Category Archives: Practicing Improvisation

Growing Your Ears: Processing And Feeding

I once heard the following exchange between two jazz musicians talking about one of their colleagues:

“He has great ears. He can play anything he hears”, asserts the first musician.

“Yes, that’s true. Unfortunately, he just doesn’t hear that much”, responds the second.

Ultimately, all artistic expression through music involves playing by ear. This is true whether you’re an improviser or an interpretive musician.

If you’re an interpretive musician, you’re vividly imagining (internally hearing) the details and quality of each phrase as you play. This is, in large part, what your practice process has been about.

If you’re improvising, you’re creating music instantaneously, trusting your muse as you follow your ear and intuition. Much of your practice has been about helping you to immediately access what you hear (imagine) as you improvise.

Part of this “hearing” most likely includes connecting a cognitive understanding (harmony, form, structure, etc.) with the aural impressions that these particular musical elements produce.

We’ve all heard improvising that sounds a bit too much like “thinking” and not enough like “hearing” (perhaps we’ve all been there, too, from time to time; I know I have). And it’s no mystery that the greatest improvisers also have (or had) wonderfully developed ears.

Tenor Saxophonist Joe Henderson is an example of somebody whose ears were so highly developed, that he could immediately play back virtually anything he heard (including his own inner musical voice!)

You won’t find a single teacher of jazz pedagogy who doesn’t emphasize the importance of continuously cultivating aural skills. It’s simply essential to improvising effectively, expressively and authentically.

There are two inextricably related ingredients necessary for “growing” your ears. I label them as follows:

1. Processing

2. Feeding

Processing

Processing is identifying what you can already imagine (which interval, scale, chord quality, melodic pattern, etc.) It has an active component and a passive one:

The passive component is your ability to recognize and label what you hear after hearing it (perfect 5th, C melodic minor scale, 1, 3, 5, 6 pattern, etc.)

The active component is your ability to reproduce what you hear, through your voice and/or through your instrument.

Singing is at the heart of this skill. If you can’t sing something, you’re not quite hearing it completely and clearly, and you’ll have a difficult time finding it on your instrument.

On the other hand, if you are able to sing something with pinpoint accuracy, you can find it on your instrument rather quickly and easily.

In a sense, the ultimate aim of this skill is to place intuition in front of intellect. Specifically, you can find and reproduce the pitches you’re hearing even before you can cognitively determine what pitches they are (no time to do this when you’re actually improvising).

Both the active and the passive components of processing are crucial to a well-developed ear.

Having said that, there is often a tendency in ear training study to put more of an emphasis on identification than on reproduction.

I’ve encountered students of improvisation who can easily identify intervals, modes, chord qualities and tensions, yet can’t even sing a simple diminished scale pattern over a dominant 7th chord. This student clearly needs more work with active processing.

Or the student may be able to find sounds (key centers, chord qualities, licks, etc.) fairly easily with the help of his/her instrument, but can’t sing them back readily. More singing and less playing is needed in the practice room to improve in this area.

Until you can sing something back, you don’t have it fully internalized. It never becomes deeply ingrained your aural imagination. (It never becomes fully processed.)

And even if you still can use it in improvising, it comes more from thinking than from intuition, thus lessening and interferring with some of your subconscious spontaneity.

On the flip side, you might be able to sing and play back whatever you hear fairly easily, but can’t cognitively identify it. There have been several jazz greats who had no knowledge of the theoretical aspects of harmony (the great trumpeter, Chet Baker is an example).

I, for one, certainly believe you can be a very effective improviser without being cognizant of the structural (theoretical) elements involved in improvisation. (Just listen to Chet Baker!)

Yet improving your theoretical knowledge/understanding and tying that into your ears can open up lots of other possibilities. This brings us to the other ingredient for growing your ears:

Feeding

Feeding is the act of giving yourself more to imagine. In large part it involves using your intellect to challenge and expand (to feed) what you are currently capable of hearing, imagining and recognizing…going beyond the conventional and familiar, towards the novel.

