Contents Introduction Lesson From a Child The Power of Rhythm Ears Good Chops Art and Technique Maintaining Honesty Under the Light of Wes Falling into a Groove Playing Time Picking Telling Stories Jailbreak Are We Okay? The Audience
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Introduction Many jazz guitarists struggle, wishing they could play colorful, compelling solos, yet sensing that something isn’t right, that something important is missing. What they need is a seasoned player to put a friendly hand on their shoulder and then show them the way. Skip Morris is that player, and in The Truth About Jazz Guitar he guides you through elements critical in making real jazz, the kind that shakes the room not with its volume but with its purpose and passion. He explores with you the importance of technique and how to improve your own, how to sharpen your ear, your time, expand your rhythmic vocabulary, how to make solos that truly stand up and speak—even how to cope with an audience—and much more. Skip’s been writing the “Player to Player” column in Just Jazz Guitar magazine for ten years and playing professionally for decades. He’s taught jazz guitar at the college level and has played with a lot of seasoned jazz pros who’ve performed with the likes of Stan Getz, John Scofield, and the Brazil 66. Skip’s even performed with a few big names himself. He still performs a few club and concert dates every month. The Truth About jazz Guitar contains fourteen chapters, each originally an essay in his magazine column but updated and polished to perfection for this book.
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Lesson From a Child If left alone to follow their instincts, some children will develop good instrumental technique without any instruction at all, a conclusion I’ve reached after considerable years of teaching and observing young musicians. This natural efficiency comes, I believe, from the way a particular sort of child instinctively learns and explores. Consider what happens when such a child encounters something new, in this case, a guitar. A sense of wonder sets the whole process into slow motion. His wide eyes follow the curious staggering of the frets down the neck, then slide along the elegant curve of the instrument’s body. Perhaps he’s then drawn to the liquid gleam of the finish, or to the golden tuning pegs. He brushes a hand across the strings—the rich vibrations make his insides tremble with surprise. He presses a string to a fret and figures out that his thumb can pluck a single string from the row—then he revels in the sound of a solitary guitar note, a note he made. If the note seems rough or muted, he experiments to make it right. His fascination with the instrument provides him something akin to great patience. There is so much for him to see and touch and hear and gaze at in wonder that he progresses languidly, taking it all in. Besides, he is a child—years of living stretch out before him like eternity. There’s not a trace of hurry in his progress. Our awestruck child is the early version of the mature guitarist with a light touch and dazzling speed, who worked carefully from no technique, over years and by tiny increments, to technique that is world-class. No, this doesn’t mean you can only develop fine technique by starting it as a child; it does means you can only develop such technique by learning in this kind of childlike state—patient, attentive, free of inhibitions and expectations. Why, then, do so few guitar players come even close to their potential for technique? In many cases, they’ve just practiced too little, spent their practice time inefficiently, or both. But often it is because, in my opinion, they are held back by their own haste—a result, usually, of influences corrupting the process. The new guitarist hears Jimmy Bruno or Al DiMeola or John Coletrane, or sees some virtuoso classical violinist on television, and his course shifts—instead of continuing to work with patient care, he now rushes to obtain that magnificent speed that fills his dreams. Ironic that he (or, of course, she) could likely have obtained such speed in time, but now that he can’t wait for it, it will forever elude him. The principles of building precise, flexible, and, yes, fast technique are universal, applying equally to guitar, piano, and even French horn and harp. No one understands this better than the teachers and musicians of classical music—they’ve been conducting serious study of instrumental technique for generations. But jazz is different: despite its loose sort of collective evolution with harmony and rhythm, it’s generally followed a here’s-the-music-now-go-figure-out-how-to-play-it tradition. Sure, some top jazz players understand how technique works. But it’s been my experience that a lot of agile, polished jazz players don’t understand the mechanics of technique, there own included, at all—it is a blessed mystery to them, something that started when they were young and somehow continues to work. In the same way I’ve long reached for my pedestrian book of medicine whenever my health’s gone awry, I studied books by classical teachers on guitar technique (classical guitar, of course), piano technique, violin technique, and instrumental practicing and technique in general when I realized my fingering and picking were off-track. I also read what jazz musicians said about chops, and questioned a few top players in person. Somewhere along the way I realized that what I was reading and hearing I had observed in children. So to fathom technique—how it functions and how we can make it work—we return to our determined and fascinated child, who naturally tends to do the thing exactly as it is best done. 1. He is patient. When he encounters a problem, he stops, and then gives it all the time required to solve it. He is not thinking about perfection, only how to improve a little whenever he practices.
2. He is careful. Not only does he take the time to work things out, he spends that time figuring out how to work things out. It would strike him as silly to just keep playing something the same way repeatedly and expect improvement. A fretted string that feels awkward, a pick stroke that’s weak, a chord that keeps missing on the second string—he tries leaning a finger a different way, or experiments with the angle of his wrist, or both, or something else. It’s not an intellectual approach; it’s about results, and about working with the variables and trying adjustments until everything just feels right and sounds good. 3. He listens. To him, the guitar and its music are never a mathematical equation for study, never just a series of black dots on lines. These things don’t interest him any more than some dry textbook; to him, it’s all about sound. Yes he notices where his fingers go. Yes he works through the technical problems that continually arise. Yes he figures out the relationships between strings and frets. But the whole point of it all is the notes —the sounds—he creates. 4. He prefers relaxation. If playing a figure at a certain speed feels uncomfortable, he slows down to where his body can let go of the unpleasant tension. This allows the muscles to sort themselves out, to learn to work together efficiently on the task at hand. Once he finds this loose way of playing, he naturally holds to it as he progresses. 5. He is curious. Why are the same two notes separated by two frets when they are played on the first and second strings, but separated by only one fret when played on the second and third strings? Even if he doesn’t understand why this is, he accepts and assimilates the discovery. He’s always learning about the frets and strings, the sounds of the notes (both individual and combined), about his hands and the rest of his body. His curiosity is free to explore (and this may be a component of what I’m calling his patience), and as it leads him ever deeper into the nature of the instrument, his confidence in playing it grows. 6. He trusts his instincts and lets them dictate. He breaks from practicing whenever he needs to and resumes only when he feels ready. He slows down and really works something through when he senses there’s a problem. He does all this and more not because someone told him to or because he’s reasoned out that it’s what he should be doing, but because it is his natural response. *** Now that we’ve examined the way a child naturally develops technique, and understand why it is the best way, let’s apply what we’ve learned to our own technique to make it clean, fast, and sure. 1. Patience comes first on our child’s list because the other five characteristics of his learning processes— careful practice, real listening, relaxation, a free curiosity, instincts followed—are impossible without it. The dangers of impatience include strain (a real killer of technique), a withering of the joy of playing (usually caused by the strain), a drag on the learning process (yes—trying to rush ahead actually slows learning), and all sorts of bad habits and obstacles. So when you hear a polished player firing off clusters of notes like buckshot, remind yourself that the way he or she got there was through years of unhurried practice. Then empty all the messages of doubt and desperation from your mind and refill the space with calm, and faith...and, of course, patience. 2. Now that you’re ready to work at a natural, unhurried pace, give practicing your full attention. That is, practice carefully, as would our child. Almost any time you care to listen you can hear young musicians in college practice rooms running scales endlessly, but sometimes mindlessly too. Some of them must wonder why those scales seem to hold stubbornly unchanged, unimproved. It’s because they’re practiced without care.
