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Gosh. Still at it, guys? Prayers.
So, the OP was posed as a question, and appeared to be objective. But in reality should have been phrased as follows?
“I like to half sing and moan when I improvise, like a number of others have done and continue to do, because it helps me with flow. I also recognize that there are many other great master players who didn’t or don’t do this, but I’m jealous of them so will declare them to be spares to sooth my ego. Have a nice day”. Lol.
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04-14-2023 09:47 PM
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It's probably better not to sing when playing ie verbalizing your lines, unless you can scat well eg Benson. Some of the old players did this and it's not very conducive to enjoyable listening IMVHO.
Originally Posted by kris
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Wow. So let's set sum up the meta-positions espoused thus far:
"1. If it doesn't work for me and my process of creating music, it can't work for anyone."
"2. I am right and anybody who disagrees with me is wrong. Even people who mostly agree with me are probably wrong."
"3. If you disagree with me, you are insulting me."
Sorry to be so harsh, but so much of what has been written in this thread is nonsense. If singing as a guide helps you with playing and improvising, use it. If it is not helpful to you, don't use it. What works for you may not be what works for me. Herb Ellis famously vocalized along with himself when he played; Jim Hall vocalized along with himself when he played; many other brilliant jazz musicians vocalized along with themselves when they played. Did they all actually suck because of this? And there are brilliant jazz musicians who don't do that. Did they suck?
We all have to find what works for us. Because something doesn't work for you doesn't mean that it's invalid for me and vice versa. At the end of the day, what matters is whether we are satisfied with what we play.
I will close with quotes from Bill Frisell and BB King. Bill was going out on stage with Charles Lloyd, who turned and said "I look forward to singing with you tonight." Bill was struck by this because ultimately all music is singing. BB King commented in a number of interviews that when he stopped singing and started soloing, he still felt like he was singing. We may sing with our respiratory system and our mouth or we may sing with an instrument, but it is ultimately all singing. If you are not singing in one way or another, are you actually playing music? If you find yourself feeling defensive about this, that might be worth considering.
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It's really funny. Originally Posted by Jazzjourney4Eva
From my perspective, singing is the basis of music and I tried to prove it.
In such discussions, the most interesting would be the statements of professional musicians.
Let these professionals tell me: don't sing because your improvisations are worth nothing.Don't even think about singing...!!!
Then I will change the musician's profession.
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Read more posts. It was already. Originally Posted by Victor Saumarez
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No matter what you say, they will agree with you if you give them a gig, a decent one. Originally Posted by kris
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+1..... Originally Posted by Lionelsax
Have a nice day
Best
Kris
ps.
More singing...more gigs.
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Or maybe this discussion lacked the link between singing and ear training....?
"If you wanted to get started training your relative pitch, a powerful but simple technique is to simply start singing back what you hear."
This is the foundation of every musician.
"With careful study, singing scales, intervals and triads teaches you how to recognize these different musical elements. You can then learn to accurately sing and hear a written melody at sight in your head, what an amazingly useful skill for a musician to have."
I'm just throwing things out for thought.
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He starts singing about halfway through the video..
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tl;dr I’m right again as usual. So basically 2) is entirely justified ya hippy. Originally Posted by Cunamara
I am mostly joking (mostly)
‘we all got to do what’s right for us…’ well of course, you may not know what is right for you.
What feels right for you but may not might be sitting in your comfort zone and not making much if any progress. It feels right to sit on the couch and not exercise. It feels very much less right to go for that first, difficult run. But you stick with it and that feeling changes - After a few months, the run feels right and to not run feels wrong.
Furthermore the nature of the most sustainable and enjoyable exercise may vary from person to person too (not everyone may enjoy or be able to keep up running for example) and different people may need different coaching strategies etc to motivate them but the underlying fact is that exercise is good for you, right?
I’ve been there, I suspect we all have.
This is of course why people go to teachers who draw on the expertise and knowledge of teaching. The problem of course is that not every teacher knows what they are doing. Great players may lack teaching expertise; good teacher may not in fact be great players. And of course many advertising their services are neither.
Tbh in jazz I think a teacher should almost be a coach. We can’t do the miles for you; you have to run them yourself; but we can perhaps suggest activities that are within your grasp and help motivate you to do them.
most musicians tend not to examine what they were taught, the words of one or two beloved teachers are held as gospel. But it doesn’t matter if they can play; it’s not philosophy or science, it’s a craft.
So I kind of understand jazzjourney’s skepticism though I’m not sure it’s in good faith. He is of course a bit of a troll, but that doesn’t mean the discussion isn’t important
I would certainly question me if I was in jj4e’s shoes, but you may find if not total agreement some level of consistency in the comments here actually. It might not be neatly packaged truth, but it is reasonably clear that singing and/or internal audition are incredibly important for any jazz musician. There are always apparent contradictions and messiness in music and these are not a reason to dismiss jazz edu on some pseudo intellectual basis.
If you can’t deal with a bit of messiness, music probably isn’t going to be fun long term.
it may be better to reframe this as ‘find me a someone who says otherwise’ - a quicker and possibly more intersting discussion. I can think of one.
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A good book from the High Church of Audiation is Edwin Gordon’s Learning Sequences in Music. I can’t remember what he says about singing - I’d have to go back to it.
The fact that I think it is a good book, does not mean I agree with everything in it. Its recommendations are what I would describe as ‘unbelievably hardcore’ for most of us.
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Another factor is a lot of people are a bit messed up about singing. It makes people feel vulnerable. It has baggage. Maybe they were told not to sing in choir at school. Maybe they studied singing to a high level but all the BS associated with the trade made them want to get away from it; or they associate valid singing with a certain level of technical polish. Maybe they feel singing is more easily criticised and objected to than playing. And so on.
