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DEVELOPING STYLE Part 1 PDF Version
By Hal Galper As published in Jazz Improv Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 4. 11/2000 Jazz great Miles Davis was once quoted as saying there were no innovators left, only stylists. Whether an accurate assessment of the state of jazz or not, one thing's for sure, there are certainly less of the former and more of the latter. Webster's dictionary defines innovation as "...to change or alter by introducing something new..." Webster further defines style as "...distinction, excellence, originality and character in any form of artistic or literary expression..." Most of us would aspire to introduce something new but it is a rare event. What we are best left with then is at least the ability to develop our own distinctive style of playing. To be sure, Most of the great jazz innovators, for example, Bird, Dizzy, Miles, Coltrane, Monk, Ornette, to mention just a few, all started out as stylists and transcended style to become innovators. Very few of us exited the womb as full fledged innovators. Developing "distinction, excellence, originality and character" in one's playing must be one of the primary goals of any jazz improvisor. Only by acquiring your own musical voice can one hope to ever transcend style to achieve the rare status of an innovator. Developing Your Own Voice If you're a dedicated student of jazz history, and if you're not you should be, play any recording of any of the jazz greats from 1900 to 1970. Start the record at any point in the recording and there is no doubt who you're listing to. You'll understand what I mean about having your own voice. It was a point of personal pride for these musicians to have developed a personal style of playing that anyone could recognize within a few bars of hearing them solo. Although difficult to achieve, the elements of a personal voice are simply defined as having an individual sound or touch on your instrument, articulating time in your own way, developing your own musical vocabulary from the tradition, and a recognizable manner of articulating that vocabulary. This article hopes to show that, although not as yet fully expressed, the seeds of these four elements are already established within each player's mind and body. It remains the student's job to develop a process of study for bringing their own personal voice to the fore. Historically, the technique used for bringing out your own voice has been, and still is, to copy or "model" the music of players from preceding generations. This modeling generally took two forms: A student selected one single player to emulate or took the eclectic approach by modeling many players. In either case, the lineage of the model or models emulated became an integral and evident part of each new generation's playing. For example, just to name a few, one can easily hear the lineage in the music of the following players: Roy Eldridge's influence on Dizzy, Louis Smith's on Bird, Duke's on Monk, Dizzy on Miles, Prez on Sonny Rollins, Dexter on Coltrane, Errol Garner and Nat Cole on Ahmad Jamal. The list is endless. Over the years, through this process of "selection, " the mentor's influence led each player to develop their own style. In a most basic sense, individual style is developed by through each individual's application of the selective process to the history of the music. The Selection Process Implicit in the preceding is that fact that to develop one's own voice, you have to listen to a lot of music for a long time. You have to expose yourself to every possible variety of jazz in order to be able to decide who or what you want to copy. As there is over one hundred years of musical history to select from and as there is not enough time in any one person's lifetime to select everything within that history to copy, it becomes evident that one cannot copy everything. The question then becomes "how do I decide what to copy that will bring out my own individual voice?" Sat, Dec 2, 2000
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The selective process is guided by being sensitive to and trusting in your intuition and emotions. Most students don't believe they have the instincts to make these decisions, or that you can make a wrong decision about what to copy. There is no such thing as a "wrong decision" when it comes to copying. In truth, most of the materiel you'll copy over the years you'll not ever play or throw out. Having a clear idea of how you want to play is a rarity and, to a great degree, you find out how you want to play though a process of elimination. You try something new and it either works for you or it doesn't. If it works, you keep it. If it doesn't, you throw it out. Truly, finding your own voice is often, through a process of elimination, a matter of finding where you don't want to be rather than knowing where you are going. There is no substitute for the agonizing and on-going process of experimentation and trial and error that is a part of each player's learning process! As a teacher I've always felt uncomfortable with most student's tendency to diminish their discriminative abilities by casting the teacher in the role of the "expert" who knows everything, and the student as one who knows nothing. A teacher's true function is to develop the individual talents of each student as opposed to stamping out carbon copies of the teacher. In this way we are not so much teachers but more like coaches. We must be sensitive to and develop each student's own way of thinking and feeling about music. I can't tell how many times I've showed a student something and