Practicing carefully does not mean straining, trying to dominate the hands, the notes—trying too hard invites some serious pitfalls. A partnership is what you want, a partnership between you, your body, your instrument, and the music, working things gradually out together. Suppose you’re practicing something new. Let’s say it’s the Dorian mode, one octave. Play the first note and just feel it, hear it, giving yourself time to sense its position on the neck. Play the second note, and do the same. After you’ve reached the third or fourth note, you’re ready to string them together. Now a lot of players would try pushing for speed—but don’t. Instead, play the notes one after another, one at a time. In other words, give your full attention to a note, complete it, and only then move on and give your attention to the next note. Does each note feel right, solid, comfortable? If not, give your hands permission to make it so. Then give them time to make adjustments. This could mean sitting on a note for several seconds, experimenting with the angle of a finger or the position of the wrist... Your body will work things out—but only if you let it. And you let it by giving it all the time it requires, and by focusing. If your mind wanders, it abandons your body and casts it adrift. Draw your attention gently back to the business at hand. But by giving the process your attention I do not mean giving it your intellect. While you may occasionally stop and try to reason something out, the great majority of the time you want to follow your body’s lead, aware in a feeling way but without thinking. Imagine driving through city traffic. You stay sharp, keep your eyes open for other cars, traffic lights, sudden stops... But you don’t think, “How should I respond to that red light?” No, thinking is too slow; you’ll never hit the brakes in time. One perilous kind of thinking is trying to force theories onto your body—for example, stubbornly trying to work the pick as you’ve reasoned you should. This route will carry you ever further from your body’s natural solutions. (Though you may sometimes offer your body ideas to explore, and then observe whether it accepts or rejects or borrows from them.) Believe in your body’s ability to work through problems. Let it guide and instruct you. 3. How do you know if your technique is working? Just like our child, you listen. And you listen in that same nonintellectual but attentive way we just explored. How do the notes sound, clean and even? If not, listen for the problem as you ask your body to find a solution. 4. Polished and seemingly effortless technique boil down to one element: efficiency. And the key to efficiency is relaxation. To put this in perspective, forget the guitar for a moment and consider your arm. Hold it straight out in front of you, palm up. Now bend it; as you do this you contract the muscles along the front of the upper arm, the “biceps.” Straighten your arm again. Bend it again, slowly, and feel the biceps muscle at work. To straighten your arm, you contract the muscle along its back, the “triceps.” Straighten your arm now and feel the triceps muscle back there working lightly. That’s how nearly all your muscles work: one (or one set) directly opposing another; when one muscle works, the opposing muscle goes limp so as to offer no resistance. That’s how you lift and lower a leg, turn your head left and right, straighten and bend a finger. Now try tightening both your biceps and triceps at the same time—note that no matter how hard you strain the muscles, the arm remains stiff and unmoving. When opposing muscles or muscle-groups contract at the same time, little is accomplished other than strain—and the part of the body under this strain is moving toward complete lock-up. I can tell you from my own experience, plenty of guitarists do lock up their muscles. I have even heard of some who work the pick from movements of thumb and finger until they freeze, then pick from the wrist, then once the wrist is frozen they pick from movements of the elbow. On a long gig, that last set must be hell. Jumping from one set of locked-up muscles to another is a strategy born of desperation. Now imagine playing smooth lines, the pick lying lightly between finger and thumb, your fingers and wrists and forearms loose and free, your entire body as relaxed as if you were luxuriating in a hot spring, as though in a trance. That’s how it is for players with great technique. Certainly they may raise their eyebrows as the music sweeps skyward, or purse their lips at a chord struck short and hard. But these are expressions of
emotion, not strain. Look at their lightly dancing hands, their easy unset jaws, their loose arms—they are free, relaxed. If you practice with patience (there’s that word again) and care, and listen, you open the door to relaxation. To draw in relaxation, keep practicing this way, at a very manageable tempo, and as you do, keep checking for tension, and let it go whenever and wherever you find it. Keep working, calmly, slowly, towards this trancelike and seemingly effortless state. A critical principle behind muscular efficiency is the use of minimum force for only as long as necessary. Consider your left hand—are you pressing the strings down harder than required in order to make them sound cleanly? You’re holding back your technique if you are. Try pressing down a string so lightly that when you pick it, the only sound is a thud. With most guitars and strings, you will find that it may actually take you a little while to reduce the pressure sufficiently. Once you have, experiment until you are pressing the string with just enough force to make it ring and no more. You’ll likely find that you’ve been using far more pressure than required. Now commit to training your left hand to consistently use minimal force—and also commit to making the training gradual and pursuing it with real patience (again that word...). Eliminating tension takes time and care; it’s not a sudden change, it’s a process. When you pick a string hard, of course, you’ll need to press it to the fret a little more firmly than usual; but experiment with this, too. You’ll probably find that the increased pressure is far less than you expected. Consider your left-hand fingers that are unused during a particular note—they are no part of the business of the moment. They should be loose. If they are tight, start training them to relax when not at work. And just before and just after you press down a string for a note, there is no point in the finger doing it being anything but free and relaxed. Which brings us to another important point: Pressure and release—allowing the muscles to rest between applications of force—is key to keeping the body facile. Force held past its need becomes growing strain in the muscles—the release of the muscles after each use keeps them working efficiently. The picking hand works on these same principles of just-enough-force-applied-briefly-between-rests. With the plectrum, or pick, the arm, wrist, fingers—and for that matter, the neck, jaw, and back—should be relaxed, and the pick should be held lightly. The pick moves downward, in a down-stroke, to touch a string. The thumb and finger, wrist, forearm, or any combination of these (there is no one right way to wield a pick) make this motion. The pick begins to give, tilt, a little against the resistance of the string—then the briefest sliver of force is applied (again, through whatever motion is natural for your particular body), and only enough enough of it for the desired volume of the note, and the point of the pick pops through, leaving a vibrating string in its wake. The soft muscles work just enough to bring the pick back up to the string for an up-stroke. The up-stroke follows the same steps as the down-stroke. That’s how the job is best managed—everything loose and free right up until force is needed, then just enough force to do the job and applied no longer than necessary, then everything loose again right away. It is possible, however, to take this minimal-force idea too far. Force is required, if only for a moment, and the muscular tension of that force can be thrown off only so quickly, even by the most efficient hands. If you don’t use enough force, the body tries to compensate in strange, unnatural ways and the door is opened to tension. But nine out of ten guitarists with strain in their technique are using not too little force but too much and with no relief from it. A lot of guitarists assume that speed comes from swinging the pick rapidly or slapping the fingers against the strings and fretboard. But they’re wrong, and every book on classical technique I’ve read—on guitar, piano, harp, violin...—confirms it. Speed comes from settling down and eliminating all the fuss, and then just spending less time between notes. The fingers and hands aren’t moving much—if any—faster during a rapid passage than during a slow one; they’re just making the notes one right after the other when the tempos are fast. Perhaps this is why people watching a virtuoso musician often comment, “He doesn’t look like he’s playing that fast.” Remember, too, that mental strain can create physical strain. If you can’t wait for speed, if you constantly push yourself to move ahead, then you need to adjust your attitude. Cast off your compulsion and replace it with faith. Repeat to yourself—even as a mantra—that things will come in time if you just practice with
patience (again!) and care and calm persistence. 5. Our hypothetical child follows his curiosity. You’d do well to follow yours. Curiosity instructs. It draws you through the honing of your technique, invigorates the process. Without curiosity, practicing soon becomes dull—dull practice makes slow progress. So let yourself wonder about the guitar and its sounds, your hands and body. Be curious. Curiosity can also improve technique by helping you know where the notes are—”Where else can I play this C sharp?” or, “How can I play a Mixolydian mode starting with my second finger?” you wonder, and the next thing you know, you’ve learned the neck a little better. Your technique is bound to improve when there’s no hesitation as to which string and fret you’re after. 6. How do you know how when to take a break during your practice; whether or not to slow back down after trying a line at a new, quicker tempo a couple of times; or, for that matter, just what you ought to be practicing? There are lots of good answers, good guidelines, but the main one should be, Follow your instincts. Our child never questions his gut feelings and will naturally follow them; adults, however, learn to think rather than feel. When you think, “Where am I messing up in this exercise?” stop for a moment, get quiet, and see if the answer doesn’t rise from within. Your body and your subconscious are a wise and sensitive team. Listen to them. Don’t be the robot who always practices the same way by the same plan. Daily practice schedules are good for some players, but if you make one up, listen to your instincts as you do, and use your instincts to check your schedule—occasionally, if not frequently—to see if it needs modification...or, if today you need to practice different things or in a different way. 7. Finally, an important matter the child might miss: time. It’s not enough just to feel time; you must hold it steady, constant. Whether the beat is slow, fast, swinging or straight it must be tethered to your music by a flexible lifeline or that music is dead on arrival. This isn’t some lofty intellectual axiom—play a few years and develop good time, then you’ll understand. But your time needn’t be rigid—great players rock on the time as a surfer leans slightly forward or back on a wave. But the balance—the connection—in either case is always solid. If the surfer loses his wave or the musician loses the beat, the ride is over. Practice, perform, while looking always to ride the beat. Develop and nurture good time in your playing. But, critical as it is to making good music, why bring up time in this discussion of technique? Answer: time is as important an element of technique as it is of music in general. Practice with careful solid time and your chops will improve faster than practicing without it. *** Despite all this, chops aren’t everything. I, personally, would prefer to have great technique and then use only sixty percent of it most of the time. And if I had to choose, I’d take passion or spontaneity or groove over great chops without a thought. But I’d rather have it all. Technique, in the end, is what makes the notes we feel rise out of our instruments. The better our technique, the more of what we hear can emerge. So now you know the process behind building good technique—at least as I’ve come to understand it—and (with the sometimes exception of developing time) it is the very process a certain kind of child would naturally follow. Follow the process, get the chops. Simple. Hmm...better make that sixty-five percent.
