Category Archives: Practicing Improvisation

Improvisation: Using Silence As A Part Of Your Expression

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It is often said about the great jazz trumpet player, Miles Davis, that a large part of his improvisational genius manifested itself not only in what he played, but also in what he didn’t play.

His use of silence became an integral color of all his improvisations. It was largely responsible for keeping us, the listeners, on the edge of our seats, never knowing what to expect next.

The same could be said about many other iconic jazz improvisers: Lester Young, Charlie Rouse, and Chet Baker, to name but a few.

Yet as much as students of improvisation admire this concept, very few seriously consider it and actively pursue it through reflection and methodical study.

And that’s too bad. Because you can use silence quite effectively to create compelling improvisations, as well as to really put a stamp upon your own personal style of expression.

Keep in mind that whenever you take an improvised solo, that solo is defined by the sum total of what you play, and what you don’t play, whether you’re conscious of that, or not.

So it’s probably a good idea to become conscious of how you use silence as you improvise.

Silence is a color in music with limitless  possibilities.

You’ve probably had at least one experience of being bored (or overwhelmed!) by the relentless barrage of notes that some (less mature) improvisers put upon your ears.

No contrast, no flexibility, no breathing room, no surprises. Not exactly the elements of an expressive, refined improvised solo.

On the other hand, you might remember being absolutely swept away by the drama and suspense of the sparse simplicity used by a master improviser (such as Miles, for example).

It is fairly simple to begin to shift your thinking about silence in relation to sound. Just start with this idea:

You are not obligated to fill every moment, every measure, every beat, with sound.

In fact, what if you were to approach your solos with a different kind of obligation?

What if you’re only obligation as a soloist was to be mindful of silence (your silence, that is), and the sounds you make with respect to that silence? What if  whatever was being played (or not played) by the ensemble without you was already beautiful? What if whatever you played, you chose to play in order to enhance that beauty?

How would that change the way you play? How you construct your solo? How you interact with the other musicians? How you use your sound? How you perceive yourself? How you hear the whole, instead of the parts?

If you approached each solo with this kind of respect for silence in mind, it would most likely get you to do at least two things differently:

1. Listen more carefully (to the rest of the ensemble, as well as to yourself).

2. Play more intentionally (following your inner ear, your muse, all in response to the other musicians).

Think about that. Those are two excellent, highly desirable traits for both a soloist and an accompanist.

You can  methodically practice and explore using silence and space in your solos. Here are a few simple things to get you started:

  • Listen to the masters-Start by opening up your consciousness to how effectively silence is used in constructing a solo. Find somebody with this quality whose playing you really admire. Listen and analyze.
  • Assess-Listen to recordings of yourself improvising. Try to hear yourself in a variety of contexts (different styles, ensembles, etc.) Assess your own use of sound and silence. Notice any habitual patterns. Notice any phrases that you play that sound unintentional or superfluous. Notice where you start and stop to begin and end a phrase (again, noticing habitual, predictable patterns).
  • Listen without playing-Choose a song form to improvise over (a standard, blues, etc.) Use a backing track or just put the metronome on. Have your instrument in hand, ready to play. Let an entire chorus go by as you listen (whether to the backing track, or to the metronome, as you internally “hear” the song form), holding your instrument, but not playing. See if you can do this and still imagine and improvised solo in your mind. What do you “hear”?
  • Limit phrases per chorus-Take this same song form and allow yourself to play only one phrase per chorus. It can be anywhere in the form, and as long or short as you like. improvise over several choruses this way. When you’re satisfied with what you’re doing, move on to playing several choruses with only two phrases. And so on, until you sense that you are “hearing the silence” as well as choosing your lines with more intention.
  • Use small rhythmic cells-Now take this song form and use small, simple rhythmic cells. Maybe start with two eight notes. Again, it doesn’t matter where you place them in the bar (or form), but you’re limited to just these two eighth notes that have to be followed by at least one beat of silence (preferably more).
  • Assign silent “rhythms”-Now use specifically assinged silences at various, random places over the same song form. Start with even numbers (half rests, whole rests), then move on to odd numbers (one and half beats; three beats, or more) to add a polymetric element in your solo.
  • Reassess-Record yourself improvising over the song form with no agenda in mind, and then listen. What did you notice? Did anything change? What did you like? What would you like to change?

