Practising For Improvisation 2

 This is a continuation of my Introduction to a method for practising for improvising musicians. For part 1 read this.

I divide the committed improviser's daily practise agenda into 3 parts:

GRID

Grid work develops the basic technical foundation of our vocabulary and, as a by-product, the beginnings of our sound. Our technical facility is based on our control within the horizontal Grid (time), and the vertical Grid (pitch).

Horizontally, we first need to develop precision based on subdividing time into 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. We do this at the slowest tempo - for example, a metronome beat of 40bpm. We should start each exercise daily at the slowest tempo. This ensures that we start out with the maximum control over the muscles involved in playing, and over time, we perfect that movement. We should then increase the rate (the above subdivision system has this in-built), but only to the maximum point where we can still play with precision.

A rule of thumb with rhythm is to always keep your time reference/pulse as macro, or widely spaced, as possible. You will develop a more solid and reliable inner "clock" this way, and fast tempos become just a subdivision of slower ones. Nobody has perfect "time", but learning to subdivide very widely spaced pulses is a great way to stabilise your inner sense of time.

Vertically: our "master" grid is the chromatic scale - the 12 notes from which all vertical structures are drawn. However the grid which predominates most music is the major scale. The major scale's ubiquitous feature in music makes it something we know internally even as non-musicians. Therefore the time we spend on the major scale quickly becomes mechanical repetition, and we should be careful to investigate intervals and patterns outside of our comfort zone in order to expand.

Other scales give us much more opportunity to expand our internal vertical grid. All scales can be considered as vertical grid options when looking to expand our vocabulary. With regular repetition, the work on ear/hand coordination will internalise these sounds into our aesthetic. The diminished scale and the melodic minor (ascending) are scales that have been incorporated extensively into jazz, especially in the last 20 years, and to fully utilise the sounds these offer us,  much time should be given to developing our grid of these scales both melodically and harmonically.

CONTENT

Technical work is going to give us control, but there is little point unless we have something to say.

Developing content is learning to make effective, expressive and logical musical connections with the structures we have internalised. We could, of course, just leave it to random chance, as all music we absorb should feed our reservoir of content, but for the musician who seeks to find their own voice, we can use an ear-training process directed by the intellectual left brain in order to create an internalised vocabulary in our right brain that reflects our aesthetic.

How to develop the internalisation process? It's all in the way we approach it.  As mentioned above, music learned by ear is already taken in by the creative part of your brain - the right hemisphere. I encourage a process I call Linear Continuity. The simplest version of this would be to work generally moving through keys using a cycle of resolving 5ths. More on that later. 

However, sometimes we need to internalise music from visual/intellectual information, for convenience or to learn new or complex parts. For those new to the process, it has to be forced as soon as we've read through the piece or exercise a few times, and remember how it sounds. Put the paper away. Play repeatedly what you remember until you encounter a seriously blank moment, check the score, repeat. You are not memorising - you're internalising.

Our content comes through many routes. Mimicry and internalisation of recorded performances that appeal to us, or fragments of them, provide a window to how things work. Learning how our mentors phrase within a certain groove, or navigate a sequence of chords is a big part of developing the language, but ultimately, to develop our own voice, we need to develop our own ideas within the rhythmic, harmonic and formal structures that make up the repertoire we wish to perform. This is where the left brain directs things, and feeds the right brain new sounds, connections, combinations.

REPERTOIRE

This is where we put the pieces together to form a complete picture - a complete blueprint for improvised performance.

This is a tricky area, because we will use our left brain to analyse, understand, and connect the pieces of the composition we intend to play, yet we want to arrive at a point where we are not thinking, merely feeling our way through with our right brain. Otherwise we can not be in the moment, can not be a part of the debate, and we will only get in the way of the music.

Here you have to make the clear distinction between practising and playing. You are practising when you are thinking about the structures in order to be able to navigate them accurately and feed your right brain true sonic references. You are playing when you are navigating by feel alone. You can practice the piece 20 times, but then you should play the piece at least another 20 times. You could also try alternating, if you find yourself unable to internalise the structures. Until you make it your own, you can also always go back to a reference recording of the piece if such exists. Listen. Absorb it's logic. If it's your own piece, or you have no reference, write a few choruses of "improvisation" using a sequencer, and learn them.

Then fly! Enjoy the moment! Nobody wants to listen to people practising.

