Tuning Slide 5.31- The "Greats" of Making Music

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

There are three characteristics of a great trumpet player:
1. Every time you play you have a great- not a good- sound.
2. You have great- not good- rhythm.
3. You have great- not good- ears to hear the sound.
— Bob Baca, Shell Lake Trumpet Workshop

n my music study a few months ago I came across an Internet post: 5 Music Theory Concepts Every Musician Should Know. The post had the following five concepts:

1 - Form
You can’t talk about the arrangement of a song without a solid understanding of form and the vocabulary to complement this understanding. I… You won’t get far as a working musician without a solid grip of form and its accompanying terminology.

2 - Functional Harmony
Knowledge of functional harmony will absolutely be the one thing that helps you learn material the fastest. Being aware of chord tendencies will help you predict what the next chord in a song will be, and will help you hone in on mistakes when one player isn’t in sync with everyone else.

3 - Consistent Rhythm
There is nothing more annoying than being saddled with a musician who is always pushing or pulling at the tempo. … It’s all well and good to be able to play in 7/8, but if you don’t have a solid internal clock while you’re doing it, nobody will care.

4 - Ear Training
Being able to hear a musical line, internalize what you think the notes are, then repeat it on your instrument is key to being a successful musician.

5 - Reading and Literacy
Can you be a musician without learning to read music? Sure, it’s possible. Will you be an even better musician if you do learn how to read music? Yes, it’s absolute.

I was reminded at that moment of the Three Greats from the above Shell Lake Trumpet Workshop quote: Sound, rhythm, ear.

◆ Sound
Music is organized sound.
— Edgard Varese

Sound is at the heart of music. Sound is things like tone, harmony, mood, loudness. I have worked hard over the past few years at getting a better sound. For me that meant not being “flat” or “dull” in my music. It included playing with “energy” so the music feels “alive.”

◆ Rhythm
Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.
— Igor Stravinsky

Now we are talking about the “beat” and the “tempo.” We have “melody” added along with the feel of the “movement” of the music, the “groove” and the “swing.” One quote I found said that music is arithmetic- we “count.”

◆ Ear/Listening
It's easy to get next to music theory, especially between your peers and music classes and so forth. You just pay attention. I had a good ear, so I realized that printed music was just about reminding you what to play.
— Quincy Jones

When we have worked on our musical “ear”, we can begin to know what it is that the music is doing without sole reliance on printed music. Listening I think makes “sight-reading” easier since we can look at a piece of previously unseen music and know what it might sound like. But it is also the ability to play with others, “blending” the different parts into a complete whole.

◆ All Together
All well and good. Now I had three things that had their own individual areas. But music is not found in three independent boxes; music is the combining of all these and more into the complete music. To be a “great” musician, Mr. Baca was telling us, you have to have all three of those and they need to work together. They are in a relationship. You can’t be “great” with any of them alone.

So I put together this visual for myself and played around with it for a while. Instead of putting each of the three separately, I put them in a “relationship.” As I did some brainstorming (or “mind-mapping” as it is called) is put those other boxes in-between the three different “greats” to show what they had in common- the box between “sound” and “rhythm”; the box between “rhythm” and “ear” and the box between “ear” and “sound.” They all merge into what we call “music.”

I do not pretend that this is either exhaustive or even scientific. It is my idea of what I have been working within these three areas over the years. Again, it is to show that what we call music is a lot of different things that come together. What I plan to do, then, is to take a week on each of the three relationships. First I will explore the things that make up the duo of Sound and rhythm, then sound and ear, and then ear and rhythm. Finally, I will bring them all together into music. Again, not exhaustive, but rather a starting point for myself and hopefully for you to do some thinking, planning, practicing, and discovering what music is for you. The goal is to be a better musician and, I think, to be reminded that it is a very poor experience of reality to put everything into separate boxes and keep them from interacting.

I am sure I will miss some things in this series. It is what I have discovered. Each of us will look at music from a different perspective and see different relationships. That is more than just okay- that is what making music together is all about. Think about it in the next week and I will take on sound and rhythm next week.

Tuning Slide

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Life is about rhythm. We vibrate, our hearts are pumping blood, we are a rhythm machine, that's what we are.
— Mickey Hart

Mickey Hart, one of the percussionists with the Grateful Dead has written much about rhythm and its location at the very center of our lives. It is not a pun to say it is the heart of who we are. To be in touch with the rhythm of our lives is one of those tasks that we can never end. The give and take, the pulses of daily living, the ups and downs of emotions can all fit into a rhythm. Many experiments have shown that different sources of rhythm will fall into sync with each other. Rhythm is one of the basics of music itself, and is therefore, I think, music is one of the best ways to learn about the importance of keeping the beat.

For the past month I have been pulling together the ideas of music and life, how they interact and what one can teach us about the other. Last week I raised the importance of jazz in this process. All musical styles can and will change our lives if we are open to them. Each of us just responds in different ways to different styles. For me- and for many- jazz is one of the most effective teachers of life and rhythm, timing and pace.

Through improvisation, jazz teaches you about yourself. And through swing, it teaches you that other people are individuals too. It teaches you how to coordinate with them.
— Wynton Marsalis

Back at the end year one of the Tuning Slide I had a post that dug into the writing of Wynton Marsalis in his book, Moving to Higher Ground. The focus of that was the idea of “swing,” one of the historically important- and still living- genres of jazz. Jazz musicians will use the generic word “swing” to describe what happens when a piece falls into its intended groove and moves beyond a simple sum of its parts. When a song “swings”, when a musician is “swinging,” they are in the best of all possible musical worlds. You are not just you, but you are, as Wynton described it above, coordinating with the others. It is that coordination that makes it work! This is not just in jazz, by the way. Bach may have produced some of the best music to "swing" to in all of history!

