Tag Archives: Practicing Music

A Simple, Highly Effective Tool For Avoiding Fatigue And Injury

Well timed and well directed rest is one of the most important elements for a serious musician to maintain and develop a healthy practice regimen. Unfortunately, many musicians neglect this crucial element, sometimes looking at rest as a necessary evil, something that steals precious time away from “real” practice.

But truth be told, it is rest in any activity that optimizes effort. All effort and no rest leads to fatigue, lack of inspiration, compromised technical habits, unclear thinking, and injury. I could write volumes on the when and how much of effective rest. Instead, I’ll introduce you to a highly effective way to practice resting that is taught and used regularly in the Alexander Technique. It’s called constructive rest (also referred to as active rest).

In this rest practice, you lie down in a semi-supine position (on your back with your knees bent and feet on the floor) on a firm surface (e.g., a carpeted floor) with something firm to support your head, such as books or magazines. Your arms are bent at the elbow with your hands resting on the side of your torso, somewhere between the bottom of your ribcage and your hips. You also leave your eyes open (remember it’s called active rest) so you can keep your senses in tune with your body. It looks like this:

Simply lying in this position for 15 to 20 minutes at a time can work wonders for you. Here are just a few of the benefits of constructive rest:

It helps to restore the length of your spine by letting your back and neck muscles release into their natural resting length.
It allows for your intervertebral discs (the soft cushions between your neck and back bones which absorb shock) to re-hydrate to their optimum thickness (this too lets your spine get back to its resting length).
It allows your breathing to return to an easy, natural and well-functioning state.
It calms your nervous system, clears and centers your mind and brings you back in touch with the present moment.
It helps you to become better aware of your habits of tension (and helps you connect thought to gesture to reduce your tension) thereby giving you a better gauge of effort and tension when you play music.
It puts you into a state of calm alertness, readying you to play music at your highest level.I’ve been practicing constructive rest for many years now, with ever increasing benefit.

For me it’s as essential as sleep, food and hydration to stay healthy and play my best. If you have chronic back and/or neck pain, this procedure can greatly reduce or even eliminate your symptoms. Here are the basic instructions for lying down in the semi-supine position for constructive rest:

Find a reasonably quiet place. If possible, allow yourself fifteen or twenty minutes to lie down.

Lie with your backside down on a flat, firm surface, e.g., a carpeted floor, or a wooden floor with a yoga mat or thin blanket beneath you. Do not lie down on a bed, cot, or sofa, as these surfaces are too soft and will not allow for the necessary feedback your body needs to release muscles.

You should also place something firm beneath your head for support, such as a few thin books or magazines. The height of this support will vary with each individual. If too high, the chin will be too close to the chest and will not allow enough space in the front of the neck; if too low, the head will tend to go “back and down” the spine, thus discouraging the natural lengthening process. Try different heights and find one that encourages the least amount of tension in the entire neck:

Too high

Too low

Good height

Once you are on your back, bend your knees to bring your feet flat onto the floor. Keep your heels in approximate line with your sitting bones. Your heels should be about twelve to fifteen inches from your buttocks.

Keeping your arms out and away from your torso (think of your arms as hands of a clock at 4 o’clock and 8 o’clock), bend your elbows to bring your palms to rest on the sides of your torso where your ribcage meets your abdomen. Make sure your hands are not touching one another, and that there is plenty of space between your ribcage and elbows:

Shoulders narrowing (arms too high)

Shoulders widening (better arm position)

Check your breathing by observing the flow of air in and out of your nostrils. Keep your eyes open during the entire session, from time to time noticing your environment. Scan yourself for any unnecessary tension or holding that you might be doing. Observe any changes within yourself that might take place. Rest and enjoy!

That’s all there is to it. By simply lying in this manner you activate great release and positive changes. If you like, you can also add the Alexander Technique primary directions. This is a simple set of mental directives to give yourself to encourage length and expansion in your body. They are as follows:

I allow my neck to be free, so that my head can release upward off the top of my spine.

I allow my entire torso to lengthen and widen.

I allow my knees to release forward from hip joints, and for one knee to release away from the other.

I allow my heels to release into the floor.

You simply think the directions, but don’t do anything about them. In fact your entire aim should be to do nothing at all. Non-doing we call it in the Alexander Technique. Just let yourself rest.

