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Hey Jay... The process you went through is what playing live jazz is, right. Unless your performing prearranged music, from memory or charts.
The improvement of your lines from, " playing an improvised guitar line as one vocally scats seems to me to improve the overall lyrical character of the phrasing and its coherency ". Isn't that just a reflection of your guitar skills as compared to your vocal skills.
Your either... playing the line on guitar and doubling with your voice, singing the line and doubling with your guitar... or hearing a line mentally and doubling with both your voice and guitar.
Personally.... the training of the ears, is what develops 90% of the imagination.
The process is great... but I wouldn't worry about backing up what you say, who cares. Your really just backing up you performance skills. Your developing your skills and hopefully enjoyment from the process.
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12-12-2014 09:20 AM
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Hey, Reg! Just a contribution to what I thought was the subject of the original post - specifically the ability to "play what you hear". Some posters feel that it is overrated, or that some who claim that ability are stretching the point.
The ability to scat is likely not essential to playing good jazz guitar, though many guitarists seem to perform some form of vocalization of the melody they are working with. I'm not sure just how I improvise an original melody, as opposed to playing the melody of a well known standard. In the latter case, yes I can sing the melody (in tune usually as well) if I know it well. In the same performance time frame I can play the melody on the guitar in various positions on the fret board, depending upon the interval range of the melody. If I can hear it, I can sing and play it. Certainly not a unique skill. But I was just commenting that inadvertently I demonstrated it to myself when I broke into vocal scatting while recording a second 'lead' guitar track over an equally improvised blues progression, with no notation of any kind to work off. Just improvising in the moment. I thought it might be interesting for some to hear that, even if it was not recorded specifically for that purpose. It is a recording of a seminal 'work tape' original tune. I would also put it up because I like the way the two guitar tracks came out, though I might add lyrics recorded as a vocal overdub on a third track towards a more polished tune.
I mean I tend to agree with the notion that vocal scatting and developing the ability to play the guitar either note-for-note with the vocal or in harmony (thirds, for example) is a worthwhile skill to try and master. I would also agree that there are a lot of other factors. For one, when you are not 'stating the melody' in a straight forward way with your guitar, but rather improvising a line over a well known melody, what you play is what is externalized, whether it was what you 'heard in your mind' exactly or an approximation of what you heard. In addition I think there is a large contribution of the rhythmic devices in the line, so important that the rhythmic pattern itself seems almost as critical as the actual choice of individual notes played. This last notion is hard to express properly, but I hope the meaning is inferable from the context. At least assuming that one's choice of notes is lyrical or harmonically correct.
Jay
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I've got a different perspective that isn't entirely related to the tangent we're on at the moment but is related to singing while playing. I sing ALL THE TIME while I'm playing ... Im probably occupying that weird middle ground between playing what I'm singing and just singing what I'm playing but that's beside the point
The reason I started singing was for phrasing. Wind instruments phrase very naturally along the same lines as speaking or singing because they play until they're out of breath and then stop to breath. If they take a big breath with lots of space they can play another long line short pause shorter line. Obviously there's a lot of choice in how people phrase too but balance of space and activity seems to be more natural with wind instruments. So I train myself to sing what I'm playing so that I stop when I have to breath. After a long time you start to phrase so that the lines fall naturally in the patterns of your breathing.
also register and intensity. Guitar players can play middle C and double C with equal ease and very little change in timbre whereas there's a natural intensity when horns change register or do large interval leaps or whatever. A timbre change. Try singing those lines while you're playing and you'll communicate the intensity of the register or contour of the line a little better. It's abstract and a total vibe thing but I think it's cool.
anyway... On the topic ...people always think there's a concrete hearing of a line before you play it and I don't know if that's true. I think there's a huge stream of consciousness with your ears and your left brain and your hands so trying to pull them apart is a bit of a chicken or the egg scenario. It's a little more important to me if the ideas are creative and organic and cool.
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The inference here being that the idea originates in the mind and the voice or fingers can express it. Or both. The important distinction for me is that the voice isn't necessarily the "go-between" between mind and fingers! People may wish to "prove" that they are not just merely wiggling their fingers randomly by singing what they are playing, but this proves little as you are hearing what you know, just as you play what you know.