This means finding new ways to approach and organize the materials of music: new harmonic concepts/relationships, unconventional intervallic movements/patterns, polymeter (and other kinds asymmetrical phrasing), etc.

In essence, you have to actively search for things to feed your ears. Where? Here are five good places to start:

1. Transcribing-Just about anytime you transcribe a great improvised solo, you’re not only improving your processing skills, but you’re also feeding your ears. If you’ve transcribed a lot, aim for players that are far from the mainstream (or far from what you’re familiar with), and who have a very personal, unique and appealing improvisational language.

2. Improvisational etudes-Either writing them yourself, or playing and studying from some of the many great resources available these days can really open up your ears and your thinking. I’ve written my own etude books with the specific purpose of feeding my ears.

3. Improvisers from other genres-If you’re a jazz player, find a great improviser from another genre, and spend lots of time listening, singing, analyzing (and perhaps even transcribing).

4. Non-improvised music-I learned so much about my own improvisational language from listening to and studying the music of Béla Bartók. Any kind of “strange and compelling” music (how I first identified Bartók) can be used to feed your ears.

5. Reflection-Ultimately, you sit with the materials of music and use your intellect and curiosity (“What would it sound like if….?” ) to think of new ways to create melodic movement. Finding new ways to make harmonic relationships over familiar forms, new ways to organize melodies and shapes, new ways to conceive of time, rhythm and form, can be a lifelong endeavor. It is one that will continuously reward you, enabling you to establish and grow your own personal improvisational language.

And of course, all this feeding involves processing. When all is said and done, you’re still figuring out, internalizing, and reproducing what you are hearing.

So if you want to improvise more intuitively, personally, consistently and expressively, stay vigilant about growing your ears: identify, understand, sing, think, challenge, imagine, and above all, listen.

The Power Of Deciding

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One of the things that has become clearer to me since studying and teaching the Alexander Technique is what it really means to make a decision.

To decide is not the same thing as to plan. Many people make plans about improving something in their lives (sometimes with elaborate details) that they will never carry out.

Why? Because they didn’t take the most crucial first step before making the plan: deciding.

Decision is a matter of commitment. It’s “closing the deal” without any way to turn back. As my older brother would say, after making a tough decision, “The ball has already been thrown; nothing to do now but wait and see where it lands”.

Though this can seem scary, it’s also empowering. If you can rely upon your ability to make a decision, and stick with it, you become your most trusted ally and advocate.

There are two types of decisions: The decision to do; and the decision not to do.

When I think of the decision to do, I think of a friend and colleague of mine here in Los Angeles, Vinny Golia.

Vinny is an internationally recognized multi-woodwind improviser, composer and teacher (CalArts). He is extraordinarily prolific, having put out dozens and dozens of recordings, many of them very ambitious in their scope (large ensembles, improbable instrumentations, multi-media collaborations, etc).

Once when I was on tour with Vinny, I asked him how he manages to plunge into these seemingly impossible projects (funding them, composing all the music, organizing the musicians, recording, promoting, etc.).

His reply:

I just make a decision to do whatever it is I want to do, whatever inspires me. I never wonder if I can or can’t. I always decide first, then figure out how afterwards.

Again, decision precedes planning to make the seemingly impossible possible. In a sense, this is the very definition of ambitiousness.

But whenever I think of the decision not to do, I always think of the Alexander Technique.

Sticking with the decision to not do something as I carry out an activity is the cornerstone of the Alexander Technique. This has been the skill that I’ve cultivated to help me solve some rather serious problems I was facing as a saxophonist.

Whenever I give an Alexander lesson to a musician, we always come face to face with the need (and the difficulty) of sticking to the decision of not doing.

For example, I recently started giving lessons to a violinist who begins her sound (draws her bow across the strings) by stiffening her neck, shoulders and arms, thereby noticeably interfering with her technique, tone color and intonation.

My aim with this student is to get her to play without this habitual excess tension. As you might guess, it’s not as easy (at first, anyhow) as it sounds.

Too often it turns into a bit of an internally waged war, in which the student is trying hard to stop the habitual response of tensing up, only to create a different, yet equally tense response.