You can use this tool anytime you like. In my musical practice, I tend to use it as follows: I usually lie down for about 5 or 10 minutes before I practice to help bring me to the state of calm alertness I need to play well. When I take brief breaks during my practice (5 to 10 minutes) I’ll also lie down.

Or sometimes I’ll take a nice long break in my practice session and lie down for an entire 20 minutes. When I do this I feel completely restored (mind, body, spirit) and ready to resume. I often do this when I have an unusually long practice day.

Also, if I’m at a gig where space permits, I’ll lie down before I start and during the intermission (or sets). I’ve been told that in the U.K. (where the Alexander Technique is widely known and practiced by professional musicians) you can see 40 or more musicians lying down back stage during the intermission at orchestral performances.

So incorporate this highly effective tool into your practice routine. If you can’t manage 15 or 20 minutes, do it for 5 or 10. It will still help. Remember, rest is part of the process to improve, so don’t look at it as time wasted. Balance rest with effort and you’ll greatly increase your chances of staying healthy, injury free and energized as you practice and perform.

Imitating Physical Gesture: Try To Understand Cause And Effect

2 Replies

“There is no such thing as a right position, but there is such a thing as a right direction.”

F.M. Alexander

One of the traps that many thoughtful musicians can fall into is that of trying to recreate physically what it looks like to play efficiently. They see a musician perform who is playing with what appears to be “effortless efficiency”, and they aspire to imitate that musician’s physical gestures: postures, hand and arm positions, placement of the facial muscles, placement of the fingers on the instrument, etc. But what they are doing, in essence, is confusing cause and effect.

They’re looking for the “right positions”, as Alexander mentions above. Keep in mind that the thing that always precedes physical expression, is thought. Alexander described the thinking that precedes and maintains an activity as being an individual’s direction.

So what you’re really seeing when watching a masterful, effortless musician perform is that musician’s direction. You’re witnessing the physical manifestations of his or her thinking during the music making process.

Much of this is a result of good training for sure, but it is also a reflection of the attitude of the musician. Anticipated effort brings forth effort. Anticipated ease invites ease (and confidence!) This anticipated ease usually has certain identifiable gestures, many of which appear as a sort of efficient stillness: No excessive jaw movement, no fingers flying all over the place, no raised shoulders, and so on.

But if you go directly for trying to look this way without examining the thinking that supports it, you run this very serious risk: Creating excessive effort in an attempt to appear effortless. (Yes, I did mean to say it that way.)

If you’re a saxophonist, for example, and were to watch many of the great technical masters of the instrument, from Charlie Parker, to Michael Brecker, to Marcel Mule play, you’ll notice that their fingers appear to hardly move at all from the keys (in fact their entire bodies seem to hardly move as they play). So you might say, “Aha, to get that great kind of speed and control I need to keep my fingers close to pearls.”

But what often results from trying to keep the fingers “close to the pearls” is a huge amount of tension and unnatural playing gesture. When saxophonists go after this directly, I often see them holding their fingers into place at the expense of tightening their necks, arms, wrists and backs. (These are sometimes the musicians who come to me for help because of the “mysterious” physical pain they are experiencing from playing their instrument.)

When you see really efficient, effortless saxophonists play, you’re seeing an interdependent chain of gestures that are the result of a clear and helpful thought process. There is no holding of anything in place. Just letting things move the way they need to move to support the best results. Lengthening and widening (through release) of their physical structure as they play. Good direction.

So of course the fingers aren’t flying all over the place. That would be inefficient, tense movement. Of course you won’t see the shoulders tightening up around the neck. That, too, would be tense and inefficient movement. (Not exactly lengthening and widening of the physical structure, if you know what I mean.)

If you were to trace this chain of events it might be something like this: Fingers staying relatively still and connected to the keys because the hands are staying soft ,supple and responsive; because the hands are being supported by arms that are freely balanced and releasing out of the back; because the neck is remaining free and mobile allowing the head to balance on the spine.

Fingers, to arms, to back, to head and neck…all determined by the quality of thought that precedes and supports it. Again, good direction is the cause. The effect are the physical gestures. (And do you notice that these gestures primarily involve release and mobility, not tension and position?)

There is a stark difference in quality between dynamic, efficient stillness, and stiff, self-conscious and limiting control of movement. No matter if they appear the same at first glance.