So embrace silence as a new, almost exotic  color and possibility for you to explore. Silence makes the notes you play sound more intentional, more meaningful, more powerful, more expressive.

I’ll leave you with something the great alto saxophonist Lee Konitz said about taking a solo on the blues, in which he didn’t play a single note on one entire chorus:

It was the best chorus I’ve ever played…

An Important Component of Effective Practice That Is Too Often Overlooked

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Whenever I meet with a musician for the first time to give a practice coaching session, I ask lots of questions about musical goals, as well as the procedures to attain those goals.

In essence, these questions fall under the category of two broader questions:

“What would you like to have?”  and “What are you doing to achieve that?”

From here we have a good starting point to look at things objectively and constructively. Both of these questions require clear and detailed answers in order to optimize progress and minimize frustration.

Often, the “What would you like to have?”  part is fairly solid. (If it’s not, we need to start there.)

But too often, the “What are you doing to achieve that?”  part is lacking. This is where the frustration flourishes.

Many things fan the flames of this frustration, but one of the most overlooked is very simple: Too much of what is being practiced is devoid of pleasure.

Pleasure is a component of practice that is sorely overlooked.

A good number of musicians come to me for help who simply dread  most of what they do as they practice. This makes it nearly impossible to get any kind of expansive, inspired growth.

The sad part is that many of these musicians think, to a certain degree, that if it’s pleasurable, it’s not really practice.

That’s just not true. Most of the great, virtuosic musicians love (or loved) to practice. For them it is not simply a means to an end. To a certain degree, practice is an end unto itself. It’s a form of meditation.

I look forward each day to my practice sessions. They are nourishing, satisfying, centering, calming, enlivening, challenging, fun, illuminating, somatically pleasurable…all at once.

And I continue to improve as a musician as I practice.

There are two main reasons way practice should be mostly pleasurable:

First, the obvious: If something brings you pleasure, you’re more likely to spend time doing it. It becomes less a matter of discipline, and more a matter seeking gratification.

Second (and this is less obvious), you simply learn better when you enjoy what you’re studying and practicing.

This is one of the reasons why skilled teachers use play (games, role-play, etc.) to enhance the learning experience for learners of all ages. (I often use play to great effect in teaching the Alexander Technique to college and conservatory students.)

Pleasure and learning work together well, as pleasure is a powerful motivator. Pleasure lights up and integrates different parts of your brain. It enlivens your senses. It makes you receptive to experience, to possibilities. It makes you curious. It makes you fearless.

Do these sound like good qualities to have while playing music?

Without a doubt they are.

Don’t misunderstand. You still have to work. Focused, intentional, productive work that you need to hold yourself accountable for. You must reflect and assess, and reassess and redirect, being constantly vigilant.

But you’ll do so much better if you learn how to do so pleasurably.

One of the things I encourage the musicians I coach to take responsibility for is altering how  and what  they practice in order to make it pleasurable for them.

Their job is to turn problem solving and skill acquisition into a primarily  pleasurable activity.

It’s a matter of transforming the activity. This calls for creativity and inspiration.

So let’s say holding sustained tones to improve your sound (long tones) is drudgery to you, try playing beautiful songs at very slow tempos. Play as if you’re really “singing” these melodies (like you really mean it!), with your finest, most personal sound.

By doing so, you engage your expressive consciousness while at the same time developing the motor skills necessary to cultivate and implement a beautiful sound in order to carry out your expression.

Don’t like to run scales mindlessly? Okay, organize the scale you’re practicing into a lovely sounding four or five-note melodic pattern and play it up and down the range of your instrument. (You can get lots of these kinds of melodic scalar ideas by looking at the music of Bach, Brahms, or even Cannonball Adderly; just follow the music you love.)