I think one thing that is an indicator of this on this thread is that people associate singing with performance, with being able to scat like Benson (one of the most gifted singers as well as guitarists of his generation btw).
No - singing is a tool. Barry Harris sang as flat as a pancake in class* but we always got the sense of it. Singing communicates ideas musically that would take a long time to explain in words; even a good musician who is a bad singer can communicate phrasing, groove and so on through singing even where the pitches are approximate.
Also people get better at it very quickly. I’ve had students who cannot match a single sustained pitch on lesson one confidently and accurately sing jazz lines a few months later. It’s a muscle you can build and it seems to improve your overall musicianship. The instrument is just a machine to express your inner musicianship. Singing is a good way to tap into the latter and not get hung up about how to operate your machinery (which leads to noodling) - even if you are no singer at all.
*as well as singing blazing fast bop lines in improv class, Barry used to sing standards and his own songs to demonstrate to vocalists, and even sang in concert. Despite the limitations of his vocal instrument (esp late in his life) his ability to communicate the words and meaning of the song for me always made those performances very touching.
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+1 Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Christian you have a plus with me again...;-)
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There is definitely merit in this whole approach, I know I should practise it more. I think there is something about the mechanics of the guitar that if you’re not careful, leads you into playing patterns you already know, because it’s quite hard to create really flowing 8th-note lines on the instrument. So we practise that stuff a lot, and eventually our fingers want to do it by themselves (at least that’s my experience).
If I try ‘singing’ some lines away from the guitar (I don’t actually sing, it sounds awful and I can’t reach the high notes, so I just ‘sing internally’ as it were), I find that I come up with ideas that are quite different to what I normally play. There is more use of space, more use of motifs, more use of shapes and rhythms which I suspect have come from the melody of the tune. Which is interesting, I guess that is because it is harder to sing fast lines like Pat Martino solos, than it is to think of short motifs (which are probably suggested by the tune). So what I ‘sing’ sounds more like Jim Hall, rather than Martino or Raney. Which I think is cool, I wouldn’t mind injecting some of that into my solos. I still like playing long lines, but breaking it up with some space and variety is good too.
So the difficulty is how to transfer those ‘imagined’ melodic ideas to the guitar. One way is to take it slowly and replay each idea on the guitar as soon as you think of it. I seem to be able to do that ok. Next I tried doing it simultaneously, i.e. playing the guitar at the same time but trying to make my fingers follow what I am hearing. This is harder, but I found it got easier after a while. In fact I think this is what happens when I am playing ‘for real’ and an unexpected idea suddenly emerges. I am vaguely aware of this sometimes while playing, and listening to recordings or videos I’ve made, I can sense where this happens.
So I think this approach is worth practising. I suspect you could train yourself to do it more ‘at will’, maybe this is what some of the players mentioned in this thread have learned to do.
Anyway, very interesting subject, I think.
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I made a recording 15 minutes ago...connected mic and guitar...I think you can hear me 'singing".
I have phrases in my head and with the help of my singing I bring them to life on the guitar.
I don't play what I practiced yesterday on the guitar for 3 hours.I'm behaving like Ragman:
BoxLast edited by kris; 04-15-2023 at 05:02 AM. Reason: correct
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Ah sorry to keep posting but this is a thought provoking subject. One reason why I get students to sing in lessons is because it gives me a way of knowing what’s going on musically beyond the guitar. I can’t literally get a sort of jazz funnel and insert it straight into their skull to let the notes out (especially on Zoom) so getting them to sing is the next best thing. (Maybe they are working on that in Silicon Valley)
as I’ve said internal singing is probably to be preferred long term. That said, musicians sing ideas and so on to each other all the time. It’s part of the way we communicate.Last edited by Christian Miller; 04-15-2023 at 05:11 AM.
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Great video! Originally Posted by Alter
Thanks
Best
Kris
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Sometimes I think of the conductor of a symphony orchestra. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Sometimes he shows by singing how a group of instruments in an orchestra should play.
-stacato, legato, faster, slower,crescendo,diminuendo,piano forte etc. and he sing orchestral instrument parts.
I mean a good conductor of a symphony orchestra.
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re Pat Martino, I think it’s more productive to focus to the rhythm and articulation and the important structural pitches (usually the highest and lowest) rather than try to nail every note. Originally Posted by grahambop
singing isn’t always about the pitches.
This might not be so true of PM, but I find by singing bop lines and so on it gives me a better idea of what notes are important and what can be ‘thrown away’ or played in a less emphatic, or even ghosted way. The guitar can be quite a binary on/off instrument compared to sax and it can be easy to treat every note as equal.
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yeah I mean I’ve been lucky to do choral performances with the likes of John Eliot Gardner and Bernard Haitink over the years, and all of them sing to the orchestra. (A long time ago now…) Originally Posted by kris
But even if you have an instrument in your hands, it can still be … more connective? And I cant play everything I can imagine musically for other instruments. I can’t do everything on my guitar I might want a sax to do for example; swell through a note, play a sforzando, or add a growl or something. I could work out a way of doing it on guitar I guess with pedals etc, but I can do it much faster with my voice… the crescendo goes there- widen the vibrato here, phrase like this. That type of stuff.
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This has not been my experience lol Originally Posted by Lionelsax
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It could be such a mysterious mental shortcut. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
I only played with musicians who had singing classes in schools.
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I hope you'll get better gigs. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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What took you so long? See, it comes to us all in the end :-) Originally Posted by kris
I'm behaving like Ragman:
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Here's a video. Sorry for the dismal lighting, it's very sunny outside.
Inculcate in Polish: wpajac.
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