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The Power of Rhythm If a phrase seems dull, shake up its rhythms. The phrase could just be a section pulled from a scale, a row of half a dozen notes played at two-to-the-beat. Then you start reshaping them, like putty—stretch some out longer, squeeze others shorter, and push a couple slightly apart leaving some silent space between. But leave them all in their original order. You’ll likely discover your previously lackluster phrase, reshaped, has become interesting. But even more remarkable than how colorful and distinctive your phrase becomes by changing only its syncopation is how little change is required to give that bland row of notes a fresh new sound. Shake up only two notes in, say, a phrase of ten, and watch all the notes leap to their feet. It doesn’t take much because rhythm is potent stuff, a vital part of melody, of improvisation, of music, that is almost as important—perhaps even as important—as harmony. You might not suppose rhythm is such a big deal if you consider how few jazz musicians really expand their abilities with it. Their loss. But make rhythm your gain. If you’re a passable sight-reader then you already have at least some appreciation of the vast possibilities of rhythm, since any decent sight-reading book will teach rhythm along with the notes. But if you’ve never really investigated rhythm, you’re ripe for a revelation. In just one bar of four beats—the most common rhythm-unit of jazz—you can go a long way. Start with half notes—one note sustained over every two beats. Since there are four beats in a standard bar, there are just two half-notes. Start improvising over familiar chord changes strictly playing half notes. Now drop the first half note of each bar, so that there is a “rest,” a silent period, of two beats at the start of each measure, and continue improvising. Now return the first note but drop the second, and improvise again. You see the pattern? It’s just a matter of trying variations, in logical order, and playing with them long enough, and often enough, to grow accustomed to hearing and feeling and producing them. Now play quarter notes, one note per beat. Improvise with four quarter notes per measure; then drop the first note and replace it with silence, a rest; then return the first note and replace the second with a rest; the third; the fourth. Now consider how many possibilities remain using just half and quarter notes—two quarter notes followed by a half note rest, a quarter note rest followed by a half note and then another quarter note rest, a half note followed by two quarter notes... There are more combinations than these. It’s all straightforward, really, and you needn’t be a sight reader to follow the logic. But if you explore— patiently—the possibilities of rhythm in this way, just improvising with them, or perhaps applying them to your standard warm-ups or exercises, then your rhythmic skills and freedom will, gradually, flourish. Eventually you’ll get to eighth notes (two to the beat) sixteenth notes (four to the beat) and perhaps even thirty-second notes (eight to the beat), and the variations and combinations will seem to stretch like a widening wave up into starry infinity. The key, of course, is to work with rhythm steadily, at least a few minutes every day or two. It’s like learning Spanish: at first you learn what the words mean and how they function together yet still struggle to ask for a glass of water, but as you work with the language daily, your thoughts begin to form sentences on their own as you rise towards fluency in speaking Spanish. Rise, then, towards fluency with rhythm. But developing a broad rhythmic vocabulary isn’t some burden required of the serious jazz musician—it’s an opportunity. Great jazz players vary in how freely they can connect with different rhythms. Some seem able to grab almost any rhythmic shape at any moment; others have a relatively small rhythmic vocabulary but constantly find fresh ways of weaving it into their improvisations. So you don’t have to master it all to call yourself a real jazz player. Whatever you gain is good. Rhythm is mathematics, as you saw when added and subtracted half notes, quarter notes, and rests. But to a musician truly desiring to play from the gut, it’s much more. It’s another outlet for passion. And since rhythm comes from the beat, it is the depth with which you feel the beat that will determine the depth with which you
can feel rhythms. So don’t just play rhythm—emote rhythm. Speak rhythm as you’d speak words of joy or grief or passion. Here’s another way to explore rhythm. Find a simple and familiar exercise of straight quarter notes that starts right on the beat. Now start the exercise one notch over—in other words, start not on the first quarter note, but on the second. The entire exercise has jumped forward one degree. When you have that down, move everything over one more notch to start on the third quarter note, and then to the last quarter note. Each time you start (and end) the exercise on a different part of the beat, it takes on a whole new character. And there it is: the power of rhythm.
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Ears When a musician says, “My ear isn’t very good,” he or she may be saying more. I’ve slowly come to realize that the unspoken part of the sentence goes, “...and there’s nothing I can do about it.” I want to proclaim, “Not so!” But that’s inappropriate, unless I’m asked my opinion. In this column, however, I’m supposed to offer my opinion, so here it is: A good ear, like good technique, good time, and just about any other musical skill, comes less from genetics than from practice. By “ear,” I refer to the ability to form notes in the mind and find and sound them on an instrument, skills I believe a serious jazz musician must possess in good measure. There are other aspects to ear, but that’s the heart of it. But why is the ear so misunderstood, assumed to be the one and only component of musicianship that must be left to develop on its own? No one assumes that about technique or sight-reading... To my amazement, a lot of jazz seems to be taught with the notion that a good ear is a gift only God can bestow—students memorize scales and chords but their lessons entirely lack training to connect these structures to their ears. Their ears aren’t tested or nurtured. That makes no sense to me—this is jazz, after all... So the news here is, a good ear is earned, which means work, dedication. But I think this is good news—it means nearly everyone’s ear (other than the truly tone-deaf) can be improved, perhaps greatly improved. It means you needn’t just accept your ear’s incidental development as its limit. Here’s another piece of news I consider good: the guitar is a particularly difficult instrument to play by ear. On the piano, middle C is always in the same place. One ivory key. Always. On the guitar, that same C lies on five different strings—in other words, in five different places on the neck. Piano: one choice. Guitar: five. If finding one note on the guitar can be five times harder than on the piano, what about groups of notes? Take a major scale, just one octave. On the guitar, after you’ve chosen one of the several locations for your starting note, you can reasonably grab each following note of that scale in two different places—you have two choices for the second note, two for the third, and so on. And the choices you make for some notes will alter your choices that follow, adding even further to the complexity of playing one short scale on the guitar by ear. Two choices for every note of an eight-tone scale—how many combinations can that make? You can work out a pattern for this one scale on one set of strings, to give you something consistent. But that pattern will probably work only when a certain finger ends up on the first note. Improvising, you could end up with any of the four fingers of your left hand on the starting note. So you’ll need more patterns. And if you make even one finger-slide up or down, you may lose the fingering of the particular pattern you’re on and perhaps lose the pattern altogether. On the piano, all eight notes will be in exactly the same places, every time. That’s why pianists don’t need patterns. There may be choices in fingerings, but the location of every note is set. Simple. Plain. Blessedly consistent. So feeling for notes on the guitar is tricky—far trickier than on piano and trickier than on most instruments. So why, you might ask, do I consider this good news? Because I see this truth as liberating—it means that if your ear isn’t as sharp as you think it should be, it’s probably not because you were born missing a critical gene, but is, in large part, because you chose an instrument particularly difficult to play by ear. So it’s perfectly appropriate to be gentle with yourself—let go of your anxiety, forgive yourself when you play a wrong note, work patiently toward a better ear. You needn’t growl in frustration over all the possible ways to create our one-octave scale; just break it down. You can simplify this piece of music—and most everything else on guitar—by taking it one note at a time. So, find the first note of your scale; then feel for the two places where you can play the second note, and choose one of them. Don’t even consider the third note until the second is settled, and so on. Now you have several simple choices instead of all of them bunched into one big complication. This is a slow process,
taking one note at a time, but you’ll actually progress rapidly this way. Learning slowly, a small bit at a time, is the fastest way to learn—that’s an almost universal rule in music. When you do settle down to give your ear the specific attention it’s probably long craved, bear in mind that there are, as I mentioned, two main aspects to this: (1) hearing the notes in your head, and (2) putting them on your instrument. Here are some of the exercises I use to find and sharpen the notes inside my head. The first exercise, I usually perform during my walks. I form the notes with my voice, scat syllables, like “ba, da” or “bom, bom.” I ease in with the obvious—major arpeggios. I pick a note at random, then treat it as the root and sing the rest of the chord—third, fifth, then root an octave up, then the whole thing back down to the root I started on. When that feels solid, I start on the third, and then sing the fifth, the root, and finally the third an octave up, then work back down. Then I start the whole thing on the fifth and go up and down. Next, I take the higher root and work back through all the steps, but now I work down—root, fifth, third, down to root and then back up to the root I started on; fifth through the chord-tones down to fifth and back up; and, finally, third working down to third and then up. After that, I may follow the same plan with the major scale, which fits the major arpeggio—root, second, third, fourth, and on up to the root an octave up, then back down to the root i started on. (Or I might choose the lydian mode instead, another choice for a major chord.) I might do the same from the third on up to the third an octave higher and back down. Then the same process from the fifth. Or I might instead follow my practice of the major arpeggio with the minor arpeggio. There are many options. The point is, I do it all with my voice—no frets on which I can find and identify notes by mathematics or memory. And I work through it all a little at a time, from the simple to the increasingly complex. And I’m careful to get each note solidly in tune. That’s critical—to sing the pitch accurately, you must form it cleanly in your ear. If the pitch is off, then your grasp of it is probably poor. But your pitch needn’t be exact either, just good—singing perfectly in tune is a challenge even for trained vocalists. If you have doubts about particular notes or about all the notes you sing, you can test each by singing it against the same note played on the guitar (with the guitar properly tuned, of course). If the two notes rest together, you’re singing in tune; if they’re not in tune, you’ll hear a fluttering or wavering between them. Patience is the key to making this exercise productive—it might take you seven practice sessions to get through a major arpeggio started on each of its degrees. So what? If it takes seven, give it seven; if it takes fifteen, so be it. This is not a race. You just keep patiently at it, and you improve. How fast you get something isn’t the point, just getting it is. That’s a wonderful way to train the ears—making the voice do the work. You can’t cheat, and your sense of pitch will sharpen. Singing is a good test and an excellent teacher. And you don’t even need a guitar in order to do it. The hearing part of playing by ear involves two basic components: intervals and chord-tones. And that the best ears hear both. Each interval is unique. Take, for example, the perfect fourth—the precise distance between its two notes creates a sound—a mood, a character—that is colorful and unique. Of course if that perfect fourth separates the second and fifth of a mixolydian mode over a dominant seven chord it will sound different than when it falls between the root and fourth of a dorian mode over a minor seven chord; it’s attached itself to two different chords, higher on one than the other—how could it not sound different? Yet the perfect fourth retains its unique character in both positions, and for that matter, anywhere it lands. An ear that has done its work with the perfect fourth knows this. An interval—not just the fourth, but any interval—isn’t just a faceless little equation, a space between frets, two dots on paper; it’s a breathing presence with a soul, pumping original blood, radiating its distinctive personality. But if you don’t really know an interval, it passes your ear almost anonymously, like a stranger on the street. So make friends with each interval. The closer your friendship with an interval, the more easily you’ll catch it and the more intuitively you’ll use it. How do you begin a friendship with an interval? You begin by learning to recognize it. A good exercise for identifying intervals is to sing them. Sing one note, any note, and then try to sing, let’s