So if you want to play like the masters, don’t try to look like they do. Don’t go after their gestures directly. Instead, emulate how they think (their direction): ease, efficiency, expansion, mobility, balance, lightness, confidence and joy. Get clearer about your habits of tension, and work toward lessening them. Get to know what helps you and what doesn’t.

By better understanding the relationship between thought and gesture, you better understand the kind of cause and effect relationship that leads to continuous improvement.

A Hobby That Will Make You A Better Musician

4 Replies

Many years ago when I first met the great flutist and composer, James Newton, he impressed upon me the importance of a musician having a hobby. He felt that many musicians spend so much of their time and passion on music, that having a hobby was a great way to maintain balance and perspective as a human being.

His hobby at the time was studying visual art, painting in particular. He told me that besides giving him an enjoyable diversion from working in music, that ironically enough, it actually ended up expanding his conception of music. He learned this specifically through deepening his understanding of color and emotion, and brought that understanding to view his musical composition process in a new light.

I had no hobbies whatsoever at the time of meeting James, as I was so utterly consumed with playing, composing and studying music. But as a few years passed I did stumble upon a hobby that has not only helped me find balance as a human being, but also, has helped me tremendously as a musician: The study of foreign language.

Though I studied Spanish for a year in 9th grade, I really didn’t catch the foreign language bug until I was nearly 40 years old. At that time I was very interested in Bulgarian folk music, so I took a trip over there to hear this beautiful music first hand. What ended up happening was that I fell in love with the sound of the Bulgarian language. It seemed to so much reflect the sounds of the music I loved so much.

So when I returned home, I began to teach myself Bulgarian. I was totally shooting in the dark with my study, as I had no idea how to learn another language. But eventually I became conversant, and at one point, after much study and travel to Bulgaria, virtually fluent.

The benefits I gained as a musician from the process of studying another language became immediately discernible (I’ll talk more specifically about this below). I decided to tackle another language. I chose Russian, as it is in the same language family as Bulgarian (Slavic) and it uses the same alphabet (Cyrillic).

Russian was an even more challenging language for me to learn than Bulgarian, but it opened up my ears, mind and musicality even more. I was hooked.

To make a long story short, I ended up studying Spanish fairly extensively, and am currently working on improving my fluency in Brazilian Portuguese (my wife is Brazilian). Bulgarian, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese are languages that I’ve spent enough time with to become conversant to fluent in (as long as I stay in practice).

But I’ve also “visited” other languages just for fun: Estonian, Romanian, Eastern Armenian, to name but a few. I never had any intention of becoming conversant or fluent in these languages. I studied them purely out of curiosity, often rising from how pleasing the language was to my ear, or how interesting the grammar was. More like a taste test than a complete meal.

Every time I approach a new language, my musical skills are enhanced and broadened once again. Here are some of the benefits of studying a foreign language for musicians:

You greatly improve your ear-Language is sound turned into meaning. When studying another language, you learn to hear high degrees of subtly in sound. In short, your ability to hear and process sound becomes more sophisticated, richer. Everything from intonation, color and shape become clearer to you. This translates right into your musical activity.
You learn to create the physical gestures to produce new sounds-If you are to be understood in any language, you must learn to manipulate your vocal mechanisms (including, mouth, tongue, throat, jaw) to produce sounds in a different way. If you play a wind instrument or sing, this helps you tremendously to gain even greater control and insight into producing sound on your instrument. (It helps with your sound conception even if you don’t play a wind instrument.)
You broaden your rhythmic conception-Every language has it’s rhythm. And even within every language there are many different rhythmic pattern, depending on region (accent, etc.) By letting yourself find the rhythm of speaking a new language, you expand your own ability to imagine and control rhythm and time.
You deepen your understanding between sound and meaning-As you gain familiarity with a new language, you dramatically increase your capacity to turn sound into meaning. That’s the same skill you need to play well, whether as an improviser or as an interpretive musician.
You learn to think way outside the box about structure and meaning-One of the first things you come face to face with when you start learning another language is how different the structures of the language are than your native language: Grammar, syntax, idiomatic expressions are but a few of the ways your sense of logic is challenged. Again, this opens your thinking up even more as a musician.
You become better at improvising with new material-When you converse, you’re improvising. Learning to converse in a new language means learning to be able to take still unfamiliar material and express ideas, to communicate. This helps your brain immensely when it comes to improvising music with new ideas and material. In essence, you learn how to absorb and use new material faster, in more meaningful ways.
You get more comfortable being wrong-If you converse in the language you are learning, you’re going to make mistakes. Lots of them. You simply stop flinching or feeling bad when this happens. If you take that attitude and skill into your music making, you open yourself up to great possibilities.
You improve your overall brain fitness-All of the above keep your brain working in novel ways, which helps you to stay sharp for the rest of your life. Working memory (the capacity to hold and work with various pieces of information at one time) is crucial for language learning. (It also comes in pretty handy in making music.) My working memory improved remarkably when I started studying languages.