Originally Posted by Reg
Singing it doesn't necessarily prove that you mean it. When I'm playing what I know (if not too fast) then of course I can sing it, before after or during, that's what "knowing it" means.... But if I'm freewheeling, or "mind scatting", I like to hear things I've never played before. Usually difficult things (think Art Tatum's right hand or something!). With these things, I'm hearing it my head, but I can't readily give it expression with either a voice or my fingers, although with the voice it's obviously easier as there's no brain-nervous system-hand co-ordination required, let alone trained movements that would be necessary to play difficult figures.
If you can play everything you hear, I say you lack imagination!
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To me it kind of comes down to that elusive goal jazz musicians often cite - find your 'voice' - or a kind of signature sound on the guitar or other instrument of choice like piano or horn. Or to put it another way - what I play when spontaneously improvising and scatting vocally or with a guitar, is what I project or where I intend to go.
For example, I can sit here, pause from typing for a moment, and vocally scat a "jazz" or other melody. In this case as I have done by recording with a Tascam DR-05 that I use for 'studying'. I can then play over this recording with my guitar, or alternatively can make another take playing and scatting simultaneously. I think this specific ability is synergistically improved and facilitated by playing the piano and using notation programs frequently.
A simple example would be to sit at the piano and play an exercise based upon a well know song melody - My Valentine. One can replicate this on a guitar. For simplicity, use the key of Bm. Play slowly and in time a two-note line that is a simultaneously a melody and a bass line voiced well as a single notes such that the bass line descends from Bm in a half-step or step manner. Baring a few mistakes I think most of us can do this easily with practice.
In effect, because you know where the melody is going, you are projecting that thought and realizing it with your instrument such as piano and guitar. One can go on to add the vocal to the instrumental melody line and you should be playing and singing in synch.
If you are purely improvising this two-note exercise as a bass and melody line without a predetermined melody or chord progression to follow or other sheet music, letting your voice take the lead and 'following' with your instrument is perhaps the simplest way I can describe the process. Of course, if my imagination 'hears' a symphony orchestra with tympani, my vocal and solo guitar version will come up lacking. But when I write, I find that my voice likes ii-V7 progressions for example and tends naturally to be lyrical. I can't as easily hear heavy metal music in my imagination. It just is not my 'voice'.
Jay
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At some point.... you need to accept who or what your are, I'm talking about your musicianship on your guitar. And this is in relationship to performing jazz. You will always continue to improve etc... but accept what you can do... not what your going to do, and start making music.
The one liner about... the road or journey is great, but if that's where or what you want than accept that and don't worry about performing. But if you do want to perform jazz... start, tap into your great stream of consciousness, if that works for you. Sing and play all the mastering a melody games... but accept where your at musically and play.
You can still have your learning journey going on, but include performance, it requires just as much practice if not more.
The mastering a melody through live performance doesn't just happen because you've learned it in all keys etc...
princeplanet quoted part of one of my somewhat one liners where I basically said you have three choices, your inner voice or what you think you hear in your head, your vocal voice and your voice on your guitar and all the combinations etc...
I also said you can mechanically create musical ideas from your instrument or memorized and notated music and combinations etc...
Anyway there are plenty of ways to help be creative and imaginative...personally... that's not the point.
When I perform I use all the musicianship I have to make the performance the best I'm able. Not me... the music being performed by the ensemble. Mastering a melody doesn't just mean playing the melody...
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I just cut and pasted this into printable format . . . enlarged, bold faced and italicized the type set and printed it. I'm going to frame it and hang it on a wall above my music stand. Originally Posted by Reg
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Playing collections of memorized phrases is what pros do, not amateurs. Plenty of amateurs do real improv we just might be inconsistent and sloppy about it. Originally Posted by Reg
According to your theory Clifford Brown would be an amateur.
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Maybe... could you elaborate on what your talking about... playing what you hear or just improv in general.