say, a perfect fourth above it. You can find that fourth by singing up a major scale—do, re, mi, fa—then trying to cut out the second and third notes. Or you can use a melody. The first two notes of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” make a perfect fourth. Just start to sing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” off your starting note and you’ve got a perfect fourth. “Red River Valley” also starts with a perfect fourth. In fact, you can find melodies for all your intervals—”By the Sea” starts with a minor second going up, “I’m Confessin’ That I love You” with a major second going up, “Yellow Bird” with a minor second going down, “Three Blind Mice” with a major second going down, and so on. Any song will do—children’s songs, Christmas songs, TV show themes, jazz standards... And if you can’t find your interval at the start of a song, find it further in—there’s a diminished fifth, for example, in the third bar of Duke Ellington’s “Take the “A” Train.” When, after weeks or months of playing this game, you’ve become pretty good at singing intervals, try singing combinations of intervals—perhaps a major third followed by a minor second, or a major second then a perfect fourth. When, after more weeks or months, this second stage is fairly manageable, work on dissecting the intervals —still by ear, without a guitar—of a melody. What are the first four intervals of “Autumn Leaves” or “Round Midnight” or, for that matter, “Pop! Goes the Weasel”? Once you’ve got this business working well enough, you’ll have truly begun a lifelong friendship, an ever-deepening friendship, with intervals. Then there’s that second component of ear-playing—the sound of a particular note over a particular chord. The major seventh over a minor chord is haunting, even a little chilling, to my ear. The major seventh over a major chord is a completely different effect—it’s like the soft sweetness of whipped cream. Same major seventh, but over a major chord it’s sound is worlds away from its sound over a minor one...if you truly listen. What about two different notes over the same chord? The ninth (also called the second, of course) over a minor chord sounds almost as haunting to my ear as the major seventh does, but not in quite the same way. More like dark purpose—a bounty hunter tracking his man. The ninth and the major seventh are different—and it’s the difference that matters. Learn to hear the difference, to feel it, as you feel snow or sunshine on your skin. Open yourself to just one note over one chord, feel it resonate in your ears and emotions. Let yourself know it a little better each time you sit down with it. You’ve let a note bare its heart to you; now, take the next step in the relationship: learn to recognize that note. If it’s the third over a dominant seven chord, strum the chord, then sing the third. When you’ve got a fair handle on the third, learn to sing the fifth, then the second, the sixth... You can use songs for finding notes against chords just as we used them to find intervals. “Deck the Halls” begins with the fifth of a major chord. The jazz standard “Angel Eyes” begins on the root of a minor chord. Get it? Progress pretty much as you did with intervals: first finding one note at a time; then finding groups of notes; then, weeks or months later, identifying all the notes in part or all of a melody; like the melody to “Lover Man,” progressing from one chord to the next. (Okay, here are the first six notes in “Lover Man,” to get you started: root, major second, root of the minor chord; then root, perfect fifth, major sixth of the dominant seven chord.) You can also perform these exercises entirely without the guitar—just sing the notes of a chord (as an “arpeggio,” a chord played note-by-note) and then hold the sound of the chord in your ear as you sing notes against it. Next we’ll look at some ear-exercises you can perform entirely on the guitar. Now you’re trying to form notes on a construct, a contraption—remember that. Connecting your ear to strings and frets simply isn’t natural; it’s the opposite of singing in that regard. All musical instruments are unnatural, and that’s why a lot of players—and a lot of teachers and college programs—depend on music theory and memorization of patterns and phrases as substitutes for honest improvisation. The guitar can be played by ear—have no doubt. Here’s my primary guitar-in-hand ear-training exercise. Find a note anywhere on the neck and plant your first finger on it. Now...slowly...try to play a familiar melody. Could be “Happy Birthday” or “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” simple stuff, melodies you really know. Try to find the notes by feel—don’t think, just reach for them. Expect mistakes, and don’t worry about them. Mistakes are part of learning. But accepting mistakes
is no excuse for laziness—so focus. And never try to improve by leaps; instead, work patiently towards small advancements and your reward will be progress, uneven and sometimes stubborn progress (that’s just the way learning works), but progress nonetheless. Once you’ve got a melody worked out starting with your first finger, plant your second finger on the same beginning note. Now try to play the same melody—this will likely prove a whole new challenge. The rest of your fingers will probably shift to new areas on the guitar’s neck. (Wish about now you’d taken up piano? Don’t despair.) Now start with the third finger. Now the fourth. Generally, you change the starting finger and you change the positions of some of the notes that follow. But that’s what you must be able to do if you are going to improvise—just play out the line from wherever you are on the neck, from whatever fingers can reach the notes. And that’s the concrete value of this exercise—it strengthens and solidifies the connection between your ear and hand. And it makes your ear and hand flexible, able to reach for notes anywhere on the neck. Try it with scales, the melodies of jazz standards, any phrase you’ve heard or can create, arpeggios, anything. Everything. This exercise, by the way, defines one of the limitations of position playing—that unless a phrase happens to land the fingers in just the right places, then “positions”—scales, arpeggios, and such arranged in a set fingering pattern—become insufficient. But now isn’t the time to get into that. One sort of ear training that has its place but also has its limits is singing the notes as you play them. We’ve all heard guitarists and sometimes pianists sing lines as they play them. It’s appealing, and can make audiences sit up and buzz with interest. Try it yourself now. Not so difficult, is it? It shouldn’t be—you’re likely playing things you know well and have heard and played many times. That’s natural. Now try singing a short line, but something unusual and new, pausing, then reproducing it on the guitar. Harder, isn’t it? Probably much harder. That’s good, because now you’re forcing your ear to really work. Your ear will struggle sometimes, sure, but it’s learning new territory. This latter exercise is really much more valuable in developing the connection between your ear and guitar than singing and playing your pet licks. Clearing your mind and playing whatever sounds fill the remaining space is the goal; it’s the foundation of the passionate (not mechanical), free (not bound by the intellect), spontaneous (unplanned), and honest improvisor. Passion, freedom, spontaneity, and honesty are the soul of jazz. But don’t look to become a free and honest improvisor by trying to master intervals and scale-degrees—you never will. Instead, set out to begin a lifelong partnership with them. A deepening friendship whose growing trust and comfort allow you to keep letting go of fear and caution by tiny degrees, until one day you realize you’re really doing it, you’re really playing what you hear and feel.
—4—
Good Chops During my first years of playing guitar, I thought of “chops,” technique, as pretty much one thing—speed. I was dazzled by the fast lines of Joe Pass and Howard Roberts and Charlie Parker; I yearned to watch my own fingers sweep up and down the fret board, spilling out swarms of notes in their wake. Speed was clearly what made these players great. I wanted to be great too. I wanted speed. I was aware of precision, of course—or as musicians say, playing “clean.” Clean counted, sure, and sloppy speed certainly wasn’t as impressive as rapid notes with neat edges. But speed was still speed, and it was wondrous. I suspect that most young guitarists figure that technique is all, or nearly all, about speed. And suspect too that when those guitarists discuss technique with veteran players, the two groups are usually talking about somewhat different things. Time reveals. After a couple of decades of playing the guitar you see new aspects of your instrument’s every facet, chops included. What I see now, after thirty-some years of playing and practicing jazz guitar, is that while speed is an important component of technique, there are other components of equal gravity. There is, as I mentioned, the matter of playing cleanly. Why play at all if your technique is so rough that your audience can’t recognize the notes? Pity the listener who has drifted into the story line of your solo but is yanked out of it when the plot falls into some undecipherable passage. True, a skillful improvisor may save the solo despite a few lost notes. But any seasoned jazz player will tell you that precision is a virtue, and that it can only improve a solo. So clean is an important part of technique, not just to please the ear of the perfectionist or appease the pedant, but to carry the musician’s notes—and their meaning—to his or her listeners. But here’s the other side of the clean issue. It is possible to polish all one’s scales and arpeggios and patterns and then play solos that are nearly perfect. Technically perfect, that is—but only if those solos stay very close to scales and arpeggios and well-rehearsed phrases. But real jazz solos are much more prepared music. Good solos are daring, spontaneous, risky, and filled with variety and surprise. Finding all this on the spot, charging bravely into unfamiliar territory, requires technique that is flexible. What happens if a particular phrase lands your first finger where you always place your third? Can you keep going? Can you keep playing out the line if it doesn’t fit into your standard patterns and fingerings? If you are going to take chances and try to follow out new ideas—true improvisation—you’d better be able to hold your course even when the old familiar fret-board positions don’t work. Therefore good technique, in my opinion, is flexible technique. Music from the gut naturally varies its voice. It may speak, shout, or whisper depending on the emotion of the moment. Slipping easily from whispers to shouts and through all that lies between requires a specific kind of control, one I consider an essential aspect of technique. Playing all notes at one volume is like speaking in monotone, grating on the ear like the voice of some old-fashioned movie robot. But emotions leap up and drop down, build gradually, and more; emotional music must do the same. Listen to players who really lean on their instrument’s range of volume and intensity. Listen to Howard Roberts and Pat Martino play guitar, listen to Gene Harris play piano, listen to most good saxophone players, and you’ll hear the undeniable power of an instrument’s full range of volume and bite: its “dynamics.” Good technique, in my opinion, requires good control of dynamics. Those are the main facets of good technique in the opinion of one veteran guitar player. I’m sure other experienced players would have some different opinions, but I expect that most would broadly agree with my assessment. There are other aspects, to be sure: good technique must be rooted in sure and constant time—a steady beat—and good technique, on guitar, must apply not only to lines but to chords and octaves and every kind of harmonic structure. Good technique must include good tone, drawing a rich and projecting sound from
the instrument. And that’s still not the whole list. But if you can play distinct notes with good speed, outside the bounds of familiar patterns, slipping from loud to soft as your ear demands, then your technique is probably good. Good may be good enough—a lot of great jazz has been created with technique that was good, not great.