they've responded by saying "Gee Hal, I was feeling something like that but didn't understand it until you clarified it by putting it into words." This reaction can only mean one thing; that students do sense what's happening, but don't trust themselves or believe it because they have put themselves into the role of "students who don't know anything." The first element in developing your own style is to trust your instincts and emotions! With out this trust, you won't be able to apply the decision making process to the selective process. As I mentioned earlier, the elements of your individual style are already part of your mind and body. No two people are the same. No two players body's are the same. The science of psycho acoustics is based on the scientific fact that no two people hear the same way either. We are already individuals, we just don't know have a technique for bringing this individuality out. The Mystery It would be safe to say that we spend most of our musical careers trying to solve the mystery of "how do I want to play?" As in any mystery, finding it's solution is a matter of looking for musical clues. These clues exist in the history of the music and in ourselves. In this sense we are detectives, ever on the lookout for clues to lead us down the path of developing our own voices. This is what makes learning how to play more of an exciting adventure than an onerous task. Learning how to play music is a process of self-discovery, of learning more about ourselves and how we feel about music, and for that matter, life. The clues can be found only by trusting your instincts and emotions and listening to a lot of music. It is a matter of using outside stimuli to discover your internal emotional individuality. No two people have the same life experiences. When you're a viewer or listener of any artistic event, you bring your total life's experience to the event along with you. The event is perceived through these experiences and appreciated to the degree that the artist has established a resonance with the you as the viewer. An art can only be appreciated if a bond has been created between the artist and viewer and the viewer can "relate" to what the artist is trying to portray on an emotional and intuitive level. If you don't relate to it, you don't appreciate or understand it. The function of art is to create a greater understanding of oneself and the world, both as artist and viewer. For example: You're listening to a Coltrane solo. It will be a sure bet that not every idea within his solo will have a uniform emotional effect upon you. Some ideas will strike you harder than others. Those ideas that hit you on a gut level are clues to the way you feel about music. A relationship was established between you and Coltrane and he showed you something about yourself. These clues must be copied and explored (I'll show how you explore these clues in Part 2). They will lead the way to your own individuality. You may not know what it is in the idea that appealed to you. You may never know. It's not important to know that. What is important is to follow the musical clue to where ever it takes you as a guide to solving the mystery "how I want to play." A case in point: Rather than select one particular model to emulate, I ended up, over the years, picking a series of models. When someone asked me who's playing I liked, my answer was "anyone Sat, Dec 2, 2000
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that can play something I can't." I started out copying pianists Dave Brubeck and George Shearing. I guess at that early stage, they were the easiest for me to hear. Then I graduated to John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet until I heard Red Garland. I copied everything I could about Red's playing for years. Now at this point, you might wonder how copying someone so closely could lead you to your own individuality as opposed to stifling it? In the 1950's I attended the Berklee School of Music, as it was called at the time. A wonderful man named Harry Smith, was teaching there as a vocal coach and pianist. He had perfect pitch and could hear anything under the sun. He also was very generous with his spare time and had a notation hand that was almost machine-like in it's perfection. At that time there weren't as many published transcriptions as there are now. You could go to Harry and request a copy of any solo or voicings and two weeks later he have them for you. I'd run to the piano and play Red's solo's and voicings along with his recordings. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how accurately I emulated his playing, I sounded nothing like him. At first I found this to be depressing. After trying this for a while the truth became evident. I didn't have the same hands as Red. Nor the same ears. The only thing I could do was my own version of Red's playing. And that's what everyone who copies does, their own version of who they're copying. The only thing you can do is your own version because no two people are alike. After a few years of trying to copy Red, I then went on to copy a whole series of bebop pianists: Tommy Flannigan, Bud Powell, Hank Jones, Wynton Kelly, Errol Garner, Lennie Tristano, Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, and more. Each one of them had something to show me about myself, although I never knew what it was they were trying to show me. I just followed my feelings. For one period I'd say, "hey, I want to play like him" and get into their playing for along time. Then after a while of absorbing that players music I'd say, "Nah, I don't want to play like him anymore, I want to play like