Tag Archives: Jazz Improvisation

Want To Find Your True Voice As An Improviser? Transcribe Yourself

One of the standard practices in studying jazz music is to transcribe improvised solos played by great performers. From the more “classic” masters such as Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Charlie Parker and Bill Evans, on up to contemporary artists such as Brad Mehldau, Mark Turner or Dave Douglas.

Transcribing a solo that you really like reaps many rewards. It dramatically improves your ear (in my opinion, this is the greatest benefit), narrowing the gap between impulse and expression.

It helps you to expand your harmonic and melodic conception as an improviser. It presents new technical challenges for you. It inspires you by giving you a firsthand aural and kinesthetic experience of how absolutely beautiful and complete an improvised solo can be (it helps you to raise your own standards).

But transcribing solos can have a down side for some musicians. For some, the main aim of transcription is to find phrases (licks, patterns, fragments, etc.) that can be memorized and later used for material during an improvised solo. An arsenal of pre-formed “ideas”, if you will. Though this is expedient, and will certainly help you play more fluently, it doesn’t really do much to help you to find and cultivate your authentic voice as an improviser.

Now, for sure you need to work on patterns, ideas, etc. This is the “material” of your improvisations. But you need to transcend that material to be able to play freely and personally. As the great improviser and teacher Warne Marsh would tell his students (after he was sure they’d worked hard on a particular pattern or idea, “Very good. Never practice that again. You don’t want your playing to become hard, to become mechanical.”

Now, Warne, like many great jazz musicians, transcribed solos. He could play many Lester Young solos easily by ear. But you never, ever heard those Lester licks in any of Warne’s solos.

In fact you never even hear any Warne Marsh licks in any of Warne’s solos. That’s because Warne didn’t have any licks. He instead relied upon his ability to make music in the moment with his own impulse to create. He wanted only to play what he felt and heard. He wanted to express his true voice.

To find that true voice you need to explore what you really hear and feel as you improvise. What is your voice? What do you hear? What do you feel as you improvise? What would you play if your instrument and technique were never in the equation, only your creative spirit?

A great way to explore those questions is to transcribe yourself as you sing your improvisations. That’s right, sing your improvisations.

There are two main benefits to be gained from this.

First, you’ll get a chance to free yourself from your “isms” You know, “saxisms”, trumpetisms”, “pianoisms”, etc., whatever your instrument is. If you transcribe your sung solo and play it on your instrument, you can find all kinds of ways of moving through melodic material that you’ve never explored before. We often get stuck improvising with what feels kinesthetically familiar, rather than what we hear or would like to express. By playing something outside of your “isms” you develop technique and conception in an integrated, practical way.

The second benefit is you’ll get a chance to see what you actually do hear up to that point, so that you can compare that to what you’re studying and practicing. As much as you might like to have all those advanced harmonic and melodic ideas integrated into your solos, you might find that you just don’t hear them yet. No problem, keep practicing them and start singing them (if you aren’t yet doing so).

So here’s a simple way to get started. Choose a standard song (or chord progression, mode, etc.) that you know well, and that you enjoy. Get some kind of a music-minus-solist type of play-along recording (Band In A Box, Jamie Aebersold, etc.) Play and listen several times in a row to the pre-recorded track. As you listen, hear an improvisation in your head (not yet sung). After a few times repeating the track, start to sing your solo. Do this several times, until you really feel connected to the music.

Now record yourself singing your improvisation with the play-along track.

Listen back to your work. See if you can find a solo that you really like. (If you can’t, just see if you can find a chorus or two.) Transcribe it. It is most important to find the notes on your instrument first, but you also might want to eventually write down your transcription. Analyze it. How would you talk about if you were teaching a class in jazz improvisation? What do you like about it? What do you dislike? What are you hearing?