In the simplest sense, aim at making what you practice musical  as opposed to mechanical.

The whole idea of a written “etude” is to turn a particular pedagogical aim into a musically satisfying expression and experience. It’s to teach a particular lesson by telling a good story, so to speak.

See if you can think in this “etude” way to bring your practice into the realm of pleasure.

For example, if there is a particular technical passage that give you difficulty, rather than just repeating the passage over and over as it is, see if you can play with it a bit. Make variations on it. Play games with the tempo as you work through it. Play it by ear in different keys. Use it in the context of improvisation (in fact, build and entire improvised solo based upon the technically challenging passage.)

If you work this way, you’ll help build a more expansive and flexible technique.

And it doesn’t have to be only because something gives you a direct musical pleasure to make it otherwise pleasurable. I have a student who loves holding long tones on the trombone because the resonance he feels in his face and chest give him pleasure. This Kinesthetic sensation is like a healthy narcotic for him. He loves to practice long tones!

Maybe it’s pleasurable because you love to be challenged. Maybe it’s pleasurable because it gives you a sense of ritual and routine. Maybe it’s pleasurable because it helps you imagine beyond what you can already do.

Or maybe it gives you pleasure because it reminds you of why you play music in the first place. All good.

There are so many resources these days to make practicing more enjoyable and efficient: backing tracks, smart phone apps, video tutorials, etudes…take advantage of these things!

And always remember to digress that which is out of your reach. If something is to difficult for you to play in the moment, transform it slightly to bring it back into reach, then raise the bar slightly once you’re successful doing so.

As a final thought, be good to yourself. “Use yourself well”, we’d say in the Alexander Technique. That is, aim to play with an easy, flexible balance and with a minimum of excess effort. And speak to yourself kindly. Be clear about what you want, and ask  yourself gently for it. Remember that music, even the most serious music, involves play. So play!

One of the Things That Makes You Sound the Most Predictable When You Improvise

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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:

  1. Feel (including articulation)
  2. Rhythmic content (whichever rhythms you’re using at any given instant)
  3. Space (the silence that is in contrast to the sounds you create, which becomes part of your “phrasing”)
  4. 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!

Two Things You Should Be Clear About Each Moment You Begin To Play

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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:

  1. Intention
  2. 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.

Improvisation: Discovering And Defining Your Voice

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What is it that makes a particular jazz artist sound so immediately recognizable?

Is it tone? Phrasing? Rhythmic conception? Time feel? Articulation? Harmonic vocabulary? Melodic sensibility? Something else entirely….? Perhaps even something undefinable?

Truth be told, it’s probably not one single thing.

Though there certainly are distinctive qualities some artists possess that immediately stand out to the listener (John Coltrane’s sound on tenor saxophone is a good example), in reality, it is a seamless integration  of various musical and artistic qualities that make an artist sound so unmistakably like him/herself.

I call this easily identifiable quality the “voice” of the improviser.

Just like you have a singularly unique voice when speaking,  so too, can you have one when improvising. It’s a matter of making a commitment to finding who you are (what you want to say!) through improvisation.

The beautiful thing about studying improvisation is that you can endlessly explore, discover and cultivate your voice through genuine curiosity and disciplined work. Defining your improvisational voice can be a highly satisfying life long endeavor.

Defining your voice has two components:

  1. Becoming more aware of what’s already there; i.e., how you’re already playing.
  2. Aiming for how you’d like to play. (Understand that this will be in a constant state of change.)

Let’s start with what’s already there.  How aware are you of your current voice? How well do you actually hear  yourself as you improvise? If you listen to yourself whenever you record, are you rather surprised by what you hear? (for better or for worse…)

If the gap between how you imagine  you sound, and how you actually  sound whenever you hear yourself on recordings is significant, you might want to bridge that gap.

