What if you had Sonny Stitt’s practice journal in your hands right now? All his genius lines and exercises written out. Everything, literally everything, complete with diagrams and descriptions of what he practiced…wouldn’t that be nice?
Well, unfortunately, unless he’s your relative, chances are this will never be the case. You’ll never have those practice journals to look at, if they even exist, and you’ll never know precisely what he was thinking…
But what if I told you that you don’t actually need his practice journals to figure out what he practiced?
And that you can actually get a pretty good idea about the exercises that any jazz musician practiced by closely examining what they played in their solo – it’s just a matter of understanding how to look for clues and put the pieces together.
This is what I like to call Trace-back-transcribing, and this type of transcribing is all about tracing back the lines you find in a solo to some larger practice exercise.
Often you might use transcribing to pick up some new jazz language, or to figure out what to play over a specific chord, and that’s great! Transcribing has many purposes…
But one of the many overlooked purposes of transcribing is this: through the process, you can actually discover the larger and more complete exercises that a player worked on in the practice room, not just the small individual jazz lines that you see and hear when you transcribe a solo.
And this is exactly what we’re trying to do today. We want to get inside Sonny Stitt’s head and ask ourselves one important question: What specific exercises did Sonny Stitt come up with & drill in the practice room to make it so effortless for him to solo over minor chords?
The whole point is to look at all the information you transcribe, and then to take a step back and think about what ties all the information together – in other words, how would many of the transcribed lines come about from practicing a single exercise?
That’s the million dollar question because if you can trace back a bunch of lines to a single exercise…well, then you now have a good idea about the exercise that the player worked on in the practice room, which you can then practice yourself.
It’s as close as you can get to having Sonny Stitt’s practice journal in your hands, and it works just as well.
Trace-back-transcribing 101
So how can you trace-back the lines from a solo to larger or more specific exercises that the player must have drilled over and over in the practice room?
Surprisingly, it’s quite straightforward…
You primarily look for 3 things:
- Lines that the soloist repeats throughout their solo
- Lines that the soloist plays in multiple keys
- Lines that are the same idea starting from a different chord-tone
When you look at a solo through this lens, you’re bound to find a handful of lines that meet this criteria.
Without a doubt, you’ll find that the soloist tends to repeat a musical idea at least once within a solo – keep in mind it doesn’t have to be 100% exactly the same. A loose copy is just fine.
And you’ll most likely find that the soloist uses a certain idea in multiple keys. Again, it may not be a perfect clone transposed into a different key, but that’s not what we’re looking for. We’re looking for musical ideas that generally resemble one another.
Finding similar ideas that start from different chord-tones is also extremely common to find. And when you find lines that fall into one or more of these categories, you’re well on your way to determining the kinds of actual exercises the player worked on in all keys.
It’s simple – if a soloist is playing a similar line in multiple keys, or starting it on various chord-tones, they would have had to dedicate a lot of practice time to drilling an exercise that would lead them toward improvising these lines throughout their solo.
Sonny Stitt definitely had his exercises, and today, we’re going to easily trace-back what they were…
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