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... so they learn and practice circular breathing, so to be able to play endless lines. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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Originally Posted by Stevebol
I'll chime in here in terms of what I've been talking about in this thread - in terms of bop - essentially having a consistent flow of 8ths over ii V progressions - you have a system of memorised phrases, or enclosures as educators tend to call them these days. Literally 4 note phrases in most cases, such as how to play around a guide tone for a particular chord - for example you might have half a dozen enclosures for outlining a 3rd on a dom7 chord. Originally Posted by Reg
I tend to think of them as melodic cells - little chunks - starting with one note, then 2 note cells, 4 note cells - not really going beyond 8 notes. This is a very different concept to just rehashing 'licks'. Instead it's a system for building long lines - basically the enclosures are a set of lego blocks: 2 note blocks, 4 note blocks mostly, and you build your long bop lines out of them.
Now I've drilled these enclosures to the point where I hear them in my head pretty well - hearing what I know - but I can rearrange them on the fly, which for the most part is what the 8th note aspect of bop improv is about. You might throw in a a riff, or bluesy lick now and then for contrast, but the weaving ii V line is basically a bunch of little cells strung together.
I think jazz which is more funky/blues based - wider chord progressions and vamps - you would instead have a bag of licks - you know, the standard blues lick cliches (which sound great) that you use, which might be considered "playing collections of memorised phrases" as Reg put it.
That's my take on it, be interested to see what Reg and the others think.
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This is what I also try to do, and is what I think many of my favourite players on any instrument have done. With all due respect to other comments which may describe alternate paths to the "Holy Grail of Jazz Improv", they could only be describing alternate paths. Originally Posted by 3625
I'm sure there are many ways to get there, but mixing pre heard and pre rehearsed cells on the fly (the more the better) is surely what worked for Bird, Clifford, Stitt, Bud Powell etc. These guys wrote the Bop Bible, so whatever was good enough for them......
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To be honest, all music is made by taking little prearranged cells and reorganizing them.
I mean, in a harmonic musical context, there are three types of figures that can combine chord tones and non-chord tones- a straight arpeggio, an arpeggio with passing tones added in to make a scale, and neighbor tone figures.
The genius of a composer and improviser is how you can take those three types of figures (and their variations) and mix and match and blend and all that together to come up with something new and brilliant.
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Totally agree with the above. The key difference for me is whether someone is consciously aware of it, or whether it happens innately. A non-musician for example might make up melodies whistling down the street, and if what they're doing is musical - then you'd be able to analyse the cells if you broke it down. With jazz standards however, the reason so many guys teach enclosures is that you need to have an arsenal of 4 note phrases (& other lengths) in your mind and under your fingers set to go - and you're totally aware of it as a system - otherwise you'll be in trouble when playing a tune like Miss Jones/(insert whatever) that has a series of compressed changes - lots of 2 chords per bar - that stuff needs to be consciously worked out in advance which is where the internalised 'hearing' bit really helps. Originally Posted by Shadow of the Sun
Now some guys (good players) might say that they can play those tunes and not be thinking when they play it - like an innate process - but at some point when they were starting out they had to painstakingly put together all those little ii V cells in the woodshed and do it enough so it became an internal process. Then when performing they just 'vibe it'. Other improvisors who are big on the whole motivic development thing might choose to be more consciously aware of the cells to manipulate them in real time onstage. Either way if it's good it's good.Last edited by 3625; 12-14-2014 at 02:57 AM.
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A really good book for looking at the cells like that in a Baroque music context (but obviously applicable for jazz, pop, rock, hell, pick a genre which uses chords and you'll find something to use) is a book I found for free online called Figuring Out Melody by David Fuentes. It gives a lot of good examples of how a lot of the great melodies from the baroque period can be analyzed and broken down into figures like that. It's a really good book.
I'm not sure if I think that the great composers or improvisers worked by taking little chunks like that based on chord-tones, but since I don't have the gift of being a musical prodigy, I'll take what I can get and work on it this way.
