Sunday, January 21, 2007

Lesson 4: Keeping it Interesting


The worst thing you can do is to bore your audience. One of the things wrong with America today is it is rife with mediocrity. Frankly, if you never want to rise above mediocrity then you need to ask yourself why you are bothering to play at all. As you will see playing jazz is not rocket science and neither is being able to rise above the mediocre. Good musicianship always takes top priority and even people who know nothing about music can tell when you are not playing well. I am going to discuss a few concepts on how not to drone which is deadly for the listener.

1. Vary the length of your phrases, 4 bar and 8 bar phrases are fine but you should strive to vary the length of your phrases. Try a 5 bar phrase or a three bar phrase etc. But beware of too many short phrases. Too many consecutive short phrases will sound like nursery rhyming which is not exactly what you are after. Ideally you should be striving for long phrases but you should try to vary the lengths.

2. Vary where you begin your phrases if you always begin your phrase on the downbeat of one you will start to drone. Try starting on the second beat and the next phrase on the upbeat of three for example. On the same token vary where you end your phrases.

3. Don’t end your phrases the same way every time. If you end one phrase on a long tone try ending the next phrase on a short note.


4. Don’t fill up your solo with too many notes. Leave some space between your phrases, without leaving some breathing spaces you will start to drone, deadly, very deadly. Listen to Miles Davis he was a master of leaving space.

5. Please, please do not play more than a one chorus solo in a live session unless you really have something to say. Only experienced players are capable of playing more than one chorus without boring the audience. It is not fair to you, the audience or the other players in the band.

I would like you to keep these concepts in mind as we get into the next lessons. I will be adding some more stuff on how not to bore your audience such as the use of chord substitutes, chromatics and the like but all in due time. The above five concepts should keep you busy and thinking for some time. Don’t be a wind-up player! Think about what you are doing.

One more thing before I get mediocre and forget, YOU DON’T HAVE TO MAKE JAZZ HISTORY EVERYTIME YOU PLAY. Try to play musically and with logic, save your history making solos for the appropriate time, you only have a finite number of those so be judicial.

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