F.M. Alexander (the developer of the Alexander Technique) sums it up accurately:

When you are asked not to do something, instead of making the decision not to do it, you try to prevent yourself from doing it. But this only means that you decide to do it, and then use muscle tension to prevent yourself from doing it.

And so it was in the beginning with my violinist. Her problem, too, was that she never really made a decision to play without her habitual pattern.

Why not? Well, first, producing her sound was so tied up into the excess muscular tension that she really had no idea what it might be like to play without all that extra effort. (Part of my job is to work with my hands to guide her into a different kind of coordination as she plays.)

Second, she (like most musicians) has a very strong aversion to sounding bad, and/or being wrong. Holding on to the tension was an unconscious security blanket that made her believe that she could get her sound, no matter the physical consequences.

She’s already (after about seven lessons) doing noticeably better with all this, as she gradually changes her practice process.

Specifically, she aims at giving herself permission to draw the bow only if she doesn’t tighten her neck and shoulders first. If she feels herself preparing to play a particular passage with her habitual tension, she simply stops.

That’s right. She doesn’t start to play. She decides to proceed into playing only when she feels confident that she has started without all the extra junk.

It’s a decision she’s made and a commitment she stays true to. Now, to be clear, this is something she works on as she practices. It’s obviously not something she has the luxury of bringing into rehearsals and performances.

But the more she does this, the weaker (and more manageable) the old pattern becomes. By giving herself permission to stop, she no longer replaces tension with tension. Instead, she replaces excessive “doing” with an easy “non-doing”. Things will only get better for her. All because of her growing skills of deciding not to do as she plays here instrument.

So if you’d like to change, to really improve the quality of your practice, you can apply this same, highly effective principle. No matter whether you’re deciding to do, or not to do, staying with a decision is an important part of your continued growth and improvement.

Improving Technique: Aiming Toward The Expressive Instead Of The Mechanical

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A potential obstacle in improving technique for many musicians is the notion of “muscle memory”. Technically speaking, there is no such thing. Muscles don’t have the capacity to remember anything. But your brain does.

The thing most people call “muscle memory” is really about how the brain learns to communicates with the muscles, via the nerves, in a more efficient way.

When you practice a fine motor skill (like playing music) mindfully and diligently, the amount of conscious thought necessary for you to carry it out becomes significantly less.

In fact, it seems like you can do it with practically no thought at all, as if the muscles themselves are doing all the “thinking” for you (hence the term “muscle memory”). Kinesiologists sometimes call this “automaticity.”

But what has really happened as you learn a new skill is that the connections between the synapses (the little gaps between nerves that carry electrical impulses to send messages from the brain to the muscles) fire more readily.

The “synaptic chains” from brain to muscles have become (as a neuroscientist might describe it) more “highly potentiated”. There is an actual physical change in the groups of neurons that work together to produce the movement, specifically, they become wrapped up together in a fatty, insulating material known as myelin.

This is part of a biological process known in neuroscience as “plasticity”. As the saying goes, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”

And it is crucial that this higher potentiation takes place, so that the necessity of conscious thought becomes lessened. You’d never be able to actually get very far in the music making process if all your conscious thought had to be spent on the motor/mechanical aspects of playing.

You’ve no doubt experienced how much more freely, expressively, skillfully and joyfully you play a particular piece of music, scale pattern, form, etc. (whether interpreted or improvised) when you don’t have to “think” too much to play it.

Yet there can be a downside to taking this “playing without thinking” idea too far into your practice process and routine.

Specifically, you can be tempted to reduce difficult technical movements to mindless mechanical repetition, as if you really were simply “training” your muscles. If this happens, there are three potential pitfalls:

1. You risk becoming less aware and mindful of what you are doing with your whole self as you play, inviting harmful, inefficient habits of movement to creep into your playing.

2. You hyper focus on the part of your body (e.g., your fingers) that is doing the work, which actually can interfere with your coordination as you play.

3. You put your musical/aural/expressive self in the back seat of the music making process.

All three of these things are interconnected, but I’d like to bring to your attention the particular connection between points 2 and 3.

