A Practical Approach to Learning the Jazz Language

[dasein]

in trying to learn how to learn jazz, the temptation is to think that "the secret" that prevents us from reaching the heights of the masters is always "somewhere else"

we spend countless amounts of money on books, videos, lessons hoping that somewhere along the way, we will acquire that knowledge that will bridge the gap, so to speak.

it's not that books never help (although ironically, the books that really CAN help like The Advancing Guitarist are the books many players tend to avoid working on, since the payoff is not immediate and requires extensive time and effort). but there is always the sense that these books are incomplete.

this is further highlighted by the fact that the great players that learned to play before the 1970's had NO access to the wealth of instructional materials that we had, yet their playing is still light years ahead of us.

it could be that these players were all "geniuses" who could figure this all out. possibly, but there's no real evidence of that. they could also be players who just practiced 12 hours a day and just worked harder at it than us. also possible, but for every player like Charlie Parker or Coltrane who practiced 12 hours a day, there are stories of musicians who decidedly did NOT have fanatical practice schedules.

i would argue that there is something else that we're missing, something that we missed not because it was a secret, but because it was right in front of us the whole time.

if you read lots of different musician's biographies and interviews, you will notice something that comes up an awful lot:

"When I was younger, I really went crazy over X RECORDING... I practically wore out the grooves on it."

many, many examples of this throughout jazz history:

- Charlie Parker was an obsessive Lester Young fan, and there are bootleg recordings of him playing famous Prez solos like "Shoeshine Boy" as a warmup, note-for-note

- Wes Montgomery started playing guitar because of Charlie Christian, and learned how to play by copying his solos. the first time Wes went onto a bandstand, he got so nervous when it came time to solo that he just played a Charlie Christian solo note-for-note

- Sonny Rollins, when he first came up, was notable for sounding almost EXACTLY like Coleman Hawkins until he went and shed his bebop stuff

- Pat Metheny would talk about interviews about how he would listen to a handful of recordings over and over again until he had them memorized (I believe they included Wes' Smokin at the Half Note and Miles Davis' Four and More)

furthermore, you have Lennie Tristano where a HUGE part of his pedagogy, the thing he called his "most important contribution to teaching", was to have his students sing along to famous solos and then play them on their instruments.

it is tempting to look at all this, and think that the key is just to transcribe more, to learn more solos. but it is much deeper than that.

it's not enough to just be able to play along with a solo, because then you can turn it into a lifeless technical exercise. you must absorbthe solo, be able to sing it from memory effortlessly and then play it on your instrument.

we hear all the time that "jazz is a language." what does that really mean? does it mean that we can just learn lots of phrases (licks) and be able to speak it? if that was the case, all we would need to be a great jazz player is one of those 1001 Jazz Lick books.

but i would strongly argue that jazz as a language is much, much more than just a set of licks. in order to play jazz, you need more than just lines. there is an essential rhythmic foundation, requiring an intuitive knowledge of proper accents and syncopation. there is not just the lines themselves, but the way the lines interact with the song both harmonically and rhythmically. there are the melodic shapes that organize the lines. there's phrasing. all of these things are essential.

there's simply no way you can improvise on a high level without these things. there's also no way you can improvise on a high level if you have to THINK about these things on a conscious level, anymore than you can speak a language eloquently if you're thinking about syntax, verb forms, or grammar.

all these things must be ingrained into your unconscious mind, and the best way to get it there is through focused and intensive listening.

with me so far? alright, because here's perhaps a more controversial statement: i believe that the best place to start with this listening is with the great players that immediately preceded bebop.

i'm not alone on this, since Lennie Tristano would start almost all his students with Lester Young. but here's my reasoning:

- bebop, while a essential to the jazz language since 1940, is simply too complicated for a beginning musician to hear and absorb. the tempos are too fast, the melodic and rhythmic ideas are too complex.

- the players immediately preceding bebop are much easier to hear and absorb on every level. and because they directly inspired the bebop players, absorbing their playing will make later bebop study much, much easier.

which players would i start with? i would go with the following:

- Lester Young. I would stick with mostly the pre-war stuff. it's the music that bebop players would have studied, and it's Young at his most effortless. anything with the Basie band or his collaborations with Billie Holiday are gold. don't forget his famous session with Basie's small group with "Lady Be Good" or "Shoeshine Boy." countless players learned those solos note for note.

