to study? How do you minimize frustration?

Well (if you haven’t already), listen to lots and lots of recordings of the artists you most admire. The more you listen, the clearer your internal conception of the jazz language becomes.

Then, work on developing a constructive  practice process to help you cultivate the skills that will enable you to express yourself within this language.

There are essentially four skills that every jazz musician is constantly (or should be!) developing in order to grow. These four skills are necessary no matter where you are in your journey. They are:

1.Hearing-You need to be constantly working toward connecting what you hear  with what you play  (or would like to play). Ultimately, improvisation is a process that is driven by your aural imagination. This applies to rhythm and time feel, pitch and form (see below). The more vividly you hear something, the more likely it is to come of your instrument as you improvise. This includes listening deeply to the improvising musicians you would most like to emulate. Pick a solo that you absolutely love, and listen to it as many times as it takes for you to be able to accurately sing it in unison with the soloist.

2. Controlling time and rhythm-You must be able to move. It’s that simple. Improvisation involves moving pitch in time. If you have nothing to imagine (which rhythms, what kind of time feel), you lack the necessary impetus to move.

3. Controlling pitch-Of course you need to gain control of the notes you’re playing. Whether you’re improvising over harmonic progressions, modes, or even freely, the question of how you choose and organize pitch is a never-ending pursuit. Scales, chords, passing tones, melodic patterns, classic licks, etc., all need to be studied and absorbed over time in your practice process. But all of your note choices must be integrated with (and driven by) your rhythmic and time/feel impulse.

4. Internalizing form-Being able to feel  bar forms, song structures, etc.,  without having to think about it (get distracted by it) is crucial  if you’re going to express yourself  freely as you improvise. Learning to feel the building blocks of two-measure phrases and then learning to connect these blocks to internalize longer forms (like standard songs, for example) is necessary to allow you to play confidently with other musicians, as well as give you a broader perspective of the canvas on which you’re painting your improvised picture.

It is important that you prioritize these skills in the most productive manner, and organize your practice efforts around these priorities.

The biggest mistake I see novice improvers make is putting far too much emphasis on which notes to play. Sure, pitch is important. It’s very important. But if you can’t move, if you can’t dance with the pitches, you have nothing but nondescript spatterings of random notes.

Start with controlling time and rhythm  instead. Start by working on simple, pre-determined rhythmic patterns, with a limited pitch set (for example, a pentatonic scale, or blues scale). Find easily singable melodic patterns that you can bring to life. You should be able to dance  to what you play. Work in two-bar phrase segments, in order to help you deepen your sense of form.

The second biggest mistake I see novice improvisers make is biting off more than they can chew. Simpler, easier, clearer and more precise…all better choices. If you’re getting frustrated with what you’re working on, regress it. Make it more doable and  more satisfying. Avoid what the great pianist Bill Evans described as “approximating”. Build patiently on what you have.

Sing as much as you can! If you learn a blues scale, for example, practice improvising without your instrument. Sing your solo. And listen to your favorite improvisers very mindfully, noting as many details as you can about their time feel, phrasing, rhythmic  and pitch choices. Listen to a solo until you can sing it vividly, bringing it to life with these details.

Your clear conception in conjunction with your ability to move (rhythm, time, form) will have you steadily and surely developing your true voice as an improviser.

Deepening Improvisation: Freeing Yourself From The Bar Line

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essential_polymeter_main3naThe vast majority of jazz pedagogy materials (books, DVDs, etudes, etc.) place great emphasis on tonality. This is true for beginner through advanced artist level.

If you’re a serious student of improvisation (at any level of proficiency) it is, of course, important to be continuously finding new ways to organize tonality: harmonic extensions/substitutions, auxiliary scales, intervallic patterns, effective voice leading, etc. It is by exploring these materials that you can find seemingly endless ways to create tension and resolution in your improvised lines.

Yet, no matter how much you’re adding to your tonal palette, you’re improvisations are still being driven by one main force: rhythm.

That’s right. As far as your brain is concerned, rhythm is primary.

It is the impulse to move the pitches that brings your improvisations to life. This sub-verbal “movement impulse” is more immediate from your brain to your muscles than the thought (whether aural or intellectual) of how the pitches are organized.

Of course, in a beautifully expressive and fluently improvised solo, there is a seemless connection between the rhythmic impulse and note choices. It may be for this reason that lots of jazz improvisers don’t devote much time specifically developing their rhythmic imaginations.

For some, this leads to a rather hardened, predictable phraseology. Because so many standard songs and classic jazz compositions are composed in 4/4, and are constructed largely of two-bar and four-bar cells, it can be a strong (almost irresistible!) invitation to improvise melodic lines that emphasize the song form at the expense of melodic freedom.

Yet it is precisely this freer phraseology that is at the essence of modern jazz improvisation. If you go back to the great tenor saxophonist Lester Young, you can hear/experience a beautiful “floating” kind of time feel and rhythmic expression that seems to  simultaneously embrace, yet transcend, the form of the composition.

In the simplest sense, Lester Young wasn’t “trapped” by the bar lines. Each phrase had meaning, freedom, and a highly unpredictable spontaneity.

