@ 2011-02-14
There are only two types of jazz solo; I call them positive and defensive.
Let's take defensive soloing first. The musician playing a defensive solo is trying very hard to play things that are idiomatically jazzy. He sticks closely to things that he knows are idiomatically 'correct' and tries to imitate the sound of other players who he admires. He relies a lot on clichés and licks worked out in the woodshed - even if they are his own personal phrases, they are ones he recycles time and time again.
As he is playing, he is judging every note and phrase in terms of success and failure. His primary concern is to prove his worth to the audience and, perhaps even more, to the other musicians in the room. He listens primarily to himself and what he is playing and what the other musicians play is merely a background noise to his efforts. He listens to them just enough to keep himself in time.
When he feels like what he is doing isn't really working, he resorts to his technique to try to make something happen; he plays faster, higher, louder and tries to force the music into a place where he is finally comfortable. He plays a lot of double-time passages and lightning fast runs because he is afraid he doesn't swing when he plays fewer notes.
If he is playing with a rhythm section, they will invariably go with him, also getting louder and busier in tandem with the soloist. Only when things are at full throttle does it start to feel to the defensive soloist that anything is 'happening'. His comfort zone is a place where everything is maxed-out, because it's the only way he knows to get something going.
Despite the temporary joy of this moment, he knows no way to get out of the musical corner he has backed himself into and invariably takes a longer solo than intended as he tries to find a way to return the band to 'normal' for the next soloist. At the end of the solo he is invariably disappointed with himself - but chances are the same thing will happen on the very next tune.
His greatest fear is that others think as little of his playing as he does, he is always playing to the crowd, always struggling to prove himself, always trying to impress. In the practice room he really thinks that he might have something to say, but on the bandstand he always feels like a fraud.
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If you recognise yourself in any of the description above then take heart, you're certainly not alone. Nevertheless, the only way you can ever change that situation is if you start playing positively instead of defensively.
Playing positively means playing only for the music, it means serving that music and trying to create something artistically worthwhile rather than dealing with the incessant demands of your own ego. It means that you have to see yourself only as one voice amongst others - even if you are the soloist. It means that you have to focus only on hearing phrases in your musical mind and turning them into sound. It means that you can't allow yourself to be distracted by constantly judging yourself and your playing.
Playing positively means that you have to find a way to put aside your feelings of anxiety and inadequacy and stop investing so much of your self-worth in other peoples' perception of your musical ability. It means stopping trying to swing, stopping trying to sound cool or hip or impressive; it means stopping trying to play jazz and starting to play music.
It means playing with and for your band-mates and in service of the group, it means listening to all voices in the ensemble equally and treating your own sound as just another voice. It means allowing and encouraging opportunities to influence and be influenced by what your fellow musicians are playing. It means allowing the music to breathe and allowing yourself to stop playing long enough to appreciate what is reallygoing on around you and to allow your musical mind the opportunity to react to what you hear.
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Playing positively is hard, and so much easier to talk about than to do - yet all great music-making comes from this state. Like all aspects of playing, it requires patience and dedication and practice and sometimes it will feel like you're never going to be able to do it.
Yet you know that sometimes you are capable of this - because you've been in that state before. Sometimes you're in the practice room, there's nobody else around and all of a sudden - you're there. You're playing, really playing, playing for the sheer joy and exuberance of it and it's all you can do to stop yourself laughing at the unalloyed pleasure of this act of creation. You're not trying to prove anything to yourself or anybody else, you're not anxious or afraid of anything, you're simply lost in the sound and the moment, lost in a moment of pure creation, in a moment of pure you that you scarcely understand and couldn't put into words even if you wanted to.
This is positive playing and these are the moments that keep you keeping on in the struggle to be a better musician. These are the moments that foster that tiny, fragile little belief that there is something you could contribute musically to the world, that there's something that you have to say that would be worth saying. These are the moments when you can sense what it would be like if you could really play.
Hang on to these moments when they happen and treasure them, they're a great source of inspiration. But more than that, try and learn to approach every musical situation with the same combination of curiosity, abandon, fearlessness and freedom from ego that acts as the catalyst for these seemingly magical moments.
When you can learn to play for the music and not yourself, when you can learn to play on the bandstand as you do in the wee small hours when there's nothing at stake, when you can learn to play positively instead of defensively - then you'll start to show the world what you're capable of.
Until next time.
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