Start recording yourself fairly regularly (easy and inexpensive to do these days with smart phone and tablet technology). Then listen carefully, as objectively as possible, to what you hear. In this case, I’m not talking about hearing flaws or weaknesses in your musicianship (like pitch and time, for example).

Rather, I’m talking about some of the things I mentioned above:  your sound, your articulation, your phrasing and use of space, your use of dynamics, your voice-leading sensibilities (or lack thereof), your time feel, your rhythmic language, harmonic choices, etc.

Become intimately familiar with what you like, and what you don’t like about your voice as it currently is (but be kind to yourself about the “don’t like” stuff). Become a stickler for details. Listen as if you were listening to somebody else. Really take in your playing completely.

When you’re clear about what you do  like, keep that dear to your heart as the foundation  of the voice you wish  to develop.

Which brings us to aiming for how you’d like your voice to be. This could come from an internal source (your own imagination), an external source (your favorite players), or a combination of both. It really is a question of what you like, of what you want to express…of who you are.

If you want to sound just like your favorite artist, so be it. Go after it with all your heart. Listen and transcribe, emulate, play along, etc. Lose yourself (in the best sense of the word!) in the world of this particular artist. Let that emerge through you.

On the other hand, if you wish to find your own voice, start by becoming intimately familiar with what’s already in your imagination.

A great way to do this is by singing improvisations along with a backing track or other accompaniment. Record and transcribe yourself. Play your transcription on your instrument. Analyze what you hear. Again, keep what you like. It’s truly yours.

As you get clearer and clearer about how you’d like to cultivate your own voice, you’ll continue to more readily know when you’re moving in the right direction. You’ll even get a sense of when you’re really embodying  the voice you seek, when what you’re feeling/hearing and you’re playing are inseparably linked.

Make that embodiment the standard you aspire to as you study and practice.

When I practice improvisation, I’m always aiming for my voice, for how I want  to sound. This may seem obvious, but it is easy for a skilled improviser to fall into what I call the “task” of improvising (flowing along in time, “making the changes”, sounding “cogent”, etc.)

While that might be fine for some musicians to get by on a gig, it is not satisfying to me as an artist. My love for, and my commitment to, improvisation is about going ever deeper into how my voice unfolds and reveals itself to me.

It is for this reason that I do these four things every day that I practice:

1. Sing-I sing with and without a backing track to hear how I’m hearing  (yes, I meant to say that). I often record, sometimes transcribe, and typically become edified and guided by what I sing.

2. Improvise slowly-This is the bulk of what I do. I improvise over tunes, modes, or melodic themes at very slow tempos (quarter note equals 40-60), listening carefully to what I’m playing, but not trying to force my playing to go anywhere. My aim in doing this is to get in touch with my voice. As I begin to increase tempo, I never go faster than my ability to maintain my desired voice allows. No auto pilot, no muscle memory, no patterns.

3. Rhythmic study-For me, so much of my voice depends on my flexibility with time and rhythm. As I work on specific skills (like polymeter and polyrhythm), my voice gets clearer, as well as closer to what I wish to express.

4. Free improvisation-I work with drones, thematic fragments, drum loops, a “general feeling”, time or no time, but no bar forms or no chord changes…all kinds of different ways to help me find the immediacy of that which I’d like to express. This kind of work not only further defines and clarifies my voice, but it also helps me to play with greater freedom and confidence over chord changes.

Keep in mind that when I speak of my voice this way, I’m speaking of a never-ending discovery and evolution. As I grow, so grows my voice. It is dynamic, not static.

So what is your voice? How would you like to play? What do you imagine for yourself? Are you already satisfied? Or do you want more?

I’ll leave you with a wonderful recording by pianist Lennie Tristano playing over his composition, Line Up  (based on the chord changes to All of Me ). This is a beautiful example of somebody who was deeply and endlessly committed to finding and expressing his voice. It’s hard for me to believe this was recorded in 1954, as it is still very “modern” sounding, even by today’s standards. (Notice in particular his extraordinary use of rhythm and phrasing in relationship to the form.) Hope you enjoy!