—5—
Art and Technique Technique is seductive. It has seduced and continues to seduce a good many guitarists into believing that fast lines are the whole point of playing jazz. The problem is—and I think about any experienced jazz musician would agree with this—technique is not the whole point of playing jazz. Quick, clean, flexible technique is an important element of good jazz, but too much emphasis on technique creates solos that, despite all the fanfare, feel hollow. What, then, is technique’s proper place in the scheme of playing jazz? As an answer I can offer only my own opinion, but it’s an opinion formed gradually over three decades of playing jazz guitar, and a good many of the best musicians I’ve known share it. So, here’s my answer: Technique is the vehicle by which musical ideas are expressed, making it required machinery of the art of jazz, but not the art itself. Yet sparkling, crisp speed has always masqueraded as art and has always lured some musicians away from real artistic expression. This isn’t to say that technique (“chops,” as jazz musicians call it) is insignificant— technique is important, because it allows the player to speak through the instrument. But in the end, technique is really just a tool, and music is about what the player says, not about the tool that permits him or her to say it. Consider this. A fine actor reads aloud a story. His training and dedicated practice allow him to express grief with an echo of tears, joy colored with laughter, to form the words clearly, to pace the story’s progress to dramatic effect. But can all his skill turn a dull and poorly written story into a good one? I don’t believe it can. Now consider the opposite. An inept and wooden speaker reads aloud a beautifully crafted story. He straight-jackets the emotions with mechanical numbness, mumbles the story’s words, stumbles through all the finer points. Perhaps the beautiful story can shine even through this rough presentation, rise above the distractions of his clumsiness, but that will take one hell of a story, and a patient audience. If these readers represent technique and the stories they read represent improvised solos, well...you get the idea: weak solo played precisely—still a weak solo. Great solo played roughly—the greatness may still emerge. There are, of course, limits; I mean, if a note is rough but identifiable—poor tone, excessive string noise, louder or softer or shorter than intended, that sort of business—perhaps that note will still manage to do its job. But if too many notes are vague, difficult, or even impossible to identify? Well, then the whole solo is probably bankrupt. If communication fails to thoroughly and too often, all is lost. So, a solo needn’t be played perfectly to be great, but there are, as I said, limits. But what about speed? Is speed a required component of a good jazz solo? I have no doubts about that one. Answer: no. Look, there are plenty of jazz solos, widely acknowledged as great solos, that contain few—if any—rapid passages. But I don’t mean to condemn speed. It’s a valid color on the musician’s palate. Just as the painter uses green and red and yellow and blue, the jazz musician uses soft and loud and slow and fast. Only appropriateness and taste can tell the musician when and when not to use speed. But like anything used too often and without purpose, speed can become predictable and monotonous. Apply speed wisely, however, and rapid passages can sparkle. So where does the importance of technique end, that place where melody, creativity, spontaneity, emotion, cohesiveness, form, surprise, originality, and all the more artistic elements take over? That’s a much easier question to ask than to answer. And it becomes a slightly different and probably more useful question when it’s aimed not at the lofty musings of the music philosopher but at the concrete practicing of a musician, in
which case the question becomes, How much time should you spend on scales and sequences and arpeggios and how much time probing the sounds in the diminished scale or training your ears to hear arpeggios or learning a new song or a familiar song in a new key or just trying to find a new groove on a tune you’ve played a hundred times, and dozens of other artistic matters? No easy answer here. But it seems to me that if your ears hear no more than they did a few months or a year ago; if your solos have become predictable, loaded with the old familiar phrases, but are true precision—polished to a high luster—you probably ought to spend less time on technique and more time learning how to capture passion in notes, as a skilled and passionate painter captures it in colors.
—6—
Maintaining Honesty Under the Light of Wes It’s perfectly normal to be inspired by great players, even to memorize phrases from their recorded solos if not the solos in their entirety. All well and good, up to a point. Consider Wes Montgomery—he’s drawn in a lot of guitar players. And it’s easy to understand why: his playing is forever fresh, he says more with five notes than most musicians can say in ten, he’s full of surprises while fitting it all into a greater symmetry, he—but why go on? Point is, he’s made his mark on jazz guitar—I, for one, can’t seem to string together more than a dozen octaves (octaves were Wes’s signature sound) without somewhere in them giving him a nod. So, let us place a dedicated but young and impressionable jazz guitarist under the brilliant light of Wes Montgomery. The young guitarist has a choice: he or she can rise into the light, reassured by the greatness of its source, or can instead wander off along his or her own uncertain path, knowing that whatever waits there, it is unique, and honest. But there is only one real choice, as I see it—to manage the fear and follow one’s own path. Trying to become great through another’s greatness is false promise—strive to become Wes Montgomery and you become only his shadow. Only Wes can be Wes. But, I believe, he or she who remains true to the Self, letting the notes rise naturally from within, on faith, will find whatever greatness he or she possesses. In the heat of playing it boils down simply to this: you feel the texture of the chord, the urging of the beat, and you make a choice: you either ask yourself, “What would Wes play here?” or you clear your mind of all thought and feel your way through, propelled by the beat, stirred by your passion, guided by your ear. If you do go your own way, it may not be as powerful as what Wes would play, but it is more powerful than you playing what Wes would play because it is from your ear, your heart. It carries in it the spirit of a real soul, of honesty. I’ve heard some remarkable jazz-guitarist impersonators, players who sounded just like Wes or Django Reinhardt or Tal Farlow. Some sounded better than their mentors, at least technically. Faster, cleaner. But what spoke loudest was the emptiness of what they played. After a while it became boring, like listening to a speaker without an original thought and who can only repeat what others have said. Yet I’ve heard guitarists with stumbling fingers and elementary ears who drew me in and held me chorus after chorus, and managed the feat just by playing honestly, straight from the gut. Seems impossible that every nuance of emotion can flow through hands and strings and amplifier into a listener’s ears and right to his heart, but it does. The classical world has long understood that feelings travel through musical instruments, and veteran jazz musicians will tell you the same. So if you steal a solo, steal a style, the theft will color everything you play with deceit. But imitation does have a reasonable place in a musician’s development. It is likely that every jazz guitarist worth his or her salt has had mentors. We all learn from and are inspired by others; just read the interviews. George Benson says that as a boy he worked Charlie Christian lines off recordings; George Barnes describes clarinetist Jimmy Noone as his “single greatest influence”; and Pat Martino confesses such a powerful early addiction to the playing of Johnny Smith that “if Johnny Smith stopped making records,” he’d have had “to stop playing.” Obviously Pat found his own way, which proves that you can come back from an addiction to mimicking the greats. And Pat and George and George are probably as good as they are, in part, because of their early influences. So it’s no sin to borrow, to learn, from great musicians. It can even be a blessing. But it turns dangerous if it goes too far. Wes, who influenced so many, understood that as well as anyone. In an interview he said so, using Tal Farlow as an example: “Instead of other guys getting their thing closed, they’d jump on Tal Farlow. Now, he can carry them for a long time, but when they get through they haven’t done a thing by themselves.”