If you listen to some of the earliest recordings, you’ll hear him “turn the time around” fairly regularly throughout his solos. It was that rhythmic freedom that served as one of the foundations of the bebop/modern jazz aesthetic.

Yet as time went by, and harmonic possibilities in modern jazz became more plentiful and complex, rhythmic exploration sometimes took a back seat.

It is for this reason that I decided to write and compose my ebook, Essential Polymeter Studies in 4/4 for the Improvising Musician.

Some years back, after spending huge amounts of practice time increasing my tonal (harmonic/melodic) vocabulary, I realized I was stuck in my phraseology. As I recorded myself practicing (and after listening to several of my recorded performances) I noticed an unwanted predictability in my phrasing.

I soon realized that much of this predictability had to do with meter. Specifically, if I were improvising in 4/4, all the phrases fit a lttle too neatly into that subdivision.

I began exploring with superimposing other metric subdivisions over 4/4. I started with learning to imagine and feel 3/4 over 4/4. After just a few weeks of exploration, my improvising began to really open up.

Not only was I playing freer, more spontaneous sounding and less predictable phrases, but also, the way I organized the pitches began to open up. I began to find surprise and delight in my improvisations.

I was hooked. After 3/4  over 4/4, I began to explore 5/4 over 4/4. To make a very long story short, I went on to explore other subdivisions, all with wonderful results.

I’ve turned my explorations into a methodical approach to understanding, hearing and imagining polymeter as it applies to improvisation. Because the topic can be so vast, my challenge was to limit the field of study to the most essential subdivisions and rhythmic patterns. I think I’ve been able to do that.

In Essential Polymeter Studies in 4/4, I’ve presented nearly 160 pages of notated exercises. Most of the exercises are common rhythmic patterns constructed from the staples of modern jazz tonality (dominant 7th scales, major, melodic minor, diminished, blues, augmented scales, etc.)

Each pattern “moves around” (displaced) the bar line to challenge you to always know where beat one is, and to help you develop an unconscious ability to sense how odd-metered patterns “return” when played over even meter.

Of all the jazz etude books I’ve composed so far, this is the one I’ve put the most time, thought and effort into. I believe there is nothing quite like it available for the serious student of jazz improvisation, and am very happy to have made it available.

So if you’d like to find new ways to expand your improvisational language, please consider my book. And let me know what you think. (On the landing page you’ll find a downloadable sample from the book). Thanks!

Rethinking A Well-Meaning Saying About Practicing

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Don’t practice until you get it right. Practice it until you can’t get it wrong.

This saying is common among athletes as well as performing artists.

In essence, this sounds like a good reminder of how committed you must be, how faithfully and tenaciously you must practice something to do it consistently well. I’ve heard many accomplished musicians express some version of this sentiment when giving advice about practicing.

But in my experience as an Alexander Technique teacher, I’ve also seen a downside attached to this sentiment.

Let’s start with the upside.

Practicing with this kind of commitment can bring you deeply into the music. Spending long periods of time as you aim towards mastery, gives your brain a chance to more fully process the aural and motor components necessary to execute the music more readily.

Plus, holding yourself to higher standards is fundamental to improvement. It can fuel your path toward continued growth.

All good.

So where is the downside?

Well, let’s start with the fact that it is an impossibility.

No matter how much you practice any fine motor skill, there is no guarantee that you will never make a mistake carrying it out. Go to any concert of even the most virtuosic musicians, and, if you’re listening for it, you’ll hear what I sometimes euphemistically refer to as “unintended events” (more commonly referred to as “flaws”).

Besides, no matter how diligently you’ve prepared, no matter how hard you practice, there are things that are beyond your control: everything from weather conditions affecting your pitch, to unwanted physiologic responses, to mechanical issues with your instrument, to the unpredictability of other musicians. (I’m speaking mostly about performance as opposed to practice here.)

Perfection is a human construct. It is an ideal, not a universally quantifiable reality.

Unfortunately, the pursuit of absolute perfection tends to make many musicians frustrated, perpetually unsatisfied, and even somewhat resentful and fearful about practicing and performing.

Some of the students who seek my help are hamstrung by their impossible pursuit of perfection. They are nearly paralyzed as they play, holding themselves stiffly, their eyes intense and glaring, their breathing noisy and forced. They more closely resemble warriors than artists.

Their music-making lives are nearly devoid of any kind of love or joy. It is mostly about fear, demand and unreasonable expectation.

As they relentlessly practice the same thing over and over, day after day, they often lose touch with what they are actually doing with themselves as they pursue this tense kind of perfection.

This, unfortunately, leads to a variety of problems: chronic pain, injury, coordination issues, anxiety and more.

Another pitfall for some is that this “practice until I can’t get it wrong” work ethic can morph into a sort of mindlessness about performance and practice. It can tempt you to rely upon a mechanical and unconscious “auto pilot” to take care of everything.

This not only deprives you of the thrill of being in the moment as you play, but also, it can invite and cultivate habits of unnecessary tension (which can cause chronic pain and some of the other problems I mentioned above.)

It needn’t be this way.