this other guy." And so on and so on. It was the eclectic approach at work. That's when I began to trust my instincts and started going where ever the music took me. In a more recent situation, When I started my trio in 1990, I had fallen back in love with Ahmad Jamal's playing again. I listened to everything I could find that he recorded and caught him live whenever possible. During this period my arrangements became rather elaborate and I was heavy into his "formalism;" with sometimes alternate interludes and ostinato vamps. This went on for years. I knew that he was trying to tell me something but not exactly what it was. I just followed my instincts. After about three of four years of doing this, I started to change and wrote more open arrangements. Much less "formal." It was one of those rare times when I actually found out what it was that attracted me to his playing again. It wasn't the formalism of his arrangements that was I responding to but how to apply that kind of formalism to my soloing. By emulating my own version of his formal style of arranging, I was eventually able to add that kind of formalism to my own improvising. How And What To Copy As I mentioned, during the time I was a student, there weren't as many published transcriptions available as there are now. Unfortunately, though these transcriptions do us a service by making it easier to see what a musician is playing, making it easier doesn't really help us. Transcriptions have a value in showing the continuity of a solo but the process of transcribing should be left to the individual. Transcribing improves the ear. In the beginning, you may not be copying exactly what your hearing. That's okay. You want to do your own version what you're copying anyway. The more you copy, the more accurate your ears become. What is important is to copy only those ideas that strike you on an emotional, gut level. Make them into exercises and learn them in all twelve keys. Once you've learned them, try to alter them to fit over other sets of changes. Redorder the components in the idea to find different ways to put them together. By exploring that idea in as many ways as possible you are exploring your own way of hearing and playing. Deciding what to practice is always a challenge. When it comes to practicing use one rule and one rule only: Practice only what you like! I don't mean that once you learned a lick that you play it over and over again. I mean copy only the ideas you relate to strongly on an emotional level. Let your feelings be the guide. Trust them. Sat, Dec 2, 2000
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stylept1.htm At this point most educators would jump up with accusations of "heretic, heretic!" Their concerns misguidedly being that by practicing only what you like you may not be thorough . Being thorough should not be one of your concerns. There is too much to work on to worry about that. Also, that's a particularly western attitude toward learning music that really doesn't apply here. Western attitudes tend to separate ideas into their smallest components in order to analyze and understand them. However, non-western thinking assumes that everything is connected to everything else. Thus is particularly so when discussing the body-mind-emotion relationship. When you learn something new you don't only improve just in that one area, you improve in all areas because the body-mindemotion relationship is all connected together. Everything affects everything else. There are no isolated events! They only appear islolated. A case in point: I joined the Phils Woods Quartet in 1980. During the ten to fifteen year before that I was heavily involved in learning how to play pentatonics. It took a while but eventually I became quite good at it. As you can see from some of my preceding anecdotes, my primary and earliest roots were based in the bebop tradition. Phil's band was a true bebop band in every sense of the word yet I was still playing a lot of pentatonics and I felt I was sounding out of context with the band. One night we were to play a concert at a New York venue called The Bottom Line. I was grappling with this problem of being out of context and realized I was approaching the bandstand with a preconception of how I wanted to play - pentatonics. As if I was saying to myself "I'm going to play this way tonight." As any performing artist will attest, approaching the bandstand with any preconceptions about what you're going to play can lower the quality of your performance. I already new this but had forgotten it. That night, before the gig, while sitting at my kitchen table having coffee after my nap, I decided that I was going to approach the bandstand with the proper attitude, no preconceptions. My attitude was going to be "what comes out is what's happening." I'm just going to go up there and play and what ever comes out comes out. And that's what I did. What was so illuminating about that experience was that all my earlier bebop roots came out. My bebop playing had improved over the fifteen years that I had been improving my pentatonic playing, as if I had been playing bebop during those intervening years! It's not necessary to take a linear, straight lined approach to practicing. Jump around and practice a variety of things. It doesn't make any difference what you practice as long as you improve in that area. Any area you improve in improves all other areas of your music. Practicing should not be boring, it should be interesting and fun. It should be a process of self exploration and discovery. I can't think of anything more exciting in life than learning something new about yourself.
