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Yes, we should strive to play evenly, cleanly, and on-time.
But Hal Galper has another perspective.
8:46 - making mistakes
14:21 - practising mistakes
Another perspective:
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11-06-2025 04:15 AM
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I love Hal's lessons. I had the great fortune to learn from him when he came to town to play with Jerry Bergonzi.
Really great advice here. He talks about the playing and the practicing duality. Wise perspective to be aware of. Another thing I get from playing and hanging with the masters is an awareness that who they are when they're playing is who they are when hanging without an instrument. Being aware, insightful, clever, playful, crafty, and aware of connections and beauty are things that are pervasive as a lifestyle. With the great musicians I've known, the music doesn't stop when the gig is over and the hang isn't something that leaves you when you play.
Play when you live. Live when you're playing. Find connections and make something new and feel the joy of that.
Often it comes down to a decision of whether you can really live this way; and so so often students eventually make life decisions not to live creatively. For every student that is inspired to learn to play music, there will be the mass majority that eventually give up the necessary "practice" time it takes to be an imaginative and creative human being.
Artists see unexpected situations as opportunities to reshape expectations. That's often counter to holding down a day job that has no room for that attitude when you're "practicing" being successful.
I wonder how many of the kids he's talking to in that room went on to actually make that lifestyle breakthrough.
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'Mistakes are what makes jazz, jazz'
Hilarious!
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Sure, jazz is mistakes
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Ask any jazz guitarist's wife when she looks at his collection.
Originally Posted by Danil
Sure, jazz is mistakes
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Mistakes are what make jazz jazz.
Lee Morgan, do you have something to say about that?
That second "video content" maker is a good example of the kind of generalization and simplification that gives this music a bad reputation. Citing examples of artists who "forgot the lyrics" in a performance and made up lyrics. That's kinda like saying
"There was a performance where a piano soloist found out on the stage that she had been preparing the wrong piece and then went on to play the concerto perfectly", that's because classical music is about memorizing pieces and playing them anytime you want.
There's a LOT to jazz and it's about you being a composer of great commitment and creating a reflection of yourself with the many things, musical and otherwise, in a form of disciplined beauty and integrity.
The gimmick of embracing and elevating mistakes is the fascination of a neophyte.
Seeing the capturing of the creative process as "right" and "wrong (mistakes)" misses the point. It's like saying that the Mona Lisa was great art because DaVinci made an image out of the mistake of an amorphous glob of ink on the canvas.
Right.
Sometimes it's better to put your time into coming up with your own revelations, and doing that in the practice room.
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Mistakes happen and they go by just as fast as the intentional notes. Better to focus on the intentional stuff, if you practice mistakes, you'll make more mistakes. Just like a youth baseball team that goofs around at warmup by throwing bad passes so the other kid has to run and fetch the ball, guess what happens during the game?
Spoiler, they don't learn how to pass well when the pressure is on.
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I deal with mistakes as best I can and those are good ways to do it, but I've never been glad to have made one
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Relay the ball is the common baseball term, "pass" refers to a catcher's error (passed ball) -- Baseball Dictionary by Paul Dickson
Last edited by Mick-7; 11-06-2025 at 02:41 PM.
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Um. There are multiple types of mistakes and their subtypes. Not all of them are cute.
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There are mistakes and there are mistakes.
There are the mistakes that happen when one hits the wrong note by accident, which can happen to anyone. But there are the mistakes that happen because one isn't sufficiently familiar with the material. And for that the only answer is more practice of the right kind.
There are also mistakes that inevitably occur when one is trying to do something beyond one's skills or capacities. And sometimes there's not a ready solution to that, it depends on the player. It's far better to play something simple with great skill than to attempt something complex and inevitably fail. A little humility goes a long way.
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I'll worry about minutia when the kids can catch the damn ball. Originally Posted by Mick-7
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Not all mistakes are the same.
- The Right Wrong Notes (the substance is good jazz, not a problem)
The are things that non-jazz people might consider anomalies - bass not sticking to roots and fifths, guitar or piano playing weird (extended/altered) harmonies, soloists playing lines with peculiar extra notes from "deformed" scales with too few or too many notes to be properly diatonic, etc.
- The Wrong Right Notes (invisible to virtually all)
Maybe not even those playing would notice or care. An example is the bass plays the same note as the guitar - the 60s video of Wes in Europe playing Round Midnight shows Wes eyeing the bass the one time this happens, no facial expression, almost subliminal acknowledgement. For normal humans, this is also not a problem.
- Real mistakes (these are a problem)
There is a very brief window allowing some or full suppression, recovery, or masking; paradoxically, despite these being the worst individual and common type of error, we don't work to learn the methods of "disarming" them when practicing - we learn them through thousands of hours of performance, gradually, and gratefully.
- Real Bad Mistakes (whole bad serious problem)
Classic example is the "train wreck" where like a derailing train, more parts of the train also get pulled into derailleur. Also paradoxically, there is a wonderful method of learning how to fix this in rehearsal. It is simple; periodically you do this exercise... You play a song but don't end it the usual way. You deconstruct it and return it back into the same song. This is done deliberately in rehearsal to learn how to get the train back on the tracks in a way that appears to have been a deliberate interlude into deconstruction of the tune.
The return to the tune may be staged where perhaps the drummer brings back the tempo, then the bass, then the rest, or someone can play something to establish a certain place in the form into which all come in.
The way to make this bulletproof is to rehearse deconstruction between to different tunes, so as you approach the end of the first tune you keep going, knowing that the next tune may be a different key, tempo, style, etc. The deconstruction interlude becomes the path from one tune into another.
Maybe deconstruction was invented long time ago to disguise jazz tune crashes?
Last edited by pauln; 11-06-2025 at 08:27 PM.
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:-)(whole bad serious problem)
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Meant "whole band" but on reading "whole Originally Posted by ragman1
bad" a few times, I like that so much better.
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"Risk is what moves all of us forward. If you're playing in your comfort zone, that ain't jazz."
-- Herbie Hancock
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