—7—
Falling into a Groove It’s tempting to speculate (there can never be a definitive choice) as to who was the twentieth century’s greatest jazz guitarist. There are plenty of contenders for the title—Django Reinhardt, Tal Farlow, Pat Metheny, Pat Martino, to name but a few. And, of course, Wes Montgomery, the man with the distinctively dark sound, with all those chords and all those octaves. But many of Wes’s fans would choose him not for his sound or his octaves but for the way he could find a groove, and then build it from a trickle to a torrent. That, as I see it, is really the thing in jazz—in fact, in all music, from classical to country to reggae—to find a groove, and then make it grow. A groove may come with quick lines, complex harmony, or intricate chordmelody, but just as likely it may not. All the dazzling fireworks aren’t the point. The groove is the point—it alone determines if the music just lies stiff and cadaverous or rises into passionate dance. All grooves, incidentally, are often referred to collectively as “The Groove,” suggesting they all flow from the same source. Which they probably do. Yet they branch off so differently. Wes, for example, liked his grooves cool—when he comes to a turn of the phrase and you expect him to raise his voice in dramatic crescendo, he often takes a breath, and then says something sly. Django is all bounce and fire. Pat Martino is about intensity and unwavering purpose. Jim Hall explores the fringe areas, brushing his fingertips over whatever textures capture his curiosity. But even the most consistent stylists do not always fall into the same groove, even with the same tune—musician X may find a reflective tone for “The Days of Wine and Roses” today, yet he played it yesterday with angry abandon. Of course it’s just as likely that the difference in the grooves he found for this great standard was slight, a barely perceptible shift. But a little goes a long way with the groove. Many believe, as I do, that we never “find” grooves at all, that we must open ourselves to the great wellspring of all grooves and let one find us. It’s a matter of letting go, making a space inside ourselves, and then inviting something in. It’s a helpless feeling—after all, the invitation may be declined. Still, I find it reassuring that great musicians are seemingly granted a groove whenever they request one. If they get one almost every time, we mortals can hope for one, all or in full, now and then. The one way you can’t you get a groove is by thinking your way into one; at least I can’t. There seems to be a switch somewhere inside, and the moment I flip it to “intellect,” the feeling dies. If there’s a halfway point for my switch between the “intellect” and “feeling” positions, I’ve never been able to find it. But good jazz musicians will give you different views on how they connect with the groove. Some will probably even tell you they do use their intellects in the process. Still, does anyone really believe that Wes was thinking when he charged through his seriously compelling solo in “Four on Six?” I, personally, fall into a groove most consistently and best when I empty my mind, absorb the beat (the beat is the indispensable foundation of the groove, its heartbeat), and play simply. A short, plain idea with a shred of life comes out. I feel that bit of life and respond to it in what I play next. Ideas follow ideas, rising from the color of the cords, the pulse of the music. Then, somehow, I am no longer aware of my technique, my guitar, where I am, what time it is, what day, what year. All I know is that something has caught me in its flow and I am swept away in its clarity and purpose. I’ve fallen into a groove. It’s hard to say exactly what a groove is, but you know when you’ve found one. That may be the most important thing you can say about it. The sad truth is, I don’t always fall into a groove. I keep getting better at it as I concern myself less with what is fashionable and what is hot, and instead concentrate on keeping my switch in the “feeling” position. Yet despite this effort, there still come songs, even some entire nights, when I can only now and then feel the weak edges of The Groove’s lap at my ankles—small consolation once you know what it’s like to be swept
away in its rush. These are the times when experience must substitute for groove. It’s a poor substitute, but sufficient in small doses. Forget all the valuable, even invaluable, mathematical intricacies of the practice-room sometime. Turn off the mental computer. Tap your foot hard in steady rhythm and feel the beat resonate up through your bones. Play a note on the guitar, anywhere. Keep drawing in the beat. Feel for more notes and try to find them without thinking, just reaching for them, trying to sense their place on the neck as they ring in those invisible ears within. Don’t try to add notes to the beat, as though forcing two disparate entities—time and melody—together and then binding them back-to-back. Instead, coax the music from the beat. Improvisation and the beat and are like river and rain, one rising from the other. Perhaps you’ll feel the rising force of the current as you wade out deeper and deeper until, finally, it sweeps you away. Then you’ll forget where you are, what time it is, what day. Then you’ll have fallen into a groove.
—8—
Playing Time I began to recognize The Look, and wondered what it meant. I usually saw The Look after some good musician asked me about a gig I’d played: “How was the time?” I’d pause, a little confused, then answer something like, “Oh...uh...fine.” We’d stand there looking at one another blankly for a long moment; then, once it was clear I had nothing to add, they’d drop the matter—and that’s when I’d see The Look. Their eyes would settle into what seemed recognition. I came to suspect that every time I got The Look I’d just been sized up, and that those musicians knew something I didn’t. Now I’m sure of it. I eventually figured out what they knew: good time is never a sure thing. In fact, most musicians lack it, and they’re usually the ones who assume their time is just fine, if they think about it at all. What I now believe is that solid time almost invariably comes from patient and persistent effort to develop it, that those who possess good time tend to obsess about it somewhat, and that if you don’t understand time’s importance your time is probably poor. Time is a big deal. It isn’t just a nuance, something hung onto music like ornaments on a Christmas tree— it’s the core of music, the trunk of the tree. And I’m convinced that understanding the importance and nature of good time is the first step in developing it. Time is the skeletal structure supporting the flesh and muscle of harmony, melody, dynamics, and rhythm. If that structure—time—fails, everything collapses: anything played without good time, as I’ve heard more than one fine musician state, just “doesn’t matter.” It doesn’t matter because it’s empty, dead. Noise. Sometimes musicians say things like “Keeping the beat is the drummer’s job.” Yes, it is, but more important, it’s every musician’s job. Whether you’re soloing, comping chords behind a soloist, or repeating the simplest of figures, you can’t be neutral about time; you’re either supporting it and contributing your own unique color to it or you are sucking out it’s life’s blood. Only two choices: you are with the time or against it. But to good musicians—drummers, bassists, saxophone players, and, of course, guitarists—there is really only one choice. It’s been my good fortune to play with some excellent musicians over the decades. Their instruments and styles varied, but they all shared one characteristic: their time was good. This isn’t to say their time was perfect, like the precisely staggered ticks of a clock or a metronome. Great time isn’t necessarily perfect time. What made those players’ time stand out is that it felt steady, confident, vibrant, alive, and that every note or drum-strike emerged not along with but from the beat. Their time was blended with the music, inseparable from it. Consequently, everything they played did matter. Everything lived. The best news is that most musicians are capable of developing good time. If your time is poor or inconsistent, it can probably be made good. What’s the secret? Simple: dedication, care, patience. Practice with a metronome—carefully—and play right on its ticks when the notes should fall there. Practice without a metronome, developing a sensitivity to the evenness of your foot-taps. Listen and feel for the beat every time you practice or perform. And when you play with others, stay constantly aware of their time—if it’s not in sync with yours, what’s the problem, and is someone (perhaps you?) not paying attention? Listen to recordings of great players—how is Joe Pass’s time? Jim Hall’s? Oscar Peterson’s? And if their time is excellent (which, of course, it is), do they all seem to feel the beat in exactly the same way? (Which they probably do not.) Listen to the other musicians with them, to the whole group together; you’ll learn what unified time feels like among great players, the strong, clear beat, everyone listening, everyone riding the same train. Good musicians, as I said, are often fanatics about time. They talk about it; they seek it in everything they play, whether practicing or performing; and prefer always to play with other musicians who share their
obsession. So that’s part of what it takes to develop really good time—a powerful and constant awareness of and desire for it. And it’s also a requisite for getting calls from first-class players—the last thing a real timeplayer wants is the strain of playing with a non-time-player who keeps kicking the beat in the shins. *** So now you understand what The Look was all about: it was a look of recognition—I had just been identified as a non-time player, one of those who just didn’t get it. I think I understand time better now. After all, I’ve become very aware of, very careful about my time over the past two decades. And I haven’t seen The Look for ages. I don’t miss it.
—9—
Picking It was Dad’s fault, my journey through all the varied ways there are to pick a guitar string. Like a lot of kids I started playing with a pick, or plectrum, just a water-drop shape in flat plastic. Then I heard some dazzling guitar playing just a few months later when my father set the phonograph needle on a Buddy Fite record. Despite some horn arrangements that were pure elevator-music and a breathy, little-girl-sounding chorus in the background, there were fistfuls of rich guitar chords and crisp lines of impossible speed. I guess it was my guitar teacher’s fault too. He said: “Buddy Fite? Sure I’ve heard of him—he’s amazing. Plays with fingerpicks.” That did it, of course. I walked away from my flat-picks and straight to the music store for some plastic finger-picks and a plastic thumb-pick. Four years later I went back and pulled the old flat-picks out into the light. I was making a living playing in rock and soul bands, music that required a lot of syncopated up-down strumming that didn’t seem to fit with the finger-picks. But I didn’t just go back to the plectrum because of that; I collapsed under pressure. Seemed like everyone was telling me, “You can’t play rock with finger-picks,” or “Why don’t you throw those things away and play the guitar right?” The plectrum, I found, could produce soft, velvet-edged notes or loud, sharper ones with all sorts of range in between. And it is a good tool for strumming. But I came to miss the hard bite of the finger-picks, and I missed grabbing a bunch of notes all at once, or in any order my free-swinging thumb and fingers chose. So I started experimenting with every picking method I could find—continuing the journey Dad had unwittingly set before me a few years earlier with his Buddy Fite record. Though I continued practicing with the plectrum. What I discovered, after a couple of decades, was that every way of picking the guitar carries with it specific challenges, obstacles, advantages, and possibilities. Also, I discovered that there are a whole lot of ways to pick a guitar string. There is, as I mentioned, the plectrum, alternating up- and down-strokes for lines, strumming for chords. And the finger-picks, as I used them, the thumb-pick making the down-strokes and the first finger making the up-strokes in strict alternation, chords usually sounded by plucking two to four strings at once in almost classical-guitar manner. Then there’s true classical technique, the pad of each finger touching and muting a string just before the precisely shaped nail strikes it. It’s a technique for soft nylon strings, really, though some players with tusktough nails use them on steel strings. The classical player alternates strokes of the first and second fingers for lines, as does the flamenco player, and if you’ve ever heard Paco de Lucia (flamenco) or Angel Romero (classical) you know that this method can be clean and fast. It’s a good way to go with nylon strings, if you don’t mind all the fussing with your fingernails. Though a flat pick can sound great on nylon too. The legendary Lenny Breau played on both steel and nylon strings with fingernails and a thumb-pick. He picked his lines mostly, as I understand from an article I read about him and by watching a few short live performances on video, by alternating thumb-pick and fingernail—consistent tone being no small challenge while alternating plastic and a primate claw. Joe Pass, playing in an ensemble rather than solo, liked to grab chords with his second and third fingers while striking the lowest chord-string with a plectrum held in the normal way between thumb and first finger —”hybrid picking” we now call it. Then he’d use standard alternating pick-strokes to run off his lines. There’s more. Kevin Eubanks picks lines mainly by alternating strokes of his thumb and first finger—no nails—on steel strings. Richard Boukas also makes his strokes entirely with the flesh of thumb and fingers (though he’ll sometimes use a little bit of nail if he has it) but on nylon strings; and like Eubanks plays his lines mostly by alternating thumb and first finger. Michael Howell plays his lines with alternating strokes of the first and second fingers, like a classical guitarist, but without nails, and on steel strings.