Practising For Improvisation 1

Musical improvisation in jazz happens in a collective using shared forms, structures and language, making the performance a conversation, negotiation, or debate, unique to that moment. But how does the musician prepare for such a performance?

To start with, let's examine improvisation - the act of dealing with contingencies as they happen.

We all improvise. Almost everything we do in life involves being flexible to random occurrences, and yet getting where we want to go. We can all improvise music too. All it takes is participation - though our first efforts may lack coherence. It's the best way to start. We will immediately identify the priority of communication, and therefore, what is missing from our skill set.

The bottom line is that those who improvise, become better at it the more they improvise. From a negative perspective, you could say that those who fail to make plans, by necessity, become the best improvisers. Maybe that's true for some musicians too, but in my experience, playing improvised music is a deep joy I share with many dedicated and well-prepared musicians globally.

Preparing to be able to create on the spot, more than anything, means learning to be fully in the moment: assuming as little as possible, so that we can be fully aware of what is going on, and participate. We get this just by participating as much as possible in group improvisation. For the committed improviser, further self-preparation involves considering all possible contingencies, and honing the skills to confront them. A martial artist is a good metaphor, because of the immense discipline and deep study of all relevant skills required for mastery of the moment.

In music, the true art of improvisation happens when more than one musician is involved. It's about the negotiation. Solo improvisation has it's place - at the very least it's a part of the process of developing ideas for the main event, but it is not true improvisation in the jazz sense, because of the relative absence of outside influences, which means one can easily follow habitual paths towards well-practised themes.

This introduction will hopefully make it clear that practising, for the musical improviser, is completely different from practising for any other kind of musical performance. It's not harder or easier - it's just different.

The difference is present from day one of the process. Most music is studied in a linear manner, with the performance of existing compositions as our end game. Practising for improvisation is a laterally-focused process - better to learn to play that Bach prelude in all 12 keys by ear moderately well, than to nail it in one key. Then move on. 

An improviser is perfecting a process, not a result.

EAR TRAINING

The central agenda in developing an ability to improvise music is Ear Training. The more we can recognise from what we hear, the better we can respond. A rule of thumb is that everything practised should have some aspect of ear training/expansion built into it. Once we have performed something to the point that the ear-hand coordination is well established, we should move on. Otherwise we are just developing the mechanical, and our right brain disengages.

First important point is that, though literacy is pretty crucial to an intellectual left-brain understanding of musical structure, that understanding is useless to us as improvisers until we know it "by heart". Far better to learn music by ear, as it enters through our right-brain, which is where we need it for making music.

The improviser must from the outset take on the internalisation of musical structures, horizontal (rhythmic), vertical (harmonic), and combined (melodic), so that they can recognise them, and then develop the ear-hand coordination to be able to include within their own performance, everything that they hear. A disciplined approach to this starts with what I call Grid Work, which forms the technical foundation of everything we do.

They must also know the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic language that will be used to communicate.. This is the most fundamental element, precedes even the ability to play an instrument, and starts with just concentrated listening. I am repeatedly confronted by students who want to learn to play jazz, but don't listen to it. Everything that comes out of me as an improviser and composer, is a product of my musical aesthetic, which is the selective sum of everything I have listened to. That which has resonated with me enough to work its way into my reservoir of musical vocabulary. The people that I improvise/communicate with best will be those that share more of those musical references.

The next part to this process is to develop that language into a personal one on our instrument. This has many routes, and I will deal with the details of these later. It usually starts with mimicry of musical performances that resonate with us. If we do a lot of this without going further, but really internalise the sounds, it is already massive. If we can also go beyond this, analyse what is happening, and learn to apply the ideas to other situations, we go even deeper, and here we start to develop our own voice. 

TIME

Ultimately, if all other things are equal, what governs how we prepare for improvisation, is how much time we are prepared, or have available, to spend working on it. If you have a full-time job and a young family to look after, then as long as you have an opportunity to play together in a group with other like-minded people once or twice a week, and you listen to as much music as possible, you will develop.

If you can add 2-4 hours of preparation a week, then focus on content - learning tunes and absorbing language from performances, then developing your own ideas from that. If you have 6 hours, then add some grid work on chords and scales, working in a way that best informs the ear - like playing through key areas around a resolving cycle of 5ths.

Beyond 6 hours, you have room for a fairly complete pracise agenda, which I will go into in part 2.

Read Part 2