When you over focus on the purely biomechanical process of “moving your fingers correctly”, for example, you are using your brain in a particular way that is not conducive to the holistic process of making music. Why? Because the aural/expressive component has been mostly removed.

When this aural/expressive context is absent, your brain coordinates the mechanical movement in a way that really has nothing to do with playing music.

It’s sort of like faking a smile. It seems like the same muscles are doing the same work in the same way, but your brain is organizing the movement (the smile) in a manner that has nothing to do with the natural responses that would elicit the smile (joy, pleasure, etc.) If you’ve ever had to “fake” a smile, you’ll probably remember that it feels forced, unnatural and full of excess effort.

Now, for sure, there is a time and a reason to take a challenging technical passage out of context, out of time, and into mechanical consideration. It gives you a chance to slow things down and observe. It can also give you chance to make better decisions (about fingering, breathing, articulation, etc.)

But once you’ve spent a bit of time in that analytic/mechanical mode, it’s time to put it back into the context of sincere musical expression.

It’s probably no mystery that many of the great classical virtuosi claimed not to have practiced mechanical, “un-musical” exercises (like running scales up and down their instruments for hours at a time). They instead, worked on practicing music.

This is perhaps one of the greatest values of playing an etude. Good technical etudes tend to turn mechanical challenges into meaningful music. They help to integrate the aural/expressive and the motor/mechanical seamlessly together in the brain.

Unfortunately, the “mindless motor repetition” practice can help to a certain degree, and that’s why (too) many musicians spend a good deal of time working this way. All this experience of repeated movement patterns can certainly help “potentiate” the movement itself more readily.

But it comes at a price:

Wasted time (there is definitely a point of diminishing returns here!)

Inconsistent performance (the good performances are always aural/expressive by nature)

Focal dystonias and other coordination issues (arguably caused, in part, from consciously attempting to micro-managing the motor activity in playing your instrument)

So take those few moments to deal with the mechanical. Then put it all promptly back into the context of making music. If you’re working on a difficult passage from a particular piece, bring it back into the context of the entire piece as soon as possible, even if it isn’t as clean as you’d like it to be.

If you’re an improvising musician working on a particularly difficult technical movement, find a way to turn it into meaningful music, rather than just repeating it over and over as a sort of calisthenic.

And of course, any time you struggle to play a particular thing, make sure you sing it. This will help you crystalize the sound in your imagination, and will aid your brain in organizing the coordination necessary to play it.

Strive towards making even the most challenging passages part of your self-expression. Your technique will improve, and you’ll make your most authentic music.

A Simple Idea That Fundamentally Improved How I Approach Ear Training

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From the beginning of my experience as an improvising musician, I have kept in mind the importance of cultivating a good ear. But for the longest period of time, my conception of what this meant was actually interfering with my progress.

In short, I used to define “having a good ear” in a rather rigid, intimidating way.

To my mind, having a good ear meant that I could easily, and immediately identify and play back absolutely anything I heard or imagined, no matter how complex or unfamiliar it was. It was a finite, “all-or-nothing” skill that I needed to obtain. (For the record, I don’t yet have skills at this level.)

The problem with this absolutist attitude was that it was overwhelming me. It seemed like such an arduous, daunting task, that I often procrastinated approaching it. And even when I had my periods of dedicated work, I never really developed a regular, systematic, disciplined way of studying.

Then I stumbled upon a book on ear training that had one sentence in it that completely changed my attitude, perception and, perhaps most important, my motivation. The book is called “Modus Novus: Studies in Reading Atonal Melodies”, by Lars Edlund, and was (and perhaps still is?) one of the standard ear training texts in many music schools for learning to hear and sing “modern” music.

The material in the book is challenging, and working through it has done a great deal to improve my ears. But, knowing myself as I was back then, I would never have had the perseverance to get through this seemingly daunting work had it not been for a simple idea expressed in this book. It was, in fact, stated in the very first sentence of the introduction:

“The main object of aural training should be to develop musical sensitivity.”

Yes, as simple as that.