- Charlie Christian. shouldn't have to explain this one. the old compilation "The Genius of the Electric Guitar" works great

- Coleman Hawkins. lots of great choices here... Body and Soul... The Man I Love... the Tristano school players did not like the Hawk compared to Lester Young, but the fact that Lee Konitz STILL learned a bunch of is solos should speak volumes

- Roy Eldridge. there's an old Columbia compilation with the Gene Krupa band that has loads of great stuff to learn. there's also lots of cuts out there where he's a sideman for a vocalist... one of my favorites is his solo on "Nobody's Baby" with Mildred Bailey

- Ben Webster. anything from the Blanton/Webster band is great, but i would especially learn his famous solo on "Cottontail." any solo that's so famous that audiences demand it be repeated ad nauseum every time they play the song... yea, that's probably a pretty good solo

now, you may notice that i left out some fairly obvious pre-bob players. what about Louis Armstrong? Sidney Bechet? seriously, what about Louis Freakin' Armstrong, isn't he the most important player in the history of jazz?

you're more than welcome to give the same treatment to Satchmo. but remember how we skipped the bebop players for now because it was too complex? Louis Armstrong's note choice and melodic ideas aren't that complex, but his rhythmic ideas and time feel were from a completely different planet. listen to a bunch of solos from the Hot Fives and Sevens and you'll see what i mean. he is definitely worth studying, but for te beginning player, i would recommend coming back to him later

so how do you put this into practice? like so...

1. first, get the music i recommended above. many of these can be had for dirt cheap on Amazon or iTunes.

2. next, rip them onto your computer and open them in a program like Audacity. take each song, and cut out everything EXCEPT the solo. export them as new MP3s so you're left with a bunch of audio tracks of JUST solos. the nice thing about these pre-bop recordings is that the solos are usually well under a minute each.

3. put these solo tracks on an MP3 player, your phone, burn them onto a CD, whatever. now you must listen to them CONSTANTLY. put them on a loop, and just let it play over and over. play them in the car. play them on the bus. play them as you're jogging. play them while you're at work. play them as you're getting ready to fall asleep. play them until you're sick of them. OVER AND OVER again.

4. after countless listens over weeks and months, you're eventually going to start memorizing these solos. first see if you can sing along with them. once that happens, you can start learning them on your instrument. you'll be surprised at how easy it is once you go through all this.

after you do that, i would move on and do the same thing to bebop players: Bird, Diz, Bud Powell, Fats Navarro, etc.

if you do this thoroughly, i guarantee you that it will have a transformative effect on the way you play and hear this music. when you're able to clearly hear and understand bebop, it changes how you hear ALL of jazz that came after it.

obviously, you should still work on other things: scales, chords, arpeggios, voice leading, learning tunes, all that fun stuff. but in working with my students, i find that this sort of intensive listening and absorbtion is often a "missing piece" in their playing

[Pukka-J]

Good observation I think!

[Jehu]

Good stuff. The only thing I wonder about is #2. Correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of pre-bop soloing is built off of the melody, is it not? So wouldn't it be best to keep the head so you can situate the solo in the context of how they interpret the melody of the tune?

[GuitOp81]

I subscribe to this.
I am convinced that such an approach would work.
Abstracting from the specific examples and indications you gave I would say that learning improvisation requires:

1. an extended period of full immersion practice spent learning how to play the music you like. Anecdotal evidence suggests at least a couple of years of adolescent fire spent on the instrument.

2. a way to make sure you fully assimilated the things you learned. Singing the solos is one way but the ultimate test is using what you learned in a live situation, with other musicians and an audience

3. reach a critical mass that, by the sheer quantity of things you learned, puts you beyond the mechanical regurgitation of licks. i.e. it becomes easier to improvise than to remember licks note by note

And that is why I will never make it

[dasein]

Good stuff. The only thing I wonder about is #2. Correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of pre-bop soloing is built off of the melody, is it not? So wouldn't it be best to keep the head so you can situate the solo in the context of how they interpret the melody of the tune?

a good question, and i dont think there's a right or wrong answer. my reasoning for not including the heads went something like this:

- in a lot of instances, they don't even play the head. especially Coleman Hawkins, sometimes he just plays the first phrase of the head, and immediately starts improvising. it makes sense, on those old 78's you had maybe 3 minutes for the entire song, so if you could avoid playing the head you had more time to improvise

- for me personally, it's a lot easier to memorize/sing a melody, even the really complicated bebop heads. by contrast, it takes me quite a number of listens to memorize even a pretty simple Lester Young solo. but your experiences may differ.

- frankly, a lot of the melodies in some of those pre-bop recordings are pretty bad. if i had to listen to some of those Benny Goodman heads a hundred times in order to get to the Charlie Christian solos, i would go insane.


but if you want to include the heads, by all means go for it.

i did a similar "solos only" treatment to Sonny Rollins' "Night at the Village Vanguard" recordings, and ended up including all the heads, because the way he played them were so terrific.

[konstantine]

Great observations and a nice post, I agree with you, transcribing is a very valuable tool to learn the language, and many great players tried to copy other players when they where learning. Some (Mike Stern for example) still transcribe solos even thought they clearly are beyond this phase.