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Copyright 2000 by Hal Galper. All rights reserved.
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The Development Of Style, Part Two. PDF Version
By Hal Galper (Copyright 2000 All rights reserved) As published in Jazz Improv Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 1 In Part One the processes involved in the development of style was discussed. The proposition being that style is based on the selective process . That you use your intuition and your emotions to select those musical ideas you wish to copy. This article examines the questions: how much copying do you need to do and what to do with the ideas you‘ve copied? “The Myth Of Information.“ When I first started at Berklee College in the early 50's I was under the impression that to become an improviser one had to learn thousands licks, practice them in all 12 keys, and string them together when soloing. It appeared to be an awesome and mechanical task. However, over the decadesas I learned more about the learning and playing processes, I began to see these processes in a completely different light. When I had my quintet in the 70's, every time we went to the bandstand Mike Brecker would say " oh man, you're going to have to listen to my twelve licks again." I had a similar experience when I was playing with John Scofield's quartet . He’d say " Oh man, you're going to have to listen to my seven licks all night. " I thought they were kidding. Then Mike and John would get on the bandstand and play every kind of idea under the sun. It wasn't until I examined Coltrane's solo on Giant Steps and isolated seven of his solo's most repeated 4 note groups that I realized the key to improvisation wasn't the information but the attitude toward the information that was crucial. I transposed these seven groups into all the keys finding infinite ways of using them to spell out any set of changes inside or outside of a key. In a very true sense, what Mike and John were talking about wasn't very far from the truth. This truth was best expressed by the great jazz educator David Baker who once said "If you want to learn how to improvise, take one bebop head a month and learn it in all twelve keys. By the end of a year you'll end up with enough of a musical vocabulary to be an excellent improvisor." The point being that you don't need to collect massive amounts of licks, you need to collect a small amount of the right kind of information and learn how to get the most out of it. "The Big Picture." What you get from applying the following techniques is what I call "The Big Picture." Contrary to popular thought, you don't memorize a bunch of licks and then try to play them as a solo. That's not improvisation, that's craftsmanship. You'll discover that although you might be making some nice sounds by playing rote ideas , you will be, guaranteed, bored to tears and so will your listeners. It won't be what Wayne Shorter call "spontaneous composition." You don't want to play what you practiced. That's not what practicing is for. Both you and your audience want the adventure of making stuff up as you go along, playing ideas you never practiced. That's why it's called improvisation. In Part 1 I defined the goal of practicing as a quest for self knowledge. That, however, is just one of our practicing goals. Another goal of practicing is the development of an intuitive understanding of how musical ideas relate to each other. How they work together. It's the cultivation of this understanding that eventually leads to an underlying concept of how things work, or the big picture. It's this deep understanding of "how things work" that you take to the bandstand with you when you play. It develops your musicality so that while improvising, it’s working in the background, on an intuitive level, helping you to spontaneously make up strong ideas . Understanding how the mind collects and manages it's information can be best explained by combining two of science's most current discipines: "Chaos Theory," and "Information Theory." The premise of Chaos Theory is that there are no isolated events. Apparently isolated events are an Sun, Jan 7, 2001
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style.htm illusion. Though their relationship may not be readily observable, all events are related to each other. They appear to be unconnected because we lack the information needed to achieve a perception or point of view with which to observe their connections. Information Theory studies how the mind stores and utilizes it's information. The mind collects and stores individual bits of information. As the number of bits increase, some of them eventually combine to form a concept, which, when further combined with other concepts, becomes a perception or point of view. For example: If you don't have another idea to compare or relate it to, it's difficult to understand a single idea in a vacuum. It has no meaning.
As soon as you add a second idea to a vacuum, although not readily apparent, the possibility beings to exist that the two ideas may have some relationship to each other and may mean something.
When you introduce a sixteen ideas, the possibilities increases exponentially and two ideas may interelate creating the beginning of meaning.