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I'm betting my money that the great composers totally knew that stuff - especially in terms of getting down counterpoint with all it's strict rules - from the baroque period onwards is when European composers started thinking in terms of melodies superimposed over a harmonic progression. For me, a dead giveaway that a composer is aware of the 'cell' thing, is when they do a really overt example of motivic development - especially when they continue developing a theme or cell through different key centres as the piece develops. In fact every piece by Bach, Mozart, ... Brahms etc. has really overt development of motifs from start to finish - it's kinda their 'thing'. Originally Posted by Shadow of the Sun
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Basically we're talking about approaches to solo... there are more than just connecting cells of notes which imply chords, which eventually those cells do get longer and imply chord patterns, then 4 bar phrases, then Sections of tunes... then complete choruses or 32 bar or whatever length tunes.
And you then begin to create relationships with those cells.... you see a I VI II V and instead play a cell that implies III, bIII, II, bII .... you begin to have different harmonic pathways for creating relationships with the harmony.
So just as your able to hear your two, four note cells... eventually you also should be able to hear different cells in relationship to the original, or reference cell. When you see a Bbmaj7 you can probable hear possible cells that imply Bbma...
Now hear cells that imply D-7 or G-7. Now start harmonically subbing and creating harmonic relationships with the original reference... Bb. Then relationships with the relationships... etc... The only reason you might not be able to hear different cells that are created from creating relationships is because you haven't exposed your ears to them.
Personally every note implies a harmony, a chord. Even the notes in your cells have options of implying different chords, and usually do.
If you listen or watch my vids... when I comp, I play many more chords than are notated... sometime way too many. But that's the way I hear... I hear complete harmonically organized tonal systems, usually there are a few going on simultaneously, the performance part is the improv....
All this leads to different choices to how you hear... trial and error. You put in the time and train your ears to recognize from memorization, probable the path most are on.... or you educate yourself and your ears to understand and hear relationships.
I've taught myself to work by the... educate yourself and ears method.... obviously over time and playing millions of gigs, my ears have lots of trial and error also. But generally why I can walk into the studio or on stage and read through music I don't know is because I understand music and my ears can hear what I understand... I still make mistakes, from lousy notation, or lousy choices by me of reading the music.
So now you have harmonically organized systems, that you can hear... for options of where to pull your notes from... now all you need is the melodic and rhythmic organization to use them. Again that's the easy part... we all hear melodic and rhythmic patterns... we just need harmonic organization.
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I believe in improvisation.
I have no doubt that much music can be analyzed and broken down into cells large and small.
I, myself enjoy and engage in such academic exercises.
There is a wealth of great speeches mades and deep literature written.
While it is surely life enriching to study these, it would be incoherent, absurd and possibly rude, to engage in a conversation by stringing together and reworking quotes from these.
I do not believe that this was/is the methodology of master improvisors past and present.
It is more complex than a musical erector set construction project with pre-existing cells that neatly snap together.
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I hear you, and fully expect replies such as this, after all there are many wonderful players, who through devices such as motivic development, are much harder to analyse in terms of prelearned material (cells, riffs, lines etc). Sonny Rollins or Jimmy Raney for example, and yes, guys who do stitch bits together can sound a little "canned", maybe Stitt is an example of overdoing it? Originally Posted by bako
But lots of cats always made it sound fresh, Bird is THE example here. If you don't believe Bird used pre learned material almost all the time, read Thomas Owens in depth dissertation on Parker. Most illuminating yet doesn't diminish his greatness, the how and why regarding his moment to moment decisions will always remain a mystery...
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Yes I think that is really pretty obvious... but I think we were getting into one learning process which eventually gets somewhere.
But anyway a learning process, like learning to swing by accenting the and of downbeats, or the use of cells, eventually become your voice and just one of many improvisation techniques and approaches, just like the very mechanical device of motif development, both melodic and rhythmic.... eventually they become part of this magic...improvisation.
The techniques and approaches are not the goal... just learning devices... to help one find his or her inner self.
Sorry, I'm trying to have fun... music is just music, you'll be much happier and better at performing music when you keep it that way.
bako... I agree, improvisation can be very live, interactive and reactive... nothing pre-planed or played... But I believe one needs to get to a fairly high technical level of abilities both on your instrument and in your head and ears for that to happen.
This happens as accompanist also... being able to go with ensemble or soloist, not just improvisation when we're soloing.
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Everybody has some favourite ways of doing certain things. That's what's percieved as a style.