Everybody knows about Wes Montgomery. Wes played everything with the thumb, lines, chords, octaves, everything. A lot of players love Wes’s sound, and it was a sound only flesh could make. A plectrum can sound rich too, though it’s a sound different from Wes’s. Fingernails, finger-picks, they have other sounds. But sounds are more than flesh or plastic, much more. Angle of the stroke, when and how and how much pressure is applied, and a player’s touch in general all powerfully influence his or her sound. And then there are the sounds of different guitars, different amps, different strings, and more. All these variables can and usually do alter the sweetness and depth and overall character of sound. My point is, don’t be quick to blame your method of picking if your sound displeases your ear. Aspects of your technique may need fine tuning, or perhaps another amp, other strings... It can all be a little confusing. Which method is right for me? you wonder. First, I’d say, if you already have a method you like, stay with it. You can experiment with others, of course, but why switch if you’re satisfied? If, however, you are new to the guitar, now may be a good time to stop and take stock. The decision concerning a picking method may not be so difficult after all. Do you want to play unaccompanied guitar? Then prefer a finger-style method. Do you love the sound of nylon strings? Then you probably need to learn to care for and play with your fingernails (though a few rebels play true classical guitar with no nails, so why not classical-guitar jazz?). Do the warm electric sounds of Kenny Burrell and Grant Green make you want to plug in a cord, flick a switch, and pick up something like a Gibson L5? Then consider the plectrum. No question: the great majority of jazz guitarists play with a pick unless they’re playing solo guitar, and some even then. It’s always been that way. But you can brush aside convention by placing smacking your fingers down on the strings so that only their impact against the frets makes them sound—no picking of any kind—as Stanley Jordan does. Or you could even pick up two or three finger-picks and a thumb-pick and play the guitar as though it were a steel guitar. I started doing that again a little over a year ago. And this time around I don’t really care if anybody else likes it or not. It felt awkward wearing the finger-picks again, but it felt good too, and pleasantly familiar. Who knows where it will lead?
—10—
Telling Stories A lot of young jazz musicians (and even quite a few seasoned ones) seem confused about just what they are supposed to accomplish in a solo. Should they play phrases they learn from recordings of Bud Powell or Stan Getz or other great players? Should they create hot new phrases? Reach their lines up into the extensions of chords or out into the altered tones? Or just cram each bar full of notes? If you asked around, you’d probably find plenty of players who’d support each of these notions. But I believe the purpose behind a jazz solo is, more than anything else, to tell a story. Think about what makes a good story. The beginning introduces the characters, sets the scene, and suggests a plot. Then comes the body of the story, in which one action leads to the next as one or more conflicts build. Finally, there’s a climax, where the conflict comes to a head and is somehow resolved. The rest is the closing, a settling of accounts, a chance to breathe easier after the tension of the climax as the story coasts to its end. Now think about an effective jazz solo. It begins with a sort of introduction which suggests the tone—the particular groove. The ideas flow one into another as intensity builds. Then there is a crescendo, the peak of excitement. The last bit of the solo winds down from the crescendo, settles the tension, and eases the listener out. A story told in words and a story told in notes—different, to be sure, but as you can see they are similar in form. Of course there’s tremendous range in both kinds of stories. Just as a written story may charge relentlessly toward its end, or pause occasionally to perhaps wander down some interesting side road, so may a solo. A word-story may build rapidly or in leisurely reflection, and so may a story of notes. And either kind of story may reach its peak in a frenzy or instead crest quietly, on the turn of a thought. There’s spacious room in all this for the imagination of the writer or musician to follow even its wildest impulses. In both word-story and note-story, things have to make sense, which means that most actions or ideas must follow logically from one to the next. In a story of words, this means the plot progresses in a way we can understand. And so it is with a story told in notes—most phrases in a strong solo build on those that preceded them, so that everything adds up, fits together. Consider this bit of a word-story: I was only a few yards from him. I was staring him out. He pretended not to notice me, but I knew he knew I was standing there rudely and quietly.
These three sentences (from “The Fight” by Dylan Thomas) move logically from one idea or action to the next. They make sense. But how about this? Till I actually saw him laid out in his brown shroud with the rosary beads entwined between his waxy fingers I did not take the report of his death seriously. On the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. Max looked into the mirror all the time he was talking.
This second bit is composed of solid sentences (the first is from “The Drunkard” by Frank O’Connor, the second from “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, and the third from “The Killers” by Earnest Hemingway), but it’s meaningless. The sentences are unrelated; they make no sense in this order (nor in any order I tried). They follow no logic. So, what about a solo composed of random hot phrases? Is it any more likely to make sense than these random sentences? Any more likely to tell a story? Or is it more likely to be gibberish, like the chatter of the insane? Listen to a solo by Paul Desmond or Tal Farlow or Larry Carlton. If, as you listen, you cannot hear the ideas flowing out of one another, in a sequence that seems to know where it’s headed, in an overall form that could fit a story of words...well, keep listening; all these things are there.
But getting ideas strung into sensible patterns isn’t everything. If every action in a written story is completely logical—and therefore predictable—the story soon becomes dull. If you always have a strong sense of what will happen next, then where is the interest, the suspense? And if a jazz solo is highly predictable, it, too, will be dull. There must be surprises in a solo’s flow of logic. Little surprises—”twists”—and perhaps big surprises. You expect a pattern to continue through to the end of the bar, but instead it shifts to a new pattern. You expect a phrase to end after the turn-around, but it just keeps going. Some earlier rhythm suddenly pops up again like an echo, but woven neatly into the phrase of the moment. An idea seems abandoned before it’s completed as the improviser veers off in some whole new direction; then, just as your ear is about let go of the orphaned idea altogether, it’s pulled back up and fulfilled with a flourish. These are only a few of the almost infinite surprises a solo can serve up. But if there are too many surprises in a solo, then the logic—the “story line”—collapses into chaos. There must be surprises in the logic, yes, but there must be logic in order to create surprise. Notes without sense are little more then noise. Musical phrases that lack direction are just unrelated fragments. “Oh wonderful,” you say. “I’ve finally got my scales and arpeggios together enough to keep up with some chord changes, and now I’m supposed to tell stories too?” Yes, you are. But don’t be hard on yourself. When you get comfortable with some chord progression, even a very simple one, try letting one idea drift into the next. When you feel you’ve captured some continuity, experiment with leaping from the logic here and there. Experiment with beginnings: try different ways to start a solo and see how they lead you (or fail to lead you) into a groove. Feel for that high point in your solo and, once you’ve found it, experiment with how you’ll work down to your closing. Try ending your solo in different ways. If you explore each of these areas now and then, and listen for the sense and form and surprise in the recorded solos of top players (and their absence in the solos of some inexperienced players you might hear at a high-school concert or a local club), you’ll come to understand all this ever better. Your storytelling will improve and, eventually, become instinctive. If the idea of being a story-teller doesn’t work for you, try thinking of yourself as a seat-of-the-pants composer. They are the same to me—the storyteller and composer—but sometimes a little change of perspective can flick the switch of enlightenment. While playing the role of composer you are bound to sense the larger form of your music. But there’s no rush. Be patient, and be kind to yourself. The process of taking a journey can be as rich as reaching its destination. Don’t spoil the journey by rushing it, or suffering it as a curse. You’ll only waste energy and slow your progress. Instead, listen, experiment. Relax and enjoy the trip.