With 32 ideas in the pot you begin to see how more single and grouped ideas relate to each other making the information even more meaningful. Sun, Jan 7, 2001
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As more connections between ideas and concepts are established, a kind of "critical mass" (to borrow a phrase from nuclear physics) occurs and you begin to acquire an overall intuitive understanding of the information and get "The Big Picture" of "how things work." The concepts acquire meaning. At that point you transcend mere information collection and become a user of the concepts derived from your overall understanding of the information. This is a very dynamic process. As more ideas are added to the concept, the concept expands exponentially and begins to create more new ideas on it’s own. Although it would appear that this process leads to more complexity it actually does the reverse by simplifying and reducing apparently complex ideas to their most simple and basic elements. If a musical concept appears complicated it’s because you’re looking at it wrong. Behind every complex idea is an elegantly simple one. If an idea looks complicated it’s only because you are looking at the results of what it’s simple basis can produce. Mathematicians use the term “elegant” to describe a formula that is in essence very simple but has the potential for infinite complexity. For an example of this see my article “Melody and Embellishment” on my web site at halgalper.com. It’s generally accepted that music and mathematics are close cousins. Joseph Schillinger demonstrated how any musical idea can be reduced to a mathematical formula. This idea was further confirmed by an experience I had in the 70’s while performing with the Donald Byrd Quintet at Howard University. I met a musical mathematician who was a professor at Harvard University. He had invented a computer into which he had programmed thousands of bebop melodies. The purpose of this was to create a machine that you could play for and it would analyze your playing in terms of it’s strongest and weakest attributes. A musician could then work on eliminating the weak ideas and enhancing the strong ones. He told me Coltrane had played for this machine. His theory was that any strong musical idea has, as it’s basis, a strong mathematical formula. That what we do when improvising is intuitively sense the strength of various ideas while playing. He suggested was that, and it had, from personal experience, a “ring of truth” to it, when we play a note at a certain point in time and space (the changes and meter) it’s sets up a certain number of possible strong (and weak) choices of a second note. Of these possibilities we select one of the strong ones. This now becomes two notes in time and space and these two notes create another set of possibilities for a strong third note. We select one of them and the process continues. Each time you add another note to the series it suggests new sets of strong possible next notes based on the previous ones. As we begin a solo the number of possible good note choices is small. As we progress through a solo sensing the direction the solo is taking, the number of choices expands. As we proceed toward the resolution of a solo the number of good note choices begins to reduce again to the point that there are only a limited number of choices left from which we select a strong ending. Graphically represented a solo takes the following shape: Beginning of solo----------------------------------------------------------------------------------End of solo
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Naturally, the intellect works too slow to make these decisions on a conscious level. We intuit the mathematical logic of these choices. It has been suggested that the intuition makes decisions at a speed 20,000 times faster the speed of intellectual thought. The quality of these decisions are based on each player’s sense of musicality and one’s aural imagination (hearing) working in conjunction with each other. This sense of musicality is acquired by practicing as many strong melodic ideas as possible. By practicing and experimenting with strong melodic ideas, we eventually come to realize, not only on an intuitive level but an intellectual level as well, the elegantly simple basis’s of various musical concepts. For example; in the early ‘70’s I began to work on pentatonic playing. I started with the one basic component I new, the pentatonic scale. As time went by I learned, through experimentation and suggestions from other musicians, the second, third, fourth and fifth components of the pentatonic concept. At first the concept seemed complicated. When I finally learned these five components, the concept became simpler. “Idea Expansion“ This process of interrelating single ideas to create more infinite possibilities of ideas can be musically demonstrated in the following examples. To demonstrate how to achieve the maximization of a small number of ideas I’ve selected one of the most common 4-note groups used in the history of jazz, the major and minor triad with an added note. Taking the groupings 1, (2), 3, 5 and 1, (2), flat 3, 5 we‘ll see how many potentially infinite ways they can be used on a set of II-V's, descending in whole steps, two beats per chord. The directions of the notes within each grouping may be either ascending or descending. Calling the first grouping ( 1, 2, 3, 5 ) Idea "A" ascending, we’ll find places where "A" will fit on the changes.
Over the same set of changes we'll use Idea "A" with the notes in the groupings desending.
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Using Idea"A" again, we'll alternate directions.
Using Idea"A" again, we'll reverse the alternating directions.