So if you think you’d might like to try a new language (and have no previous experience), here are some guidelines to help you get the most out of your endeavor:

Pick a language that really appeals to you-This can either be because of the sound of the language, love and interest in the culture, and more. If you have genuine interest in the language you’ll always enjoy learning more. And don’t think you need to become conversant or fluent to gain some of the great benefits I’ve listed above. Don’t worry about how “useful” the language is. Let your interest be your guide.
Start with an “all audio” language course-Don’t start reading in the new language at the start. All you’ll do is bring your english speaking sound limitations to the language. Instead, learn to really hear and reproduce the sounds of the language. Pimsleur self-study language courses are an excellent option for this.
Sing, sing, sing-Learn songs as soon as you can in the new language. This will help you produce the sounds, as well as deepen your sense of meaning with the words.
Study grammar and structure-After you’ve spent some time just playing the new language by ear, invest some time in learning grammar and writing. You can either take a course in the community, or find a self-study course well suited for this purpose.
Watch films-Watching a film in the new language (with subtitles, of course) will significantly increase your understanding of all aspects of the new language.
Speak-If you can find a friend who speaks your new language, practice as much as you can with him or her. If not, consider finding an online community of other speakers and learners of the language to practice with. Remember, don’t be afraid of making mistakes. If you have a chance to travel to the country where your chosen language is spoken, you’ll find that the locals are gracious, helpful and flattered that you are making an attempt at learning their language.

So there you have it. I hope this post doesn’t seem somewhat off topic, but lately I’ve come to realize even more how my language study has deepened my musical experience. I think it can deepen yours as well.

Two Habits Of Thinking That Will Limit Your Growth As A Musician

9 Replies

If you ask an accomplished musician about what is necessary for continuous growth and improvement, you might well be met with a “to do” list: Always work on improving your sound. Find new ways to challenge your reading and technical skills. Keep expanding your repertoire with pieces that broaden your expressive capacities. Listen deeply to, and analyze great musical performances. And so on.

And for sure, all these are things you need to strive toward in order to grow. But what about the things you need to avoid in order to grow as a musical artist?

If you were to ask an accomplished musician this question, you’d most likely get a fairly extensive list of things to steer clear from, as well. (It’s even possible that this list would be longer than the “to do” list.) In essence, for you to grow, you must do certain things, and must consciously avoid doing certain other things.

It’s important to keep in mind that if you wish to change what you do, you must change how you think. In my experience both as performer and teacher, I find that the vast array of ways musicians interfere with their progress is often a result of two habits of thinking (attitude):

“I won’t let myself sound bad.”

“I’m doing well so far.”

Let’s look at these habits in detail:

I won’t let myself sound bad

This is of course a habit based in fear. It limits your growth by not allowing you to try new things with an open mind. It radically shifts your emphasis from process to result as you explore musical growth.

For sure you’d like to sound immediately better when you try something new ( a good result). Who wouldn’t? But often enough, changing something to sound better starts with you sounding somewhat worse ( “worse”, at least, in your current perception).

You’ll never improve by doing something the same way you’ve always done it (whether you think so or not). If you examine any musician’s improvement, it comes down to a continuous evolution of edification. What seemed like the “right” thing at one point turns out to be the wrong thing. You acknowledge this, then you move on, proceeding in a different way.

I’ve taught the Alexander Technique to musicians who were so afraid of sounding bad that they could not (at the start) allow themselves to play their instrument (even for an instant) without indulging in the particular habits of tension that were causing the very problems that brought them to see me in the first place. They simply believed that if they didn’t do what they thought they needed to do, they would sound bad. Their fear of sounding bad was trumping their desire to improve.

One of the milestones of growth for my students is their gradual acceptance of allowing themselves to sound bad in order to allow for change. There occurs a shift in thinking, and then the desire to change trumps the fear of sounding bad. When this happens, it opens up a huge, beautiful path toward expansion and upward development.