—12—
Jailbreak Most of us begin playing jazz chord-by-chord, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Each chord presents a brief opportunity to slip in a phrase or two before we are presented with the next chord and a new set of challenges and possibilities. It’s a go-stop-shift gears-go sort of approach. This perfectly natural way of learning improvisation is, in my experience, a good way...if itprogresses finally to the next step. The next step in playing jazz is to pass through the chords, having comfort enough with them to just let go and ride out the melodic lines to their natural conclusions. The problem is, improvisation doesn’t always progress to this next step. Stuck in the first step, a player eventually feels the chords becoming jail-cells, improvisation running free only until it reaches a cell wall—then the line ends, sometimes abruptly. The improvisation begins again when the improviser enters the next chord-cell and the door slams shut behind him or her. Go, stop, go, stop... When a player’s phrases are restricted to the breadth of one chord, beginning and ending within its confines, the phrases are consistently short, predictably short, and too much predictability in jazz is, well, dull. Of course the player can limit himself or herself only to songs in which a chord sustains over several measures. But if that’s your goal, you’re in for a lot of frustration—few jazz tunes sit on one chord for long. I usually find chord-by-chord phrasing creeps into my own solos when I’m trying to think my way through the chord changes: “This is a Db minor chord so I’ll play a Db harmonic minor scale in the position that puts my first finger on the fourth fret,”that sort of thing. It’s the kiss of death to spontaneity and passion, and drags like an anchor when I try to follow out the sense and excitement of my lines. Here are the approaches I use to break out of playing chords as though they are jail-cells; perhaps these approaches can help you make a jailbreak too. My standard tactic is to empty my mind, to clear it of all thought, and then simply improvise over the chords while trying to follow out the lines that flow into my ears, to carry them through the chord changes by feeling for the notes. Stripped of the intellect I have no alternative—feeling for the notes is my only remaining option. It becomes a matter of feeling everything, really: the texture of the chords, the notes that want to stream out in response to them, the sounds of the strings at the different frets, the directions the lines want to travel. I don’t exactly do any of this; I simply give myself to it and allow it all to happen pretty much on its own. In other words, I stop trying to control everything. I let go. Another exercise, a bit more formal, that has often helped me make a jailbreak is to take a short, simple phrase and modify it to work over each chord change in a progression—again, without thinking. To adjust the line, I have to lower or raise some of its notes as I go. Yes, we’re back to short, one-chord phrases again, but this exercise trains the ear and hands to hold onto one line as it passes through different chords and make it fit, rather than grabbing whatever phrase is safe and familiar on each new chord—it forces you to focus not primarily on the chords but on the line. It all boils down to trust—trust in your ears, in the music your gut wants you to play, in your technique, in your connection with the guitar. Trust is never perfect—you’ll make mistakes when you practice this way and perform this way. So I guess you have to accept the mistakes, even embrace them as part of the whole package of real improvisation. And as part of the cost of soaring through progressions of chords, rather than serving a brief sentence within each. Of course you can eliminate mistakes almost entirely and play lines as long and smooth as you like if you work out every solo note by note, practice each phrase to perfection. But the result would lack the excitement of spontaneity, of reaching for notes that pop like little bubbles of emotion. And it wouldn’t be jazz.
—13—
Are We Okay? For three years I played often with a wonderful string bassist who’d taken the stage with some great jazz guitarists—Joe Beck, Richard Boukas, John Scofield, and others—a fact I tried to forget. Each of those guitarists did wonderful things with a guitar that I simply couldn’t do. Which I also tried to forget. If I couldn’t have forgotten, or at least thrown off the pressure that comparisons of this sort can exert, the weight of it would have had me down and pinned; I probably couldn’t have played a decent note. Or worse, I’d have played too many notes—notes with no soul, with no story to tell, meaningless notes thrown in panicked handfuls into a hopeless abyss. But I’d already learned that when I dodged the panic, I found peace, and there was no abyss. Only the warm satisfaction of settling into a groove. And there normally was no panic and no abyss when I played with that bassist partly because he never held those other guitarists up to me as a challenge, and wouldn’t. But we became friends and talked as friends talk, so I knew which guitarists, pianists, saxophonists, and other musicians he played with, and it was a fast crowd. Playing with that bassist was just one potentially oppressive situation. Jam sessions are another. Really, there are plenty of them. I used to tend to make such situations bad, but I’m learning to deal with pressure. It’s taken me a long time to come as close as I have to just say to myself, “However you play is how you play; this is how I play.” And along the way I learned that accepting and enjoying the way I play not tomorrow or in four years but right now is the only way I can possibly play anything worth hearing. Believing you have something good and unique to say through your instrument is a jazz musician’s salvation. It’s an act of faith, too, and one that many of us wrestle with. Fact is, it’s normal to have doubts. But you need to find faith in order to cope with them. Such faith, I’ve found, comes in large part from just accepting who you are as a musician. And even as a person. I suspect it also comes from accepting that no matter how well you play, some people won’t like it. That’s inevitable—if you ask ten guitarists to name their favorite jazz guitarist, will they all choose the same player? Of course not. Point is, tastes and opinions vary. Always do, always will. If you keep growing, practicing, learning, you’ll be a different player in a year than you are now. A different player, but still playing from the same soul. That soul is unique. Be thankful for it. Not everyone will believe in its worth, but you must. Nurture it, protect it. Every year this self-acceptance business gets easier for me, but I can still be intimidated. Now, however, I have better tools than ever before for coping with intimidation and the doubts it arouses. What intimidates me? Plenty. Playing with unfamiliar musicians—hot musicians especially—playing in unfamiliar clubs, playing when there are good musicians in the audience, playing to a real jazz audience that truly listens (though that usually inspires, rather than intimidates, me). When I feel my temperature rise and my pulse quicken, I take a few deep breaths; then I let a wave of relaxation sweep down through my body. Then I have a talk with myself. I ask, Whom do I play for? Myself, the other musicians, the audience? My answer is always the same: I play for myself. Sure, I listen, try to find a groove with the other musicians, find a balance with them, and I appreciate the audience. But I can’t really play for someone else, because when I stop playing to please my own ears, I stop playing my own music. How do you play from the heart when you’re focusing on the audience, on other musicians, on scales and keys, on trying to be hot (on how many great guitarists your bassist has played with), on everything except your own feelings? Once I calm down, I can then (usually) disregard all the comparisons and doubts and expectations and just enjoy playing. Relaxed, with a clear mind, comfortable behind my familiar guitar and within the familiar
flavor of my playing—that’s how I am when I play best.
—14—
The Audience It’s true: Mother Nature does have a sense of humor. Why else would she destine a shy person for a life on the stage? One such shy person is the jazz guitarist—anyone sensitive enough to coax living music from strings and frets is an excellent prospect for shyness. Overall, I qualify as shy. And I remember my first performances before an audience as numbing, terrifying, and thrilling. But the sensitive person and the stage are not so poor a match as you might assume. That sensitivity—with its keen awareness of nuance, its ability to read subtle emotions—can be a real asset for the performer if it can be directed. Consider the most courageous of all performers: the stand-up comedian. With no instrument as an emotional shield, no music to dive into when a line falls flat, no team of actors or fellow musicians on stage to share the pressure, this person has to coax a laugh from strangers, risking the stunning silence of a failed punch line. Yet it’s long been common knowledge among comedians that most of them—including many of the best—are shy, the fidget-quietly-in-the-corner-at-parties type. So, like the shy comedian, you may plunge into terror when the stage lights go on, but you’ll eventually will find some balance up there. And when you do, you’ll have a relationship with your audience. Just what kind of relationship that will be is your choice. Some musicians develop an attitude of superiority—they see audiences as pitiful and uncultured savages very lucky just to be allowed in. Others take this further by actually resenting the audience—flashing hostile glances and ignoring applause or even throwing snide jokes at it. While it’s true that most people who come to hear jazz aren’t musicians and don’t fully understand the music, they’re no fools either—they know when a nose is thumbed at them, and they don’t like it. I, like a lot of experienced musicians, prefer to treat an audience with respect, to let them know I appreciate the effort they made to come hear me play. But there are musicians at the other extreme—they’re subservient to an audience. They’ll do anything to please the crowd. This, I think, is a dangerous course: it is disrespect for the Self. So the ideal, in my opinion, is mutual respect—the musicians thankful to have an audience, and the members of the audience thankful for the music and to those making it. The test of the musician’s self-respect comes when someone in the audience isn’t appreciative. Someone may ask, for example, “Why don’t you play some reggae?” Or it could as likely be a rock tune or any number of things most jazz musicians don’t play. If the request is made politely, the musician replies, politely, something like, “I’m sorry, we’re a jazz band. Is there a jazz tune you’d like to hear?” That’s pretty easy, but once in a while some blow-hard will shout, “Why don’t you play some real music?” It’s not that important, I believe, what you say back, if you do reply. But the point is that if you say something, it needs to come from a position of self-respect. You don’t have to parry words with this person (unless you like tossing come-backs at hecklers, which some musicians do), but you do need to say, either in plain words or overall tone, or even just in actions, This is the music I play, and I love it. Sorry you don’t, but that’s the way it is. Look, a bully may have tormented you at camp; the popular girls may have have ignored you in high school —but the heckler isn’t those people. And this isn’t camp. The old issues have no place here. Learn to deal with the situation right now. And then don’t unfairly judge the rest of the audience—or al l audiences—by this one obnoxious and troubled soul. A piano player I know was leaving a motel parking lot when the manager came running out, shouting, “Did you pay your bill?” My friend stopped his car, and then his surprised eyes narrowed. “Not yet,” he replied. “I’m registered to stay another night. Aren’t I supposed to pay the day I leave, like everyone else?” My friend didn’t like being
judged by the irresponsible behavior of some other musicians who’d stayed at the motel. You wouldn’t like it either. Is that any different from judging all members of an audience by the behavior of one, or even a few? Most people who come to a jazz club are civil, and they don’t like a loudmouth any more than you do. Sometimes they’ll even come to your aid, telling him (or her) to knock it off. If you step onto the stage intending to treat your listeners as you’d like them to treat you, you’ll probably all have a fine evening.
Table of Contents Introduction Lesson From a Child The Power of Rhythm Ears Good Chops Art and Technique Maintaining Honesty Under the Light of Wes Falling into a Groove Playing Time Picking Telling Stories Jailbreak Are We Okay? The Audience