At this point the possible uses of only one idea have increased dramatically. Combine each of the above examples into a single line, when played, it begins to take on the quality of an improvised melody.
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Apply the above process to the grouping 1, 2, flat 3, 5, calling it Idea "B," ascending and descending, to increase the number of possible ideas.
Combine these groupings and directions as in examples 2-5. At this point it appears as if we are beginning to collect quite a bit of information from just two ideas. But we have just begun. Lets combine Ideas "A" and "B" ascending:
Combine these groupings and directions as in examples 2-5. Change the order of the ideas and try Ideas "B" and "A" ascending over the same set of changes:
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And now Ideas "B" and "A" ascending and desending:
The number of ideas increase exponentially by combining the two groupings and directions in as many way as possible. So much so that limitations of space will not allow us to show every possible example of the many ways these groupings can be combined to come up with new uses for them. However, just to show you how this concept continues to expand, try it using them on some altered II - V’s.
It should be apparent by now that applying the above techniques to a small amount of information can greatly expand it’s potential. Before we go any further with these techniques lets backtrack a little to Part One and and how it Sun, Jan 7, 2001
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relates to what we've done here in Part 2. When you use your emotions and intuition to select an idea to copy you‘ve embarked upon an adventure of self discovery . When the preceding techniques are applied to copied ideas, you further clarify your personal style, learning more about your individual way of hearing. You’ll note that the above triadic examples contain no chromatics. Melodies that contain other types of melodic components need to be treated with different techniques. Except for the preceding triadic examples, most tonal melodies are composed of four basic components in any number, order, direction or combination: scales, arpeggios, chromatics (appoggiaturas and approach notes), and intervals larger than a fourth (usually broken arpeggios) and their “connecting intervals” (the interval between the last note of one component and the first note of the next). The following example contains all four components:
Analysis: An ascending interval, to a descending half step connector, to a descending chromatic appoggiatura, to a descending half step connector to a ascending two-note arpeggio to a descending whole step connector, to a ascending four-note arpeggio, to a descending half step connector, to a descending three-note scale, to a chromatic approach note, to a four-note descending scale. Reorder the components, their direction and shape, to find other ways to use a melody’s content. For example:
Discover other ways to use a melody on other chord changes and chord qualities. The melody line may also be applied to other chord changes as well.
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style.htm If you change the chord and the melody doesn’t fit you can change any melody note to make it fit. “Four Of Everything” The information can be exponentially expanded by applying the technique of "Four Of Everything." The concept is based upon the fact that all musical ideas are built around either basic or superimposed chord tones. That being the case, there are always at least three other versions of a copied idea based around the other three chord tones of a chord or set of chord changes. This can be best demonstrated by taking the first example above.
Note that the first note of the example is the 5th. of the G-7. Move the whole idea upward to start each new version of idea on the 7th., Root, and 3rd. Of the chord.
In the example above I changed some intervals to make the line fit the chord. The line works well for E-7b5 - A7 alt. as well. You can mix and match any of the melodic components from any version with any melodic component of any other version. This process can be extended in the extreme by trying “Seven Of Everything” where you move the line up diatonically in scale steps for versions that start on every note of the scale. They may not fit the original set of changes but they will fit some others. “Closing Comments” I'm sure you've noticed that when practicing an exercise, there is a tendency for the ideas you're working on to take on a life of their own. They branch off into directions that were not originally intended. Do not resist this tendency. Let it lead you wherever it goes. This exploratory work will take you into surprising areas of self discovery. At a later time you can always come back to the Sun, Jan 7, 2001
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original idea you were working on. Practicing then becomes more of a creative than mechanical process. In themselves, the techniques of Idea Expansion can be intellectually fascinating. They can open up limitless, new melodic possibilites for the student. However, the focus of this process is not the mere collection of new melodic ideas themselves but the global effect continued implementation and experimentation with the process can have upon the mind! The musical ideas not only serve a higher function than their mere memorization, they are the tools you use to achieve general state of musicality. It’s what one gets from doing this kind of work, “The Big Picture” if you will, that eventually becomes one of the most basic tools an improvisor takes to the band stand.
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