A more practical and constructive saying might be something like:

Don’t practice until you get it right. Practice until you know it intimately.

(Yes, I know it’s not as catchy as the original, but it’s more doable. And it’s certainly more healthy.)

Knowing something intimately doesn’t mean you’re beyond making errors. It means that you can always find your way back if and when you do. You can self-correct. You can stay present. You can stay connected with your muse, your desire and the overall meaning of the music. You become responsive, inspired. In the moment.

How do you know when you know the music intimately?

It starts with your ear. Can you sing it with reasonably detailed accuracy? If you can sing it, it’s deeply wired in your brain (your ear, your imagination). If you get off track, it’s easy to quickly find your way back.

Second, make sure you are crystal clear about any technical choices that best support the music: Fingerings, voicing, articulations, breathing, dynamics. Take time and be mindful with these choices. As you sing the music, review in your mind these details of technique. Merge technique and imagination seamlessly together, and let your desires be clear and lucid in detail.

Finally (as I’ve mentioned above, as well as in several of my other articles) create your music from a place of love and desire. Love cultivates the best kind of intimacy. Aim high, remain flexible, be present and enjoy the unknown mystery and magic of playing music.

The Difference Between A Good Method And A Good Teacher

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Most musicians that come to me for Alexander Technique lessons have a well-developed, highly detailed practice method that they follow. They have chosen this method deliberately, and typically follow it with an almost religious reverence.

And therein lies some of the problems that lead them to seek my help in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of a logical, purposeful, structured method of pedagogy based upon the principle of cause and effect (as opposed to anecdotal assertions by accomplished players that aren’t based upon repeatably measurable results).

But any method, no matter how sound, has one rather obvious limitation: It can’t respond to you. It can’t modify itself to best suit your needs.

A good teacher, on the other hand, is helpful precisely because he/she responds effectively to you.

It’s all a matter of the teacher’s sensitivity of perception and communication with you, moment to moment, week to week (and longer). How you learn, what’s helping and what’s not, what you are misunderstanding, where you need more practice (where you need less!), etc.

And most important, a good teacher can notice what you’re doing with yourself as you carry out your practice. Are you straining, stiffening, compressing? Are you creating an unnecessary struggle within yourself as you play? (This is where the skill of a well-trained Alexander Technique teacher can be of enormous benefit.)

You see, most of the musicians who come to me for help do so, in part,  because they’ve become inflexible with their method of practice. Inflexible both in the details of the method itself, and in carrying it out on a day by day basis.

At the very least, this leads to a sort of stagnation in progress, a sinking feeling that, “No matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to get past this plateau in my progress.”

At worst, this rigidity with method leads to more serious problem, such as repetitive strain injuries, chronic back/neck/shoulder pain, and even focal dystonias.

I ask my students to ponder the differences between teacher and methodology. And because they are ultimately responsible for the choices they make as they practice and study, I encourage them to ultimately think of themselves as their own teachers.

I’m not telling them to ignore the advice of their teachers. I’m just telling them that it’s easy to turn their teacher’s methods into rigid, inflexible, unresponsive practice habits. It’s up to them to be vigilant, to grow into experts on themselves and their learning process as they practice each day.

To become your own teacher is a lifelong skill. It’s something you strive to get better at. It takes lots of reflection, discipline, honesty, discernment, love, commitment and great attention to detail. (That’s the same, of course, whether you’re teaching yourself, or somebody else.)

But the main thing you need is responsiveness. You need to see which component of your practice method needs modification.

I’m very well-organized in my saxophone practice, and most definitely follow a method of learning that I’ve designed largely myself. I always have a “to do” list of particular exercises and study. Typically, this list is based upon a weekly cycle.

But a day in the week doesn’t go by when I don’t modify something from my weekly plan in my practice session. Alter a tempo, spend more time on one detail of a particular exercise, reduce or eliminate the detail of another,  sometimes throw out an exercise in its entirety. (In fact, by the end of the week, the routine I started with has morphed into something quite different.)

With each component (exercise, or detail of an exercise) of my practice routine on any given day, I’m either regressing (making it simpler and/or easier), progressing (making it more complex and/or challenging), or keeping it the same.

I make my decisions on modifying (or not modifying) the components on my routine by asking myself one simple question: “Is this helping me exactly the way it is?”

If the answer is yes, then I know to keep working on it until it needs to either be modified (progressed), or dropped, from my practice routine.

If the answer is no, then I have to ask myself, “What would I need to modify right now to make this more helpful to me”?

This is where creativity comes in. If it’s too complex and/or difficult, I need to find a constructive way to regress the exercise while still maintaining the pedagogical intention.

Regressing effort is a fundamental part of the art and science that any good teacher utilizes. The better I get with regressing effort for myself, the better I get with helping my students. And the better I get in helping my students, the more efficient (and satisfying!) my own practice continues to become.

Equally important is learning to either progress an exercise or to let it go entirely. I encounter so many musicians who are spending time needlessly on things that just don’t continue to help them improve.

So strive towards being a teacher as you practice each day. Go by principle, and follow a method. Just be observant, curious and flexible. If you do so, you’ll do nothing but improve.