If you practice this regularly (as I have, and continue to do), you’ll gain great confidence in yourself as an artist for one main reason: You’ll realize that nobody in this world imagines and plays music quite like you. You’re literally one of a kind. In my book, that’s a lot, and nobody can take that away from you.

To quote the great improvising pianist Thelonious Monk, “A man’s a genius just for looking like himself.”

It’s important to remember that the vast majority of great jazz artists “looked” (okay, actually “sounded”) like themselves. And this is why we still cherish them.

Want To Improve Your Time? Call Upon Your Imagination

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To me the most fundamental skill for an improvisor to have is good time. Specifically, being able to perceive and control tempo. It’s probably impossible to create rhythmic interest and thematic development without first having a strong internal clock as a point of reference. (You never hear a beautifully improvised solo where the player’s time is unsure and squirming all over the place, do you?) Even when you’re playing with some kind of outside time keeping source (whether a rhythm section, conductor or metronome, or?) you have to be able to internalize and respond to the time.

Good time in music is always flexible of course. If you’ve ever played with a rigid, metronomic drummer, you’ve probably found the time to be less than inspiring, and even somewhat suffocating. The tempo needs to be clear, but it needs to be able to breathe, too. That said, the good time keepers have a tremendous internal sense of the default tempo of the piece they’re playing and don’t stray too far from it, always seeming to come back to it. Doing so helps maintain the integrity of the music.

For the improvisor, one of the fundamental skills is to seamlessly integrate melodic thinking and construction (pitch choices) with the perceived (internalized) tempo. Of course, playing with other musicians means being able to be primarily responsive to the collective tempo by the group. This, too, demands the ability to hear and imagine the collective push and pull of the time.

If you listen to Thelonious Monk, you can often hear the rhythm section pushing against his very strong sense of tempo. Monk was a master of finding the tempos in the “cracks” (you know, those tempos that are either a metronome setting too fast or two slow to stay at comfortably). Whereas most players would default up or down with the tempo to get out of the cracks and back into the “comfortable” (familiar is more like it) tempo, Monk would just sit there in the middle of it. This is what often created such excitement in his music and often characterized the piece he was playing.

To develop this kind of strong internal sense of tempo you have to be able to clearly perceive time as it passes inside your body and mind. That is a matter of imagination. Imagining how the time passes is what it really means to “internalize” the beat. I’d like to offer three exercises (games, really) to help you to imagine the time more vividly (and accurately). They involve working with a metronome, with and without your instrument. I’ve presented them in a sequence, the idea being that you build one skill solidly before you proceed to the next. Here they are:

Canceling the click-Set your metronome to about 80 beats per minute. Listen for at least a minute to the clicks. In your mind, really try to hear each oncoming click before it actually arrives. Now clap your hands on each click. If you can hear the click, you’re either early or late. If you hear nothing but your hands clapping, you’ve landed precisely in the middle of the beat, thus “canceling” out the sound of the metronome. See if you can clap for at least 30 seconds without hearing the click. If you can make it to 30 seconds, slow the metronome down to about 76 and try the same thing. Each time you’re able to cancel the click for at least 30 seconds, lower the tempo setting more. See if you can make it all the way down to 30 beats per minute (this might take weeks to master). If you can imagine the time at this slow tempo, you will have really strengthened your internal clock, and your sense of time will become noticeably better.
Finding the cracks-Take a standard song that you know well, or choose a mode or theme to improvise over. Start at the most comfortable tempo and play a chorus or two (or if it’s an open ended form, just play for a minute or two). Next, move the tempo down one metronome setting and play a chorus. Notice if it’s any less comfortable to play at this tempo. If it is, then stay at this tempo and improvise for a while until you find comfort. Then keep moving the tempo down in increments until you find the tempos that are difficult to internalize. Make a note of these metronome settings. You can do the same as you increase the tempo. Obviously as you increase the tempo upward you’ll run into other challenges with technique and with improvising good quality material. The aim here isn’t to see how fast you can play. You’re just trying to see if it’s (for example) more difficult to improvise over Confirmation at 182 beats per minute as compared to 186 beats per minute.
Fading the click-Find one of those “in the crack” tempos that is challenging to internalize. Set your metronome to click on beats 2 and 4 (in 4/4 time) in that tempo. Improvise for about 4 or 5 minutes in that tempo. Then, turn the metronome off as you continue to improvise in real time, not missing a beat. Improvise for about a minute or so, then turn the metronome back on to see how close you are to the original tempo. If you can stay fairly close to the metronome tempo for a minute, work on increasing your time away from the metronome. The more vivid your imagination of the tempo becomes, the longer you’ll be able to improvise with a solid sense of the original tempo.

