The Cannabis Is Optional
Published: Fri, 05/19/23
Case in point: the role of phrasing in learning to improvise. Occasionally, when I'm teaching improvisation, I hear "I dunno, this all seems kind of contrived. What about the role of intuition in all of this?" Well, here's the thing. Yeah, the best way to learn to improvise is to spend time listening to great improvised music, organically absorbing the feel, the cadences, the vocabulary, and all the rest, while putting it into practice along the way. Or, as Duke Robillard once put it, when asked how he got so fluent in so many styles, "There was a time when I smoked pot and listened to records for ten to twelve hours a day, then went out and played my gig at night."
Ok, maybe the cannabis is optional, but the point is, you get good by listening closely, then trying to use what you've heard in real time, ideally with other musicians, in front of real people. But if you don't have access to one or more of those variables, you wind up looking for other ways to pursue the information and skills you're looking to assimilate. For me, hearing musicians like Charlie Christian on records and watching people like Duke Robillard and Chris Flory from ten or fifteen feet away was revelatory, but it wasn't necessarily paired with a relentless degree of jamming and performing in this style, at least not right away.
It did, however, involve a fair amount of attempting to explain to other people what I was learning. And that meant somehow codifying a somewhat abstract and at times highly intuitive art form. I'd been taught other kinds of improvisation via conventional methods: here are the chords, these scales match these chords, go ahead and do something." Which I found less than illuminating, at best.
I could tell that swing and bebop were more melodically and harmonically complex than blues, but blues was what I understood best, and what I really wanted was to be able to play the changes like a swing or bebop musician with the same sense of expressiveness and intuition I felt when I played on a twelve-bar shuffle in E. And since I was teaching people who wanted to be able to do something similar, I tried to codify what I was learning, to come up with some kind of personal taxonomy for how swing and bebop musicians play the blues.
Which is where Natalie Goldberg comes in. For me, the talking – the explaining, the articulating, the observation and analysis – was a critical piece in figuring out how to play like this. Anyone who teaches knows that in order to explain things to someone else, you first have to be able to explain it more than adequately to yourself. And anyone who has ever learned a chord progression and a couple scales and still felt helpless trying to apply the latter to the former knows there has to be more to it than that.
What I ultimately determined was that phrasing – the rhythmic containers holding the notes you choose – are equally if not more important than the notes themselves. In other words, you don't need to know a ton of scales or arpeggios to make cool music – but you do need to know how to phrase the scales you do know. In today's Youtube video, I explain how phrasing, scale choice and playing the changes are the three essential tools for building a vocabulary of swing-style licks and applying them expressively and musically to the twelve-bar blues. You can find it at the link below:
Build Your Vocabulary
As you doubtless know by now, if you sign up for tomorrow's workshop, The Swing Scale, you can spend a couple of hours with me getting hands-on exercises, model solos and swing licks to practice, along with detailed ideas for how to practice improvising in the swing style. The two-hour class is available for on-demand replay for an entire year and includes clear, accurate notation and tab for every example and a downloadable jam track to practice along to. You can find out more and sign up at the link below:
The Swing Scale Workshop
More soon (but not too soon),
David