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To me, the most critical (and under-discussed) aspect of jazz soloing (guitar or otherwise) is to have musical ideas. That comes first. You can tell when someone is playing ideas (rather than material, patterns, etc). It flows, it connects one phrase to the next, and can surprise you going to new places. Ideas are both rhythmic and melodic. Of course, on jazz guitar, the "ear" players -- Django, Wes Montgomery, Tal Farlow, etc -- are prime examples of the benefit.
My model of improv is: musical idea first, then, via ears note-finding, then via physical technique performance. Of course this all happens real time in a continuing loop.
Practicing material such as scales is still important in this model: it feeds all aspects of the loop (imagination, note recognition, technique). However, teaching musical imagination is not very common and I'm not even sure how it could be done. Encourage listening to the jazz greats? Encourage singing along with oneself? Not sure. If you agree that promoting musical imagination is important, how would you recommend teaching it?
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02-28-2022 10:26 AM
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Break down how ideas are constructed. You can approach this from a raw materials standpoint of a rhythmic idea plus a harmonic set of notes or you can analyze ideas in other players.
Originally Posted by Rsilver
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Thanks for your response. I actually think ideas must come to one as musical sounds. So exercising musical imagination needs to occur without concepts such as harmonic rules. If you can hear a blues solo in your head — that’s your musical imagination. Now try to hear a solo on — whatever — Autumn Leaves etc. Now you have to get those musical ideas on to the guitar (of course each time you do it it’s a different solo).
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Why? Hearing ideas is absolutely one of the main goals, but figuring out ideas can be done with the help of a framework. If you wanted to teach the concept from a sound only standpoint, you could work on ear training to hear ideas in your head or hear ideas directly to your instrument. Originally Posted by Rsilver
Last edited by Bobby Timmons; 02-28-2022 at 12:15 PM.
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Don’t worry about musical imagination.
Get on stage and play with other people. Brace yourself too, because all those good ideas you have in your living room, they aren’t going to show up when you’re on stage, And the band just keeps playing.
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^ That isn't true. You may not be able to execute everything that you had planned out in practice, but you still draw on the stuff you have built up, and you can probably have some sort of imagination in real time as well.
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My model is that you have to play musical ideas on the bandstand -- when you are improvising---because that's what you are improvising: music. However, everyone (me included) has a set of licks, everyone can open a can of their prepared "beef stew" as Mick Goodrick called it. But if the goal is improvising -- it's music you are improvising and your contribution to the tune is the ideas you are having. So a good thing to develop is your unique musical imagination.
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I agree, but the process isn't aural only.
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I really recommend a strong sense of rhythmic phrasing.
The goal is to hear space in a way that swings.
Work with a metronome with the clicks on 2 and 4, and learn to scat, with your voice; no hands on the guitar at first.
If that's tough, snap your fingers on 2 and 4 and walk (move your body) so you can sing a line, short phrases with your fingers snapping on 2 and 4. This will internalize a musical feel and give a framework for playing melodic harmony appropriate notes.
Feel the time.
Use your voice.
Practice swing phrasing with shorter segments.
Listen to what you do.
That's the groundwork for melody in my book.
Others may be different but this works really well for myself and my students.
Have fun
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There's also a "technical" musical imagination.
"Musical idea" itself is soooooooooooooooooooooooooo vague - not much theory or definition helps there. But worth to pursue of course.
My simplest approach is to just sit and figure out a tasty passage when learning a scale. Or progression with tasty feel when doing some chord workout. (like football)
Instead just going over the always infinite combinations in orderly fashion. (like gym)
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OK but keep in mind that many jazz players JUST play musical ideas (Satchmo, Django, Wes, etc). And they are very melodic and compelling players. So I don’t think it’s vague. It’s jus music as it’s commonly defined :-)
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But you don’t know what they worked out before and what’s an improvised musical idea. Originally Posted by Rsilver
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Those players (and many others) did indeed rely on a great deal of melodic invention to cultivate their styles. But I don't agree that they JUST played musical ideas that they created on the spot- they had their devices.... Anyway, that's not to de-legitimise players that heavily utilise patterns or devices for their style, Coltrane for example... Originally Posted by Rsilver
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I exaggerated in my original post to make my point. Of course patterns, licks, cliches, etc get plugged in to solos, even by the greats (let alone by me) to keep the flow going, and sometimes as the primary strategy. But I think players would benefit from taking more chances with just their melodic imagination and (hopefully) their ability to recognize the melodies they imagine and play them in real time. When that is working it feels like you’re really playing jazz! Originally Posted by princeplanet
PS. I bet that when Coltrane played his 1235 pattern on a chord mid-solo he was hearing it as a musical idea, not as a pattern. He had practiced the pattern until it got into his musical vocabulary.Last edited by Rsilver; 02-28-2022 at 10:28 PM.