“To develop musical sensitivity” seemed like such an open-ended, user-friendly, logical and completely non-intimidating idea. It sounded to me as being more an invitation than a demand. It was a direction to head toward, not a destination.

You see, as obvious as this may seem, I never thought of ear training in this way. To me it was an obtuse entanglement of difficulty, an abstract idea of sorts.

In my previous attitude, ear training was a plane to be reached by navigating through perilous waters. It meant learning not only to be able to identify and sing back every interval, but also, every chord in any inversion, every harmonic substitution or extension on any chord, any inversion of any chord, any melodic pattern (again, no matter how complex or unfamiliar), the sound of every note relative to any chord, not to mention being able to recognize and sing any scalar fragment, whether tonal or symmetrical.

All this and more. (I haven’t even mentioned transcribing any improvised solo I came across.)

Now don’t get me wrong. All the things I mention above are vital, useful skills to develop. But is was this simple idea of the deeper goal of ear training that put everything into perspective. It made me realize that I could work on my ear much more steadily and frequently, simply by changing my intention in what I practice.

Ear training transformed from the abstract into the concrete instantaneously. The beautifully empowering idea of developing musical sensitivity broadened my definition of what having a good ear was. It wasn’t just about identifying pitches and harmonies. It was about hearing and imagining music on a much deeper (and detailed) level:

It meant listening more closely to the color of the sound of my own instrument, to my articulations and dynamics.

It meant listening more mindfully to other musicians, hearing their nuances of expression.

It meant perceiving, understanding and hearing form and structure in all music I heard or played.

It meant being more open to the “non-musical” sounds around me, realizing that I can hear pitch and intervals in the sound a car engine makes, or of a barking dog.

It meant becoming more aware of how much rhythm there is in everything I hear: from music, to speech, to objects in nature… world itself.

It meant that I was singing more than I’d ever done before. I began singing every solo I listened to, every melodic pattern I practiced, every chord progression I practiced. Anything that moved me or interested me, I sang (and continue to do so).

What made all this so easy now was that I realized that I could aim toward getting “better ears”, instead of a “perfect ear”. I could accomplish a tangible goal every day. In every practice session I could say with great confidence that I had mindfully increased my musical sensitivity.

As my awareness and reception of sound began to expand, my desire (and the discipline that followed) to methodically improve my ear in regards to the “traditional” ear training skills mentioned above, took on a life of its own.

I shifted from a sense of obligation, to a sense of genuine curiosity and wonder. Passion to become even more sensitive to sound began to transform my musical practice in general. The more I could hear, the more I wanted to hear. I became hungry to find more and more ways to challenge my ears.

And so it is nowadays, as I continue to follow my love and curiosity.

So If you’d like to get on a lifelong path of improvement, embrace this simple wish of always improving your musical sensitivity. Begin today.

For sure, work on hearing and singing intervals, identifying harmonies, scales, etc., in a logical, progressive, methodical way. Definitely consider transcribing a solo that moves you deeply, or even just a simple melody. Just begin somewhere.

Make sure you are singing everything. Even in the practice room, sing more and play less. Make what you hear truly yours. Let it flourish and enrich your imagination.

Light your fire, and follow your heart. The music making experience will be so much richer for you if you do so.

Something That Nobody Can Teach You, But That You Can Learn

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These days there are so many resources available to students of improvisation. Excellent books, instructional videos, smart phone apps, classes, private lessons, solo transcriptions and more, are there for the serious student (and for the not so serious student, too).

Yet there is a fundamental truth about any kind of instruction when it comes to improvising: Nobody can teach you how to improvise. No set of thoughts, or instructions, whether written or given verbally, can teach you this skill.

Why not?

Because improvisation is a creative process. You can’t teach somebody “how” to be creative.

It’s the same whether it be improvising, composing music, writing poetry or designing a new dress. Ultimately, you have to bring order to random elements. You have to be able to bring something forth from nothing. You have to be able to create.

