How do you keep your practice session “musical?”

[Roberoo]

Out of a two hour session I will dedicate only 15 minutes to slow warm up technical exercises. The next 90 minutes I will work on 3 tunes and will play each one

1 Freddie Green style if applicable
2 A modern comping style
3 play the melody in 2 octaves
4 Improvise 5 or 6 choruses
5 Work on intro and ending if need be
6 Work on problematic sections if necessary

The remaining 15 minutes is reviewing a new tune including listening to interesting versions.

In short, the vast majority is tune based. People don’t come to listen to variations on the double diminished scale.

Before coming off as too preachy I will confess to doing a lot more technical work in my younger years. Now I am bored stiff by it.

[telejw]

love this approach!

Out of a two hour session I will dedicate only 15 minutes to slow warm up technical exercises. The next 90 minutes I will work on 3 tunes and will play each one

1 Freddie Green style if applicable
2 A modern comping style
3 play the melody in 2 octaves
4 Improvise 5 or 6 choruses
5 Work on intro and ending if need be
6 Work on problematic sections if necessary

The remaining 15 minutes is reviewing a new tune including listening to interesting versions.

In short, the vast majority is tune based. People don’t come to listen to variations on the double diminished scale.

Before coming off as too preachy I will confess to doing a lot more technical work in my younger years. Now I am bored stiff by it.

[Bobby Timmons]

My current focused practice routine.

BH 6th/dim and single note.
Bluez and rhythm changes. Using Blue Monk and No Mo.
Every key.
Metronome on every beat at 120.
Learning Bud Powell Celia all the way through with solo.

[emanresu]

Btw. I got this idea from ancient times at school when in a band rehearsal someone killed the lights and we played in the dark and something special happened.
I'm sure everyone has played in complete darkness for fun. But it actually works awesomely for realz.. it turned out.

Made a video too.

[Groyniad]

the very best way is to look at nice archtop guitars online and sometimes post on music fora - like today. Or swap from one guitar to another thinking - oh yes this is the really nice one, thank goodness I've got this one, maybe I'll sell that one....

but if I get bored of that approach - this one is the next best:

to improvise on guitar you need the whole neck - it takes a stupidly long time to be able to see / hear everything from many different angles so you don't get lost when playing tunes and so you can play a given phrase musically rather than like a typewriter or machine gun (horn players and pianists don't have this challenge like we do). if you use non-musical methods to learn the neck (e.g. repeating patterns/scales that don't fit in the bar - or that don't sound cool) you will wreck your ear and turn yourself into a technician rather than a musician. so you have to use groovy musical ways to conquer the extraordinary musical geometry of the neck...

what ways?

By far the most obvious and surely the best thing to do here is to learn lots of tunes (melody - harmony - bass line) and to force yourself to learn them in all the different parts of the neck. I think this is likely to be almost enough if you're quite musical already. There are gaps between the melody lines making up the tunes - find musical things to play in those gaps. I don't think you could learn fifty good songbook tunes in this way - learning how to embellish and fill in - and fail to get really very good. I think it would be impossible to know fifty tunes really well - and not be a pretty damn good musician. So you don't need more than this really - just keep munching up the wonderful tunes and keep trying to hear/play what the tunes suggest to you.

(I went to a masterclass with Jack Wilkins a long time ago and sat in a room with him and twenty students. he kept asking them to suggest tunes for him to use to demonstrate this and that, and no-one could come up with a tune after Autumn Leaves and Stella had been suggested. I wanted to say to everyone there that if they weren't into tunes they should not be trying to learn to play jazz. I think that's what mr Wilkins wanted to say too. if you think your practice routine is unmusical and you aren't learning tunes then you should be very clear why your practice feels unexciting.)

if this isn't enough - and you can't think of what to do to develop the tunes you're learning - then work out what you're favourite players do with the tunes - making sure you learn to play their ideas musically (with the slurs and the emphasis in the right places). if you love be-bop learn to play every phrase of a couple of (feasible) bird solos in lots of ways in lots of different parts of the neck. This ought to stimulate your imagination sufficiently so that you can start to invent ideas which satisfy you almost as much as your favourite players' ideas satisfy you.

using chromaticism heavily (enclosures/approach tones) has been crucial for me to find musically enjoyable ways of learning the whole neck. there are fabulous exercises you can do which speed up this process very nicely - the be-bop descendants of scales I suppose (see e.g. Chad Lefcowitz Brown's teaching materials).

I can't practice anything that fails to cook my musical biscuit - I get bored easily if I'm not practicing, but I figure I should be able to avoid getting bored when I am.

There are no tricks available for someone who wants to learn to play jazz (take that pearl of wisdom to YouTube!). You have to put yourself through the most holistic course of musical development you can devise for yourself. singing as much as possible has to be a good way to make sure you include yourself and not just your fingers and hands in the musical training you put yourself through.

[Cunamara]

I enjoy music the most when I involve myself in situations that require me to learn tunes. Last week it was Cheesecake by Dexter Gordon. What a fantastic tune! Learn a new tune a week and by the end of the year you have 52 new tunes. That's several sets worth of music.

[emanresu]

There are no tricks available for someone who wants to learn to play jazz (take that pearl of wisdom to YouTube!).

Rather, there is no need for tricks for someone who truly wants to learn to play jazz.
Because while there are a lot of tricks, if you really, truly want to play jazz great… yeah, there's no way around putting in that humongous amount of work.

[Groyniad]

the tunes will teach you everything if you get into them 'deeply'. I am nuts about the way melody and harmony work together - and the wonderful truth is that so many (if not all!) of the coolest combinations of time/harmony/melody are explored and exploited by the fantastically gifted songsters working in the states between (what?) 1920-1958. do they leave any harmonic nooks and crannies unexploited? between them I bet the answer is no.

start with the melody and dig how it exploits (makes the best of) the harmony - when you can play the melody with the changes effortlessly, allow yourself to invent some simple motifs which do a similar harmonic job - then put the odd 'line' in between the motifs (to fill them in).

Bill Evans suggested working up ten versions of any tune starting with a version which features the melody in very close to its written form and ending with a version which is a very long way from the melody. that is fun. (I limit it to three versions.... because I'm not that good yet)

oh and we have to distinguish between doing musical things in practice and producing music in practice (trying to do musical things in practice but not managing it very well is perfectly cool. deliberately doing things that have no obvious connection to musical things is possibly quite uncool.)