So when you change something as you play, don’t immediately jump to judging the quality of your result as sounding good or bad . Shift your judgement to, “Is this different than what I’d normally do?”

Then shift from judgement to discernment: “What am I not doing that I would normally do?” (Your growth will often involve you playing your instrument without indulging in your habits of tension and over-doing. Non-doing instead of doing.)

When this happens you put yourself in the frame of mind to make logical, objective decisions about your playing. If you can suspend judgement and stay with discernment long enough, you can choose most clearly that which serves you the best.

Some of the other manifestations of this habit are: a rigid practice ritual that aims toward maintenance instead of growth; avoidance of playing with better musicians; avoidance of challenging musical situations; a limited palate of musical self-expression . As you can see, if you’re afraid of sounding bad, you can’t really risk stepping into the unknown. You can’t ever find something new to play. You can’t ever surprise yourself.

I’m doing well so far

This habit, in many ways, can be more insidious than the fear of sounding bad. Insidious, because what appears as self confidence (a good thing) can easily morph into self-deluded dogmatism (not such a good thing).

It limits your growth in a similar way, in that it robs you of your impetus to explore the possibility of doing something differently. I call it the curse of expertise. When you are absolutely sure that you are right in what you do, you can’t possibly change. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, the saying goes.

In my teaching experience, the most common manifestation of this habit is the belief that excess tension and strain don’t significantly impact musical success. Talent and practice does. “So what if I’m tightening my shoulders and neck as I play? I’ve seen Sonny Rollins doing the exact same thing and it doesn’t seem to make any difference in his playing. He still sounds great.” (I had a young saxophonist with a rather brittle sound tell me this as I tried to explain to him that his sound was colored by his excessive neck and shoulder tension.)

First of all, you’re not Sonny Rollins. Second (and more important), you have no way of knowing how Mr. Rollin’s habits of misdirected tension impact his playing. He obviously plays quite well despite his habits. But it’s possible that he could play even better than he does without them.

One of the things that virtually all truly masterful musicians have in common is that they believe that they can always do what they do in a better way. The great cellist and teacher Janos Starker talks about the importance of this idea, and the process by which the musician’s thinking is edified on the path toward improvement.

Other manifestations of the “I’m doing well so far” attitude are: lack of discipline where practice is concerned; an unwillingness to deepen self-awareness; a superstitious adherence to well-meant, but ultimately useless or counter-productive advice given them by other musicians; an inability to understand cause and effect with respect to their own bodies and the music making process; a perceived (by others) sense of self-satisfaction bordering on arrogance.

You may have noticed that these two habits of thought are closely related, and indeed they are. One often supports and blends in with the other, and both are based to some degree on fear of change.

So always keep in mind that what you do (and what you don’t do) for better or for worse, is conditioned by what you think. Aim at keeping your thinking clear and helpful by avoiding these two habits.

Practicing Improvisation: Aim Mostly For How to Move, Not For What to Play

4 Replies

Virtually all music disciplines share one thing in common: The movement of sound. This of course involves time and rhythm, even in the most seemingly out-of-tempo and arhythmic music.

It could be said that the improvising musician’s skill lies in having the ability to sponataneously turn artistic impulses into ideas that manifest themselves into moving sound.

Students of improvisation (from beginner to pro) approach this reality in various ways. Some spend huge amounts of time memorizing stylized patterns, licks, solo transcriptions and so forth. For sure this leads to maintaining and cultivating the ability to “move the sounds” to create the music.

If you’re working constantly on these things, more music comes out of you when you improvise. This is largely because you know “what to play” as you improvise a solo.

If you approach improvisation this way, your solos will most likely sound consistently controlled, melodically sound, stylistically accurate, cogent, and full of clear intention. All good things, without a doubt.

But if you ever want to get to a deeper level of playing, a more personal level, you need to shift your emphasis from “what to play”, to, “how to move”. I’m talking specifically here about taking a step back from working with pre-formed ideas (licks, patterns, etc.) and instead aiming at working with the materials of the music on a much broader level. Diving deeply into the materials of the music to expand your ability to move the sounds with ever increasing spontaneity and surprise (both to the listener and to yourself).