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Now that I understand your point, I agree with you.
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Yeah, that's what "jazz" means for me too, although others will disagree... It's a combo , innit? A bit of freewhelin' and a bit of prefab, too much of the former and it's very hard to sound compelling all the time. Too much of the latter is just clearly (for me anyway) no fun at all ! ... Originally Posted by Rsilver
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I consider myself first and foremost an ear player. And I agree with the original poster.
1) sing what you play
2) practice imagining in your head
3) Ensure your notes connect first to the sound of your instrument
4) leave more space, listen more
5) simplify ideas and focus on flow.
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I’m a big fan of yours Mark Originally Posted by Mark Kleinhaut
i can improvise a little
but i’d like to get closer to the
freedom you exhibit one day
to that end
could you expand on 3) please ?
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With regular language, there is a duality - we may expect our children to express ideas but also to learn enough grammar and vocabulary that they might express thair ideas better, more fully and with greater precision. There is also the idea, that it is much much harder (some would say impossible) to express something or e even think it if you don't have the words for it. It's that old dictum: If you cannot say what you mean, you will never mean what you say.
So, I would think language is a prerequisite for thought and ideas and for being able to articulate them clearly.
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SOUND!! Think about it for a moment. This is what travels through the air and excites the air molecules against the eardrums of the listener. There can’t be any musical connection to anyone - including even yourself- without a visceral physical connection in how you muster your technique to create the sound. Originally Posted by pingu
I’ve noticed that playing one single note with that solid impactful sound quality, will communicate more directly with the listeners ears than anything else. It’s too easy to get ahead of ourselves in think only about the musicality of what we’re playing, at best, or unfortunately
sometimes just a bunch of notes, at our worst.
i’ve heard master musicians refer to this as “making the notes speak”. Horn players spend countless hours working on long tones, and their breath control for the reasons. When that tenor sax can fill a room with sound without amplifier, it shakes the walls and everyone in it. How do we as guitarists get that? One path is with effects and amplification- it sure works for the rock guys who can fill stadiums with their sound.
My interests have long included how to play quietly but get big sound. It’s quite a journey
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[QUOTE=Average Joe;1183493
So, I would think language is a prerequisite for thought and ideas and for being able to articulate them clearly.[/QUOTE]
I hope you don’t mind me taking this one sentence out of context, but I think it highlights one of the problems in music education, that is; one must learn scales, chords and theory before they can expresses musical ideas. Personally, I think that such a notion of required sequencing sets many the musician back from achieving their potential. My experience was that I found as much meaning and enjoyment in the first month of guitar playing when I only knew three chords and sang out of tune as I get from play now with 50 years of experience.
just as a child can express itself even before knowing any language, so to in music we can find a voice and convey messages. Our ability to develop vocabulary and language is incremental, but should be side-by-side with the convenience of meeting and delivery of pleasure to ourselves as players and those who listen to us. Overtime, the technical ability and knowledge base grows in tandem with the depth and intensity of our messages, in lockstep at all times.
I have seen way too many musicians exhausted and frustrated because they have technique and ability with nothing to say, or conversely plenty to say but lacking in the tools and skills to get their message out. The key is balance and synchronicity.
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To me (the original poster) learning and practicing material has clear benefits if done with the right attitude: you are certainly building chops on your instrument and you are associating new sounds and patterns with particular chords or chord progressions. But I think the mistake made by some players (and I have made this mistake myself) is that they then believe that the material is what they play when improvising. To me the material just gets added to all the musical memories and associations in your brain so that when you improvise the range of melodies you create on the fly has been widened by material you have practiced. But at improv time you are just making up melodies.
Of course on the bandstand everyone plugs in a bit of prepared material here and there to fill gaps, but the goal or ideal is to just make up and play melodies.
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^ I agree, and that's what I try to practice. However, I still use theoretical tenets as a guide. Use my scales, arps, and intervals as what notes to draw on. Think of rhythms for phrasing. Try to start and end phrases on a chord tone like my teacher told me etc.
I've never had that experience. I find my inner voice can only be expressed better the more fundamentals I work out. If I work on raw theory and it doesn't end up helpful or immediately productive, it never hurts my playing, I just disregard it. Also having my fundamentals worked out makes it easier to exercise my own rhythms freely. Originally Posted by Mark Kleinhaut
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I work on fundamentals too, but they never in my mind while playing. Some of the fundamentals are less interesting to me than others. For example, I could benefit from improving my sight reading skills or playing in odd meter, but these areas just don’t attract my pleasure center, so I work in the half hearted at best. When it’s fun it’s effortless.
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Develop musical ideas? Play live.
Marinero
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