by Minim Pro
Approximation is the curse of the
average musician. We've all heard players suffering from this curse - their
lines are almost executed well, they almost resolve
in the right place or on the right beat, they almost swing -
in fact, they're almost good players.
Learning jazz theory is by far the
easiest part of studying this music and many musicians are better theorists
than players. The hard part is putting the theory into practice because in
jazz, what you know is worthless - it's what you do that
counts.
The difference between a great player
and the average jazz student or journeyman is not that the great player knows
more, it's that he can do more. And actually, when you really get down to it,
it's not even the case that great players do that many things that others are
inacapable of doing; what marks them as special is that they can do thingsconsistently that
the average player can only do intermittently.
Assuming that you're not one of the
greats and whatever your level of playing, I'm sure that you experience moments
on a reasonably regular basis when things go really well, when you really
execute something perfectly. It may only a be a chord change, a simple blues
lick or a well-interpreted phrase of a head and the rest of the piece may be a
train-wreck, but whatever that thing is, you really nail it.
The difference between you and the
greats is largely that those guys nail stuff in that way all the time.
You might really swing for four bars in a chorus, they swing constantly: You
might be able to tear up a ii-V-I in several of the keys, they sound great
in everykey: You may be able to burn on medium swing tunes, they
can burn at any tempo.
Just imagine for a moment that you never
learn any more about jazz theory and that the musical resources you use in your
playing and soloing now are the ones that you are going to be stuck with
forever. Now imagine that you nailed everything you ever tried
to do with those resources - what do you think your playing would sound like?
I'm willing to bet it would be a damn sight better than it is now!
You see, most of us can do certain
things really well, but not all the time, or in every situation. In our rush to
get better faster we learn more and more theory - more scales, more
subsitutions, more alterations, more voicings and so on and we're trying to
take on that much material that we never really master any of it.
When struggling players are frustrated
with their playing and feel like they're really not getting anywhere, what do
they usually do? They buy another tuition book or DVD, think about taking
lessons or go on youTube and start looking for tutorial videos. In other words,
they start trying to learn more things, instead of learning to use the things
that they know consistently well.
For example, if a player has been trying
to play major scales over ii-V-Is and it's not sounding good, he might switch
to working on chord tone soloing. If that doesn't work he dabbles with
pentatonics. If that's not any better he decides to start playing modes for each
seperate chord. When that seems too difficult he decides just to play major
scales...and is now back where he started. Despite all that work, his playing
doesn't sound any better than it did in the first place because he never really
got to grips with any of those approaches.
If this has been your approach to
practising, then it's not surprising that your playing is patchy and
inconsistent and you're probably feeling frustrated and doubting that you'll
ever get to where you want to be.
Remember, what you know in jazz is
useless, it's what you can do that counts. If you can learn to do something,
anything, consistently well then you're on your way. The answer is almost
certainly is not that you need to know more things, it's that you need to
practise the things that you know until you they are things that you can do.
Then, you need to practise them some more until they become things that you can
do all the time.
In the next post, I'll be discussing
just how to go about this and offering some practice tips I hope you'll find
useful. Until next time..
0 Comments:
Post a Comment