IMO, it's wrong to access making music as some sort of a puzzle to be solved. Of course, there are places and uses for that, too, in making music, and important one it is, but it can not be and is not all there is.
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Nice thread; fascinating how many different approaches there are to improvising, and theories about what is going on with the different methods.
Perhaps the thing about hearing it in your head can be clarified with this simple exercise.
- prepare a song recording or backing track to provide some chord changes to play over
- as the music plays and the chord changes happen, do the following:
Start by playing one note that "fits" over the first chord... some chord tone.
When the chord changes, either stay on that note or ascend up either a semi-tone or a whole tone (whichever is going to sound right)
With the next chord change, repeat this process.
What will happen is that you will end up playing a peculiar kind of scale in which each subsequent note fits the next chord.
Do this strictly by ear, hearing in your head what the next note up should be to sound right, and you may be surprised at how well you do this... at this point the things working in your favor are that the direction of movement to the next note is always up, the step up is limited to a couple of choices, and you are only making one note change for each chord change. Even those with little experience of interval ear training will likely discover that their "span" of accuracy is quite good when limited to just the couple of neighboring notes.
At this point the process is slow enough with sufficient restrictions that you can concentrate directly on the sound of the next note and should be able to get it right ("fits" the chord).
The eventual extension of this is to progressively release the restrictions but continue to play it only by ear:
- play in the down direction
- play in the up or down direction
- play more than one note up or down for each chord change
- increase the span of the envelope of your choice of notes to additional intervals
- introduce more complex or less predictable chord progressions
- increase the tempo of what you play over, or use songs with faster changes
Although I'm presenting these steps as a possible deliberate experiment or exercise, the basis of these things is what actually happens through practice and playing that leads to the ability to play what you hear in your head... predictively, reliably, and effortlessly enough to provide plenty of "headroom" to focus on the emotional aspects of construction, technical aspects of execution, and musical aspects of integration and expression, etc...
You still have to have "something to say" in your playing, based on experience with music and time on the instrument. The development of playing what you hear in your head is just one of the most direct methods of getting "your musical statement" to come out of the instrument... (have you seen Hal Galper's Master Class - The Illusion of An Instrument on youtube?).
I'd be interested in hearing results from anyone who tries this experiment / exercise; especially from those that question or wonder about the "play what you hear" idea.
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Originally Posted by bako
+1 for what Reg wrote - I genuinely enjoy talking about this stuff and find it valuable to hear what another player thinks about this. Originally Posted by Reg
Bottom line is that jazz, and specifically bop is a language. And you have to learn the vocab necessary to communicate in that language. The cell thing is just the minimum set of skills you need before you've even got a chance of making art. And yeah, there's a multitude of more advanced, or 'macro' concepts you superimpose over that framework.
Bako, - safe to say we're on different sides of the river on this. I don't want to take away the 'magic' from jazz improvisation - but if you don't know your stuff on the instrument, i.e. how to correctly outline chord changes - then how else are you supposed to do it?
Question for you - you're onstage, and having to play a standard at say 190bpm (quick but by no means fast) - could be 'How High The Moon' (something that cycles through key centres) - if you don't believe in having a system of lines (I call them cells) for outlining the changes, how would you approach it? I personally don't think it can be done otherwise in this context. It's all well and good to say 'I believe in improvisation', but what exactly does that mean in concrete terms?
Also, for me the whole point is that you eventually develop your own system of cells, you don't 'cut and paste quotes from the masters' - that's the opposite of what I've been saying - if you did that your playing would sound disjointed and false. Someone who develops their own system has a continuity to their style - you can hear it's them from start to finish. Their own musical DNA.
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I'm definitely with you on Bird - good point. But I'd say the motivic guys are the easiest to recognise in terms of the cell thing. Raney had a system of cells you'd hear him use over and over again. Particularly in the 70's/80's he had this descending lick you'd hear almost half a dozen times each solo. I'd hum it for you if I could (well I can't type it) and I reckon you'd recognise it, if you regularly listened to his playing from that period. In fact I'd say Raney is the poster child for the whole 'cell thing' with bop guitar, particularly the later stuff. Originally Posted by princeplanet
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You play a tune enough, you-re gonna remember some ideas.
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