You have to find your own voice.

Here’s some bad news: The process of learning jazz is a constant, life-long endeavour and you’ll almost certainly die before you are 100% satisfied with your playing.
Here’s some good news: You don’t need to be technically perfect to make good music and entertain your audience. Sometimes you can turn your limitations into strengths.

Learning jazz is hard; and as time goes on, new players come along and develop another raft of stylistic conventions to learn and absorb. A great emphasis is placed on the assimilation of ‘the tradition’ in jazz education and I’ve often felt jealous of guys like Bird and Diz in the past because I think ‘those guys were so lucky, they only had 40 years of music to absorb when they were learning and I’ve got over a hundred!’
Clark Terry, the famous trumpet player described the process of becoming a successful jazz player as follows:
•Imitate
•Assimilate
•Innovate
Just think, when the bebop guys were starting out, all they needed to absorb was blues and swing styles and they could set about creating something new. Latin jazz was rare, Miles’ modal excursions wouldn’t be on the horizon at least another decade, the concept of Fusion didn’t really exist and Free Jazz was when the club didn’t charge a cover or the musicians from the club across the road had come over to sit in on their break.

The weight of ‘the tradition’ is now so heavy that it’s hugely intimidating for the emerging jazz player – and it will only get worse as the music continues to expand and develop. Nevertheless, one thing that has always been true in jazz it that it is the players with their own unique sounds that stand out and move that tradition along. Put in its simplest terms; you have to find your own voice. This is so important that I’m going to say it again, in big letters:
You have to find your own voice!
And why is it so important that you find your own voice? Well two reasons really; firstly, if you imitate someone else, you’ll never be as good as them anyway. Have you ever heard any John Coltrane copycats? Have you come across any Charlie Parker wannabes? Have you ever seen anyone trying to play just like Oscar Peterson? Of course you have, there are a lot of clones out there. But have you ever heard one of them who sounded as good as the musicians they're slavishly copying? I’ll bet my hat you haven’t.

No matter how much they have developed their technique; no matter how much of the vocabulary they had down, these kinds of players will only ever be pale imitations of the Real Thing. That is why Trane and Bird and Oscar still shift albums by the bucketload. Charley Mingus had it right when he wrote a tune famously entitled ‘If Charlie Parker Were A Gunslinger, There’d Be A Lot Of Dead Copycats’ (later shortened to 'Gunslinging Bird).

The second reason for trying to find your own voice is that the world doesn’t need clones of great players to keep their styles alive – that’s what we have CDs and MP3s and DVDs for. If I want to listen to something that sounds like Miles Davis, why would I want to listen to somebody who has spent years copying Miles' sound, his tone, his technique, his phrasing, when I could just listen to the man himself with the touch of a button or a click of the mouse?

The pursuit of instrumental technique has become one of the holy grails of jazz performance with an unbelievable procession of virtuosos seemingly setting the bar for the level of technical facility required to play jazz. However, when I think of players like Monk and Miles, I am reminded that technique in itself is no substitute for an original conception of the music. That's not to say that facility on the instrument is not a worthy goal but the development of that facility should be dictated purely by the player's musical conception.

Could Monk play like Art Tatum? No, he couldn't. Some would say that Monk didn't have the technique to play like Tatum but I think it's truer to say that Monk conceived the music in a different way than Art did. Look at it this way, could Art Tatum have played like Monk? Undoubtedly not, nobody plays like Monk!
Could Miles Davis play like Clifford Brown? For me, his recordings with Charlie Parker show Miles to be a competent rather than exceptional be-bop trumpeter. If Miles had stayed in within the be-bop genre for the rest of his career, I think it's fair to say that he wouldn't have gone on to become the most famous jazz musician in the world.

I believe the reason that Miles didn't excel at be-bop was that he was never truly enthralled with the be-bop idiom. He sought Bird out because he was the biggest name in jazz but as soon as he went out on his own, Miles ditched the acrobatics of be-bop and started developing the style and conception that would eventually result in the seminal recordings on 'Birth of the Cool'. Perhaps the most interesting question of all is this; Did Miles and Monk conceive the music in the way they did because of a limitation in technique? Would having the technique of Art Tatum have made Monk into a different player? Would Miles still have had such an unmistakeable sound if he had developed the facility to play like Dizzy Gillespie?

Of course, we can only speculate at the answer. The one thing that does seem undeniably clear is that Monk and Miles are rightly revered as two of the greatest jazz musicians of all time, not because of their technical mastery of the their instruments, but because of their originality in musical conception and the distinctiveness of their musical voices. Bill Evans once said "Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument" and if this is true, it should always be remembered that ideas are more important than technique; technique is merely the vehicle that allows the expression of ideas. With this in mind, it would seem that Monk and Miles had every ounce of technique that they needed.

I am great believer in the liberating power of instrumental facility and I wouldn't want to give the impression here that I don't believe that technical development is an important part of learning to play jazz. Nevertheless, what I do want to stress is this; you don't have to wait until you have great technique to try and develop an original voice. Earlier in this article, I quoted Clark Terry's Imitate, Assimilate, Innovate formula and discussed how overwhelming it can be when trying to absorb the history of jazz. I think there is a real danger that jazz players can get so caught up in imitating and assimilating, that they never get round to innovating.

I would encourage all jazz musicians, whether they're beginners or advanced players, to strive to develop their own sound and their own way of playing the music. Study the tradition and learn from it, it is the basis of all that we do. Develop the facility on your instrument to express yourself without limitation, but don't ever be a slave to technique or beholden to convention and the perceived wisdoms of the past. Whether we're talking about the all-time greats or the musicians at your local club, the players who truly stand out are not necessarily the ones who have the best technique, but those who have an individual sound and a unique way of conceiving the music I know in the past, I have made the mistake of thinking that I would eventually start to develop my own sound once I had learned to swing like Oscar, play be-bop like Bud Powell and developed Herbie Hancock's harmonic mastery.

Of course this was mistake. Eventually I realised that no matter how much I study and practice, I'll never be able to play like any of those guys – which was kind of a depressing thought until I figured out what it really meant. It meant that all I that was left was to try and play like me.
http://playjazz.blog.co.uk/2009/10/15/find-your-voice-7174005/