But I have two conflicts with your post, the first is that you´re creating a rule there and the best rule is that there are no rules!! For example, Jim Hall; the father of modern jazz guitar, has said to have only transcribed only one solo (by Charlie Christian).

And secondly, you claim that played thaw learned how to play before 1970 are light years ahead of us, thats an ignorant statement to make and its simply not true!

[dasein]

Great observations and a nice post, I agree with you, transcribing is a very valuable tool to learn the language, and many great players tried to copy other players when they where learning. Some (Mike Stern for example) still transcribe solos even thought they clearly are beyond this phase.

But I have two conflicts with your post, the first is that you´re creating a rule there and the best rule is that there are no rules!! For example, Jim Hall; the father of modern jazz guitar, has said to have only transcribed only one solo (by Charlie Christian).

And secondly, you claim that played thaw learned how to play before 1970 are light years ahead of us, thats an ignorant statement to make and its simply not true!

huh?

i never said that there were any rules. if you don't like something about it, change it. or don't do it. what do i care?

and my point was that many players who learned jazz before the 1970s are better than the players ON THIS FORUM, despite the fact that many people on this forum have countless instructional books, videos, access to teachers via Skype, etc. that older players couldn't even dream of.

but hey, if you know someone on this forum who plays better than Bird or Trane, by all means let us know. i'm sure they'd have some good advice.

i also want to clarify that this method is not just transcription.

a lot of players decided to transcribe something, then they go put it in Transcribe! or Amazing Slow Downer, get it to 50%, and learn a solo phrase by phrase with their instrument in hand.

while i think that those transcription programs are very useful and have a place in the process, the key part of the process is intensive listening. without the listening component, without the aural memorization and absorption, a solo just becomes a lifeless technical exercise, moving your fingers without any real comprehension.

while Jim Hall may not have learned too many solos note-for-note, he clearly took the absorption thing to heart:

"I was amazed. Christian played two choruses of blues on Grand Slam. I bought the record right away. We didn’t have a record player at home, so I carried it around with me and played it wherever I could."

in his book, he also gives a recommended list of solos to listen to.

[randalljazz]

working on buddy bolden solos myself...

[samrsmiley]

The OP is right on a ton of this stuff. I'm a huge fan of the Tristano clan myself and did a huge research project on it in grad school.

After sitting with this topic for a long time, I think that Tristano's sentiments are pretty right on, BUT the list should probably be updated. I've always felt there have been a few 'real improvisors' (to use Lenny's term) since Lester Young. I would include Monk - who Tristano did NOT like, Bill Frisell, and maybe Lovano.

Then of course there are the Tristano-ites - Konitz, Marsh, and more recently Mark Turner.

But the idea of learning the jazz improvisation language through means other than bebop is a very good place to start with young improvisors. Bird and Dizzy didn't have any Charlie Parker lines to learn Same with Bud Powell... just saying.

[samrsmiley]

Don't forget the biggest part of Tristano's teaching was SINGING - read that interview with Lee Konitz (I think it was Lee) where he had to SING Bird's solo on Yardbird Suite for several MONTHS before learning to play it!!

That is where that intensive listening really happens in Tristano's method.

So that's the mechanism, but I think it is a little short sighted to use Lennie's list verbatim.

[monk]

working on buddy bolden solos myself...

Good trick, especially since no Buddy Bolden recordings are known to exist.

[coolvinny]

I totally agree with all this, except personally I'm focusing on Jimmy Raney because his playing seems most compatible with what I often hear. I'm not a bluesy, soulful guy but rather more of a thinking man like he was, so it seems like a good fit. I guess my 2 cents are that it could make sense to choose a role model that you see as musically compatible with yourself (assuming you're not a beginner).

[NSJ]

Good trick, especially since no Buddy Bolden recordings are known to exist.

Still meaning to pick this one up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Through_Slaughter

[nosoyninja]

...

3. reach a critical mass that, by the sheer quantity of things you learned, puts you beyond the mechanical regurgitation of licks. i.e. it becomes easier to improvise than to remember licks note by note

Very astute observation! Easier said than done, though...

[GuyBoden]

Good stuff.

[Broyale]

I'm listening to alot of Grant Green's stuff, picking up little lines and licks as well. His recordings have been very helpful for improving my phrasing. I agree with Dasien's post. One of the reasons I think jazzers from back in the day got where they did skillwise was because they had few distractions to deal with (youtube, books, everybody trying to sell you a method book, forums, etc.) All they had was the music, their ears, and a mentor or two to guide them along. Some were even lucky enough to study jazz in college. Sometimes, I have to remind myself that you can't learn to play the music if you don't actually listen to it.

[randalljazz]

Good trick, especially since no Buddy Bolden recordings are known to exist.

alas, i am not at liberty to reveal my sources.

[Jonzo]

Deleted comment after I reread OP.

