Learning To Improvise
Published: Fri, 10/07/22
Given that bebop's creators came of age in the dance band era, musicians like Dizzy Gillespie, fellow trumpeter Howard McGhee and drummer Kenny Clarke saw instrumental facility and deep musical comprehension as fundamental professional values as well. More than once, DeVeaux quotes a musician expressing some version of the idea that "to play bebop, you had to really know what you were doing." Gillespie in particular was conscious of developing a vocabulary, repertoire and approach to music that, while rooted in swing, had it own internal logic, syntax and aesthetics and as such required other musicians to learn very specific things to play it: new ways of thinking about chord changes and scales, new ways of feeling time and expressing rhythm, and a specific body of compositions built out of those new melodic, harmonic and rhythmic values.
There is something gratifying about discovering how much work went into becoming a Coleman Hawkins or a Dizzy Gillespie – and how conscious a process it was. I think it's why we all take solace in learning how many hours the Beatles spent playing covers for drunk sailors in Hamburg – yeah, they were really talented and absurdly creative people, but they also worked their asses off to make something of the potential they were born with. This is something I think about a lot, because I have spent a fair amount of time trying to explain, first to myself and then to my students, how improvisation is something you can learn. It's such a weird idea on the surface of it that for a long time I've introduced the topic this way: "ok, I know this sounds like an oxymoron, but there is, in fact, a way to practice improvisation."
My first real introduction to this idea came from tenor saxophonist Bill Barron, who taught at Wesleyan University while I was undergraduate in the 1980s. Rigorous barely begins to describe Professor Barron's approach, which involved learning every possible way to run the necessary scales, arpeggios and patterns on one's "horn" over rapidly shifting chord changes. But I didn't really figure out what to do with such rigor until I determined to become a bluegrass dobro player just a few years later. Like bebop, bluegrass demands the ability to manipulate a somewhat finite amount of information into a seemingly infinite flow of unrelenting eighth notes, a practice which calls for fast reflexes, both physically and mentally.
At its best, bluegrass, like bebop, relies on the contrast created by leavening the rapid-fire delivery of eighth notes with the more grounding, familiar sounds of the blues. Obviously, the rapid-fire chops are the part that takes the most physical training. But learning to create that contrast takes a corresponding kind of mental training that is no less important. I found that out in no uncertain terms when, after a long layoff from teaching, I began work on my first online course, "The Practicing Blues Guitarist." Diving back into classic 1960s recordings by the likes of Albert and Freddie King, I learned that many of the things I had come to do intuitively on the blues were more or less reliably codified in the playing of these giants of the idiom. Simply put, guitarists like Albert and Freddie King phrase the way they sing – their solos often literally follow the same melodic and rhythmic contours as the lyrics to classics of the blues repertoire.
This last discovery was really the crucial piece of the puzzle: the idea that you could improvise with clear roadmap in mind to guide your choice of phrases and your placement of them in the chord progression. Just like you could set out to write a song knowing you needed an intro, a couple of verses, a chorus, a bridge and so on, so could you embark on a solo knowing you needed an opening phrase, an answer to that, a repeat of the first phrase with a different kind of answer, and so on through the number of bars at your disposal.
Because so many of us learn electric blues intuitively, usually while spending plenty of time as listeners and fans, this degree of conscious specificity strikes some people as, at best, ridiculous and more often, soullessly formulaic. That's ok with me – if you can arrive at good results intuitively, I'm all for it. But due to the number of moving parts involved in playing a completely worked-out fingerstyle guitar tune, I think it's worth having some kind of plan if you want to be able to improvise while playing solo, self-accompied blues.
Every month I include improvisation skills as part of my Fingerstyle Five membership, but in November we'll be spending the entire month working through a stepwise, methodical approach to practicing fingerstyle blues improvisation from the ground up. As a preview of those lessons, my October 15th workshop Soloing From Scratch, open to members and non-members alike, will provide anyone who attends with a concise overview of those steps. We'll start with some exercises to get your picking hand coordinated, playing the essential syncopations you need to play blues phrases over a steady bass. Next, we'll look at how to use those syncopations to create a personal vocabulary of licks. After that, we'll see how to use call and response to assemble those licks into into a coherent, compelling statement. And finally, we'll go over how to swap in licks one by one in real time, the key to creating solos on the fly.
If you're already a part of the Fingerstyle Five, my ongoing monthly membership, the workshop is included your subscription. For non-members, the price is $29, and includes a two-week trial of the membership. You can use that trial to watch the replay as much as you like, while also checking out the entire archive of songs and lessons for two weeks after the workshop takes place.
You can find out more about the workshop, and sign up, at the link below:
Soloing From Scratch Workshop
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I have a new Youtube lesson out today as well, addressing this very question of whether improvising is in fact something you can learn. You can find that video at the link below:
Can You Learn To Improvise?
More soon,
David