People will tell you all sorts of things about learning jazz improvisation. But no one tells you many of the things that could actually help you the most. As we practice jazz improvisation, we develop a concept of how we think we should go about learning things. This concept primarily comes from what our teachers, friends, and books tell us. The problem is they often either don’t know or think to tell us specific things that could help us tremendously.
It’s not their fault. We need to take 100% ownership of our education and our improvement. Part of “Being greedy for the music” is being greedy for the knowledge, all the tips and info that can push us to the next level, little gems or ideas that click in our mind and help us to do something we never thought about doing before.
And that’s what we’ll discuss today. 8 things no one is going to tell you about learning jazz improvisation…
It’s never too early to put your approach on things
When you’re developing as a jazz musician, people will tell you that you have to imitate your heroes a lot. And, this is true.
Whether you listen to them for countless hours or transcribe their every note to memory, at some point you must immerse yourself in the music to learn the nuances that are available to you no other way.
But, just because you’re copying all the time doesn’t mean that you can’t begin developing, applying, and embracing your own unique style.
Here’s the thing…people think it’s so important to learn from what came before them—and rightly so—that they forget that learning from their heroes is more about conceptualizing what’s possible than strict copying.
And when we conceptualize something for ourselves, we can’t help but see, hear, and feel things through our own unique perspective. So, this is the perfect opportunity to interpret and build upon what we’re learning in our own way, taking things in a direction that we think is cool.
Yet, most of the time, a little voice in our head tells us, “No no no, I don’t have the right to put my unique style on this yet. I have to copy a lot more before I can do that.”
Horse $#!^
What separates the greats of this music from everyone else?
Besides incredible self motivation and perseverance…
Strong perspective and the courage to let that strong perspective shine through.
Lee Morgan was playing like his bad-ass self in his teens. Same with Clifford Brown. They didn’t wait to say, “hmmmm I think it be cool if I took this line from Fats Navarro and played it like this instead.”
They had no qualms about taking what they transcribed and changing it, developing, and applying their own unique perspective to it.
I’m sure you’ve heard the famous Clark Terry quote, “Imitate, assimilate, innovate.”
And the way that this is commonly interpreted is in terms of your stages of development as a musician. In your first stage of development as a musician you imitate, then once you do that for a while you move into the assimilation stage, and then perhaps a few years later you move into the innovation stage.
This interpretation would look like this:
But, what if instead of thinking about this quote in terms of your stages of development, you thought about it in terms of one line that you transcribed. Now, suddenly you’re innovating all the time.
Stop waiting to innovate. Make Clark Terry’s process a daily process and innovate every day.
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