The Power Of Persistence

by Minim, 2009-10-26
Last time on the blog, I talked about the frustration caused by being afraid that you're practicing the wrong thing. In that post, I also claimed that any practice you do will help you get better as a musician's improvement is very rarely linear and there is a basic relationship between the amount of time spent practicing and the level of musicianship reached.

However, what most emerging players are looking for is the key to improving faster. As promised, I will be posting some hints and tips on how to take your playing to the next level in the shortest time, but first I think it's important to talk about attitudes to practice and outline a couple of things I feel are absolutely vital for students to remember if they're going to improve.

The first is all about dedication. To put it simply:
Never Give In
Winston Churchill once famously said: "Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense." There will be times when you just don't seem to be able to master a certain aspect of playing, even though you feel you are doing all the right things. When this happens the temptation is to second-guess yourself and give it up as a bad idea.

For me, the key in what Churchill said that makes the attitude applicable to musicians was never to give in 'except to convictions of honour and good sense'. If you feel sure that you're doing the right things but it's not happening for you, stick with it - chances are you're right on the verge of a breakthrough. What many of us don't always realise is that improvement often comes through a combination of persistence and the knowledge encapsulated in the next point.

If you can't see it immediately, it doesn't mean you're not improving
After studying jazz for around a year or so, I had learned enough to realise that my playing really lacked an authentic swing feel. I asked a couple of musicians I admired and turned to some tutor books and they all seemed to say the same thing – "The answers are in your record collection".

Most of the advice was to play along with records and try to emulate the phrasing of players I admired. I had always admired the way Oscar Peterson swung and decided to go to school with him. For weeks, I would put his recordings on and busk along with them. I wasn't trying to transcribe the notes Oscar was playing but merely trying to mimic the swing-feel he epitomised in his improvised lines.

Well the results were inconsistent to say the least. I would have false epiphanies and think I had it down, only to find that after a half hour break, I was right back to the start. I was so tempted to give up and try and find another way to progress. I must admit, I did try a lot of fairly useless things, like playing about with minute rhythmic variations in swung eighths in sequencers, trying to come up with a mathematical formula that I could apply to my playing.

Of course, it didn't work and I still wasn't swinging. Nevertheless, I carried on playing along with Oscar because so many people had told me it would help and the approach itself made sense to me – even if it didn't appear to be working out. I had read so many times that the greats of the past had learned from playing along to records that I believed it had to be the right way to go.

And then, one day everything just seemed to click and I found that I was finally playing eighth notes that actually swung.! What's more, I could do it all the time, it didn't evaporate if I had a break from the instrument. Looking back, I realise my mistake was thinking that the rhythm of the eighth notes was at fault when I wasn't swinging because I wasn't accenting the off-beats correctly. A good teacher would have sorted that out for me fairly quickly but I didn't have money for lessons at the time.

Yet all those hours playing along with OP were invaluable in laying a solid foundation for my appreciation of the way a swung line should sound. It was only persistence and my belief that I was doing the right thing that finally allowed me to succeed. There was nothing different about the day it all came together but it was the cumulative effect of the work I had done that helped me to achieve my goal. If I had abandoned my approach when it didn't immediately yield results I would never have got there. I couldn't see it at the time, but every hour playing with those records was improving my playing.
This brings us nicely to the third thing it's vital to remember when practicing:

Plateaus are natural
Have you ever gone through a phase where you practiced and practiced but your playing seemed to be stuck in a rut? This happens to EVERY musician at some stage and, whilst plateaus are both frustrating and frustratingly unpredictable, it helps if you can accept that they're just a natural part of learning and not beat yourself up about it.

As in the example above, sometimes it takes a while until the cumulative effect of practice leads to a tangible improvement. The key is to make sure that you are working in ways that you feel confident will improve your playing in the long run and just keep putting in the hours. You will go up to the next level eventually.
The advice in this post could realistically be summarised in a couple of main points:
•Never give up
•Don't demand instant results
•Trust your methods

The last point is particularly important as trusting your methods will allow you to keep working when the improvement doesn't seem to be happening. This does mean you need to pick your methods carefully. If you have a teacher with a method you trust that's great, but if you're teaching yourself, don't be drawn by fads or experimental approaches if you're in a rut. It doesn't mean that you should stick blindly to something that's clearly not working but confidence in approach really helps when it all seems like an uphill struggle. Remember Churchill qualified his 'never give up' with 'except… to good sense'. Trust your own judgment and instincts – if any approach just doesn't feel right to you then find one that does and go to work on that.
Whilst this has been quite a philosophical post, developing the right attitude to practice is vital if you're going to stick with it through all the undulations, peaks and troughs that are an unavoidable part of learning to play. Developing the right mindset will do more to help you improve quickly than anything else. In the next post, I'll be returning to those practical tips I promised to speed up your development, but for now I'll leave you with some words of wisdom from Bill Evans about the power of persistence and dedication in practice:

"I believe in things that are developed through hard work. I always like people who have developed long and hard, especially through introspection and a lot of dedication. I think what they arrive at is usually a much deeper and more beautiful thing than the person who seems to have that ability and fluidity from the beginning. I say this because it's a good message to give to young talents who feel as I used to."
http://playjazz.blog.co.uk/2009/10/26/the-power-of-persistence-7246901//