These are just a few basic ways to get started in improving your time. In my experience both as performer and teacher I’ve found these to be the most fundamentally effective. I’ve since devised many other games to play with the metronome to expand upon this. I’ll be sharing those in future posts. Enjoy the exploration!

I Love To Practice!

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Welcome to my blog. This is my first entry. I got the idea for this after recently having a bit of a renaissance with my musical practice. I’m a professional saxophonist (and to a somewhat lesser degree, a flutist) who is deeply in love with improvising. I’ve always been well-disciplined where practice is concerned, but about a year ago I sort of rediscovered that spark that makes me truly excited to practice every day.

Unlike many musicians, I don’t practice for the sole purpose of being prepared to perform. Don’t get me wrong. I love to perform and take my readiness for this very seriously. But for me the act of practicing is itself a reward. One of the consistently most joyful and satisfying parts of my day is my practice time. It’s meditative, invigorating, challenging and always edifying. Practicing is also an ongoing tutorial about learning how to learn. It’s a beautiful thing.

I typically spend two to three hours a day practicing (more on days that I don’t work). Because of this, I must be mindful about taking care of myself. I personally know many musicians who struggle with chronic pain and other health issues because of their practice habits. I used to be one of those musicians, too. But not any more. Some years back I discovered something that has helped (and continues to help) me more than anything else as a musician, not only to avoid injury, but also to support continuous growth, technical improvement and artistic development.

What I discovered was a simple, effective method of self-care called the Alexander Technique. I was so impressed by how I was able to help myself with this work that I decided to train to become a certified teacher. I’ve been teaching the Technique now for a few years, and have had great satisfaction working with musicians, actors and dancers, helping them to improve the quality of their practice and performance.

So I’ve decided to share my discoveries both as an Alexander Technique teacher and as a serious improvising musician (they’re more related than you might imagine!) There are two areas of interest to me where this is concerned:

To provide simple, practical information and advice to help musicians stay healthy, pain-free and well-coordinated by applying the principles of the Alexander Technique.I’ll be writing about some of the most common concerns where musicians are concerned, such as chronic back and neck pain, repetitive strain injuries, balance and coordination issues (including focal dystonia), breathing and managing performance anxiety. I’ll also be writing from time to time about other health topics, such as nutrition, exercise (I’m also a personal trainer certified through the National Academy of Sports Medicine), rest, self-care strategies and the use of ergonomic products.
To share my explorations in my quest to continuously develop my skills as an improvising musician. I love jazz, Balkan gypsy music, just about all folk music, conceptual improvised music (free, avant garde, new music…), and just about anything else that involves the supremely human act of spontaneous composition. My primary discipline is modern jazz, and my main passion is finding my own voice as an improviser. I also love helping other musicians find theirs. I’m always finding new ways to practice and study that help me on this journey. I’ll be sharing ideas, exercises from some of the books I’ve written (or am currently writing) about improvisational pedagogy, and other resources and ideas that I discover from others. I’ll also be posting videos of great musical performers (pointing out what helps these artists play so well) as well as my own video tutorials.

So please feel free to ask, suggest, or criticize to help me make this a better blog. I always welcome comments, and sincerely thank you for reading. Here’s to your health and continued improvement!