Now, it could be argued that the memorizing of licks, patterns, transcriptions, etc., leads to all this. To a large degree this is entirely true. Studying these things to the point of absorbing their logic, and ultimately transcending them, is a worthy aim for the serious improvising musician, and can set a foundation strongly rooted in the tradition of the art form.

But if you want to significantly increase your chances of playing something fresh each time you improvise, you’ve got to start lessening your use of the pre-packaged stuff. You’ve got to leave the formulas alone and start looking toward two broader targets: Increasing your rhythmic imagination and control, and re-thinking and expanding how to organize pitches.

In an eye opening interview with saxophone legend, Joe Henderson, by Mel Martin (himself a formidable and highly gifted saxophonist, improviser and composer), Joe addresses this question of “formulas” quite well:

Mel Martin: Everybody wants your formula. How many students have come to you and said, ‘Joe, what are those patterns?’

Joe Henderson: And those are the kind of students I don’t take. I want to effect the part of their brain to create these things. When you think about this in a certain way, there is no formula.

Mel Martin: What they hear as formula is actually something you created spontaneously out of all the resources that you have at your command. (Brilliant!)

Mel Martin’s comment absolutely sums up what I’m talking about here. Joe could move the sounds differently, gloriously, surprisingly, every time he played. Melodically, harmonically and rhythmically magnificent without exception.

Here are some things you can do to help you shift your focus from specifically what to play, to playing (again quoting Mel Martin from his comment above) spontaneously out of the resources that you have at your command:

Make rhythm primary-Rhythmic variation literally has no limits. It is the thing that makes music, music. More so than anything else. It is the language of the universe. Yet it’s amazing that many jazz improvisers have a rather limited rhythmic conception and base from which to draw ideas. Start moving away from practicing all your tonal material in symmetrical patterns of eighth-note, sixteenth-note and triplet patterns. Aim for three things: Polyrhythms (e.g., 5 eighth notes over 2 beats), polymeter (e.g., organizing eighth note melodic patterns in 4/4 to imply 3/4) and rhythmic displacement. Becoming masterful at rhythmic displacement is a key element in all this. Take any melodic idea you have in mind and practice starting it from various places in the measure (e.g, up beat of 1, down beat of 2, upbeat of 2, etc.) Gaining this kind of rhythmic control and imagination will consistently help you find new ways to move the sounds. And of course, practice in odd metered time signatures. Every day. Break that “4/4” predictability (though if you practice this way often enough, your 4/4 playing goes to a whole new level of creative possibilities).

Turn everything you practice into melody-Rather than playing mindless scale patterns from the bottom of your range to the top, create patterns and ideas that sound melodic to you out of these scales (or chords, etc.). Make the organization and movement of the notes be always interesting and pleasing to you aesthetically. Work toward using your musical materials in ways that connect you to your creative, expressive self. Develop your technique to become the servant of that expression.

Rethink tonality-There really is no such thing as “mastering” the scales, chords and intervals. There are always new ways to organize this material. This was a big part of Joe Henderson’s approach. A great way to explore familiar tonalities in unfamiliar ways is to extract and regroup. For example, you can take a symmetrical, non-tonal scale like the diminished scale and organize the notes into tonal (major and minor) triad combinations that still have the tensions of the diminished scale, but have a very different color. Thought, curiousity and exploration are all you need to find seemingly limitless new tonal ideas.

Broaden your sense of time feel and articulation-If you’re a jazz musician, stop swinging everything. You can always go back to that feel anytime you want. But getting stuck into one time feel sort of locks your brain into thinking one way about organizing and moving the sounds.Try improvising over a song or a set of chord changes without your swing feel, and you’ll find many new ways to organize and move the notes. Same with articulation. Practice improvising with many different specific articulation patterns. It’s especially helpful to practice an articulation in an odd rhythmic grouping (e.g., 5) against an even time signature (4/4). Yet another thing you can do to really help broaden your rhythmic imagination.

Improvise slowly-I can’t emphasize enough the importance of slow improvisation (I’ll be writing an article about this specifically in the near future). By improvising on tunes, changes, themes, modes, etc. at very slow tempos (I’m talking about quarter note equals 50-70) you give yourself the chance to discover many new ways to work with your musical materials, many new ways to move.

Shift your thinking from the more specific “what to play”, to the more general “how to move”, and (ironically) you’ll never be at a loss for what to play. What worked for Joe Henderson just might work for you.