For you to be able to create spontaneously (as an improviser does), you have to be willing and able to imagine, decide, and take action instantaneously. Though it is often deeply impacted by those with whom you’re playing (and by those who are listening to you, i.e., your audience), in the end it is all a very solitary and personal phenomenon, with the final responsibility resting squarely on your shoulders. Note to note, prose by phrase, multitudes of decisions made in the moment, both consciously and unconsciously, all shaped by your muse.

So you can’t be taught how to improvise, but you most certainly can learn.

How?

By cultivating your creativity, and acquiring the skills to turn that creativity into a sonic expression on your instrument.

As human beings we all have the capacity to create. Now, for sure, some people are born with a more natural tendency toward this than others. We might describe them as “talented” or “gifted”.

Yet the fundamental ability to imagine is a staple of the human condition, as is the ability to spontaneously create and express meaning . When you’re talking with friends, you’re improvising. Your words and gestures, organized instantly, are a manifestation of your impulses, thoughts and feelings. They flow together naturally and effortlessly.

Though the specific details are different, the process is similar when you improvise music. (For the improviser, the details can be found in the method of study.)

Tools and Skills

Scales and chords (and all their inversions), song forms, harmonic substitutions, intervallic patterns, rhythms, articulations, etc., are the improviser’s tools. But they, in of themselves, are not improvisational skills. You may possess great control of these “materials” of music, but that doesn’t mean you have the skill to create with them.

To be able to do that, you must practice creating with them. Regularly. This practice involves (and builds upon) three components:

1. Imagination

2. Initiation of movement

3. Response to sound

In essence, you hear/think, or otherwise follow an internal impulse of your imagination, initiate its movement (you play), and then respond to what you just played (along with responding to the interactions of the other musicians playing with you, if that’s the case). That response informs what you play next. In reality, there is no beginning or end to this sequence. It’s circular, sort of a dance. And ideally, it’s something that happens intuitively, often initiated below the level of verbal consciousness. (Though in the beginning, it can seem like an entirely deliberate, somewhat self-conscious process.)

And to be clear, it is vitally important that you constantly work on developing your tools. This will give you more material to draw upon as you create, and can even spark your creativity. But ultimately, the creative process with these tools comes from exploration and discovery.

Even transcribing solos of great improvisers can’t teach you how to create. They only show you the end results of a great improviser’s creative process. You can certainly learn lots from this (perhaps most important, how the tools “work” in action). And even though transcriptions can show you many ways creative “problems” are “solved”, they can’t teach you how to solve your own creative problems.

So How Do You Learn?

You learn by doing. You can start with even the most minimal of tools.

For example, If all you know is a C major scale, you can begin to really play with it, move with it, explore its sounds and relationships, how it folds and unfolds into various intervals, shapes, colors, etc. Make up a song with it, even if it’s with only one note of the scale. Rhythm is the heart of music. Use it to ignite your impulse to create.

And sing. Many aspiring improvisers think they have nothing in their musical imagination. Yet, in my experience teaching novice improvisers, even those who are sure they have nothing in their imagination can sing (or hum or whistle) an improvisation with a backing track, piano accompaniment, with their favorite jazz recording, or even with just a metronome. The imagination is there (though it will become more sophisticated and complex through practice); it’s just not connected with the instrument yet. Vocal improvisation is a very effective way to spark the aural/rhythmic imagination. Give it a try!

Improvise along with recordings. Never mind that you “don’t know what you’re doing”. Just close your eyes and play, follow your ear, your impulses, your sense of movement, time and rhythm. Give yourself permission to sound “wrong”, smile about it and have fun. Like a child who learns to speak from listening, you’ll gradually form meaning in what you do (especially as you study and acquire some “tools”)

Listen, listen, listen to great improvisers. Let their languages wash over you. Listen to a solo so many times, you can sing it. Then sing variations on it. Play with it.

Be kind and patient with yourself. Just as a child needs patience and encouragement when learning to speak, so do you when learning to improvise. Enjoy in the process, and make the quality of the results secondary (at least in the beginning stages).

Improvising is all about making many, many decisions spontaneously (based on values, desires, conceptions, intuitions), and turning them into sound. There is no formula for that. Nobody can do that for you . But you sure can learn to do it for yourself!