[Melodic Dreamer]

I agree with the OP, but I also think there is one key thing missing for players in today's world. Maybe this was already posted, but I think the biggest thing is the BAND STAND! I know that is where my biggest problem lies. There was a time that Jazz was part of the normal spectrum of music being heard. That is not the case today. It's hard to find someone who plays jazz in a lot of rural areas. If you do find someone to play with, good luck finding a place to play.

I think for the most part the people who love jazz still listen to their favorite records. They still try to cop melodies and transcribe licks, but there isn't an outlet to really learn how to apply the things one's learned. At least this is how I feel.

[fumblefingers]

So in other words,

imitate,

assimilate,

innovate?

[fumblefingers]

i wasn't trying to be a smart ass you guys. i think its the same concept, that's all. in other words, i think its the same truth.


please continue.

[fep]

in trying to learn how to learn jazz, the temptation is to think that "the secret" that prevents us from reaching the heights of the masters is always "somewhere else"

we spend countless amounts of money on books, videos, lessons hoping that somewhere along the way, we will acquire that knowledge that will bridge the gap, so to speak.

it's not that books never help (although ironically, the books that really CAN help like The Advancing Guitarist are the books many players tend to avoid working on, since the payoff is not immediate and requires extensive time and effort). but there is always the sense that these books are incomplete.

this is further highlighted by the fact that the great players that learned to play before the 1970's had NO access to the wealth of instructional materials that we had, yet their playing is still light years ahead of us.

it could be that these players were all "geniuses" who could figure this all out. possibly, but there's no real evidence of that. they could also be players who just practiced 12 hours a day and just worked harder at it than us. also possible, but for every player like Charlie Parker or Coltrane who practiced 12 hours a day, there are stories of musicians who decidedly did NOT have fanatical practice schedules.

i would argue that there is something else that we're missing, something that we missed not because it was a secret, but because it was right in front of us the whole time...

(removed as this post exceeded the forums allowable word limit)

...if you do this thoroughly, i guarantee you that it will have a transformative effect on the way you play and hear this music. when you're able to clearly hear and understand bebop, it changes how you hear ALL of jazz that came after it.

obviously, you should still work on other things: scales, chords, arpeggios, voice leading, learning tunes, all that fun stuff. but in working with my students, i find that this sort of intensive listening and absorbtion is often a "missing piece" in their playing

Decades ago, I spent a lot of time singing along with Charlie Parker records. I was fun.

I think understanding theory helps one organize the jazz language which helps one assimilate the language. It's like having an organized file cabinet versus just a large pile of paper on the floor. To me that's just common sense.

I'm not saying theory instead of transcribing and listening to jazz, but theory does have a place in ones studies.

Dasein, are you a teacher? professor? performing pro?

"this is further highlighted by the fact that the great players that learned to play before the 1970's had NO access to the wealth of instructional materials that we had, yet their playing is still light years ahead of us."

First, their playing was light years ahead of most of the musicians hobbyists and professionals of their time also. There is no validity is saying the greats are better than the not so greats. That is true today and true back then.

Secondly, how do we know these musicians didn't spend a lot of time discussing theory amongst themselves. How do we know they didn't spend a lot of time practicing arpeggios, scales, licks etc? I read that Charlie Parker was devoted to practice. How do we know how much time they all spent copying others versus other things they practiced?

I think a lot of us grew up memorizing solos of the players we thought were great. Yet, we are still just fair players.

The best example I know of is a couple of folks that have done more transcribing than probably 99% of the music population. One of them is famous for his books, everyone here would know his books, he's good but definately not what I would consider great. The other is publishing a 300 plus page book of transcriptions of a famous guitar player that we all know. It's great work. But, the author's playing, mediocre at best.

[coolvinny]

It is easy to think one can sing a solo and think one really knows a solo, when in reality the pitches beig sung are approximations at best and are not backed up by actual knowledge of the intervals. Also "memorizing a solo" is dead freakin easy (especially to play). That is not the hard work part, which comes afterwards and takes longer. Just going through the motions does not ensure results.

[GuyBoden]

It's always enjoyable listening to good records, singing along and trying to play along.

[Jonzo]

Decades ago, I spent a lot of time singing along with Charlie Parker records. I was fun.

You still are fun, FEP!

Actually, I had some criticisms similar to what you said above, but then I read all the way to the bottom of the post:

obviously, you should still work on other things: scales, chords, arpeggios, voice leading, learning tunes, all that fun stuff. but in working with my students, i find that this sort of intensive listening and absorbtion is often a "missing piece" in their playing

I don't think there is anything magic about transcription, but I don't doubt that it can be helpful, or even essential, as part of a balanced program.

There are a lot of practice elements that can be "missing pieces" that make all the difference when you start practicing them.

Still, you need to drop the snarky "are you a teacher? professor? performing pro?" routine. He is writing about his personal experience, and doesn't need any special credentials to do so.