Sounds too good to be true doesn't it? Well it isn't. In fact I GUARANTEE that if you follow these five steps, your playing will soar to incredible levels and you can become the musician you've always dreamed of being.
Without further ado, here are the five steps to becoming an INCREDIBLE jazz player:
1. Listen to lots of jazz.
2. Practice something you can't do until you can do it.
3. Stop looking for quick fixes in books and on the internet.
4. Repeat steps 1-5.
5. Don't give up.
That's it. Are you pleased? Disappointed? Irritated? If you read this post after seeing the title and there's still some part of you that was secretly hoping I'd be able to show you some shortcut to awesomeness then you need to realise, once and for all, that there are no shortcuts.
Even if you accept that, I know some of you will bound to be thinking 'Well, I suppose that's right but what should I be practising?' The answer to that is simple: anything you wish you could do but can't do yet.
When people say 'I don't know what to practise' or 'There's so much to practise, I'm overwhelmed', they're never really telling the truth. What they mean is 'I'm deficient in so many areas yet I know that spending lots of time fixing just one of those won't make me the great player I want to be'.
So, instead of picking any one of the myriad of things they can't do and getting on with it, they start buying books and surfing the web looking for shortcuts - hoping that the next blog, the next video, the next book, the next course, the next teacher will be able to flick the switch that will make them great.
Yet what they are looking for does not exist. There are no shortcuts. This is how it is and there are two choices.
1. You can ignore what you know to be the truth of these words and stay stuck in the unhappy musician's endless loop of brief bursts of enthusiasm and industry, followed by frustration and despair when it's not happening as quickly as you would like. This is incredibly common and is caused by impatience and insecurity.2. You can accept it's going to take a while and you're not going to be the player you want to be for some time and you can start putting in the hard yards right now. It will be slow and immensely frustrating at times and you will continually question if you're going to make it, but you can decide to do it regardless.
Choosing the second option allows you to realise that in all honesty, it doesn't matter what you practise - because you're going to have to cover all of it at some stage anyway. If you're not clinging to some ridiculous belief that if you can just pick the right thing to study you could finally flick the Magic Switch Of Awesomeness, it becomes obvious that you simply need to practise anything that you can't do now. The order is largely irrelevant if you're not trying to take a shortcut.
And yes, of course this means that it's going to take time. Lots of time. When you played at that jam last week and couldn't really get it going, when you heard that great player and your heart sank because they were so much better than you, when you really knuckled down to it and practised something for ages and you still couldn't do it - well, those things are going to keep happening. It's going to be like this for a while so get used to it and learn to live with it.
Yet meanwhile, like a river wearing a groove in a mountain, a great oak tree sprouting from a tiny acorn or a baby inexorably growing into an adult, you won't be able to notice the tiny changes that will happen every day - but that doesn't mean they won't be happening.
Your playing can go on to become unrecognisable from where it is today - if you're prepared to put in the work you know needs to be done with passion, honesty, humility and patience.
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