Here is some more of what Marsalis says in the book:

Jazz is the art of timing. It teaches you when. When to start, when to wait, when to step it up, and when to take your time- indispensable tools for making someone else happy….

Actual time is a constant. Your time is a perception. Swing time is a collective action. Everyone in jazz is trying to create a more flexible alternative to actual time. [Emphasis added in both quotes]

Swing can be to a great extent what you accent and how you do it. Different tempos, different tonguing, different rhythms go together to make the music work. It means listening to each other and learning to flow together.

But something always seems to get in the way. In the brass quintet I play in we, like every musical group, can have great difficulty playing in a consistent tempo. There are all kinds of obstacles. Listening to a recording of a rehearsal I found that different ones of us can cause a tempo change within a beat or two if we

◦ Come to a change in dynamics from louder to softer.
◦ Come to a change in instrumentation adding a new tonal sound or removing one.
◦ Make a mistake and let our mind wander into self criticism
◦ Play something better than usual and let our mind wander into how good it sounds

Music teaches us how to deal with change, anticipating it and knowing how to move through it without losing who we are and what we are doing. Something we can always depend on is change, so if we learn the skill of flowing with and through change, no matter what the source, we can discover more direction in our lives.

Rhythm is sound in motion. It is related to the pulse, the heartbeat, the way we breathe. It rises and falls. It takes us into ourselves; it takes us out of ourselves.
— Edward Hirsch

Wynton Marsalis applies all this to our daily lives. Swing helps us in:

1. Adjusting to changes without losing your equilibrium;
2. Mastering moments of crisis with clear thinking;
3. Living in the moment and accepting reality instead of trying to force everyone to do things your way;
4. Concentrating on a collective goal even when your conception of the collective doesn’t dominate.

In the end, Wynton Marsalis says, swing demands three things:

1. Extreme coordination- it is a dance with others inventing steps as they go;
2. Intelligent decision making- what’s good for group.
3. Good intentions- trust you and others want great music.

The most prized possession in this music is your own unique sound. Through sound, jazz leads you to the core of yourself and says “Express that.” Through jazz, we learn that people are never all one way. Each musician has strengths and weaknesses. That is where we each find first our voice and then our song. When we do that we fall into rhythm with our lives and the world, giving back to others the gifts of our own lives.

So then next week we move to finding our “voice” so we can then learn to live our “song.” This may be the greatest gift music has to offer us.

Until then, keep the beat, watch the rhythm, and keep swinging.

Note: All Wynton Marsalis quotes are from the book:
• Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life by Wynton Marsalis and Geoffrey Ward. 2008, Random House.

Tuning Slide 4.33- Keep the Rhythm

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

To live is to be musical, starting with the blood dancing in your veins. Everything living has a rhythm. Do you feel your music?
― Michael Jackson

As I write this I am sitting on a balcony overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. There is a hazy cloudiness, but still some diluted sunlight. The wind is coming at about 10 mph from the southwest. The palm branches sway with the winds rising and falling. I see reflected off my computer screen a kite behind me catching the wind. I hear the call of gulls and children laughing and playing. Later there will be the possibilities of thunderstorms and tomorrow is forecast to be at least 20 degrees colder, so I want to enjoy what I have at the moment.

But more importantly is the constant sound from the waves. The consistent rhythm of the tide and currents is what touches me and depths I have no way of touching in a conscious way. Some will say it’s because of the none months before we are born, hearing the watery amniotic fluid in it’s rhythm. Others will point to the heartbeat and the rhythm of the blood in our brains. Others still will point to the vibrating rhythms of the universe. It doesn’t matter how or why, it is simply to say that we live in a world of rhythm, pulses, movement of sound waves, most of which we cannot even hear.

We all have rhythm! Mickey Hart, percussionist with the Grateful Dead explained it as the movement from chaos to order:

In the beginning, there was noise. Noise begat rhythm, and rhythm begat everything else.

I did a quick Google search on songs with the word rhythm in the title. While there were many versions of some of the classics, here are six:

✓ Fascinating Rhythm
✓ Rhythm of the Falling Rain
✓ Girls Got Rhythm
✓ All God’s Children Got Rhythm
✓ Rhythm Nation
and of course,
✓ I Got Rhythm.

A few years ago I did a post on the idea of rhythm in expanding on rhythm as one of the three things every trumpet player (and musician) needs to have:

There are three characteristics of a great trumpet player:
1. Every time you play you have a great- not a good- sound.
2. You have great- not good- rhythm.
3. You have great- not good- ears to hear the sound. (Link)

In essence you have to have a sound that’s worth playing and listening to, a rhythm that turns the sound from noisy chaos into music, and the ability to hear it all.

This came up in my thinking the other day as I was “drumming” along with a song on the radio. I was attempting a steady beat that wasn’t just single drum beats. I was trying to fit into the style and rhythm of the song. What I discovered again, other than why I am a trumpet player and not a percussionist, is how difficult it really is to keep the beat steady AND interesting. Sooner or later I always miss a beat, come in late, or just generally mess up the whole thing.

Which brought me to the next thought about playing in a jazz big band. The “rhythm section” isn’t just the drummer. It is also the piano, bass, and guitar. Sure, they all get solos from time to time and some of them even get a melody, but they are, together, the rhythm of the band. They keep us moving at the steady and appropriate beat. Rhythm is far more than just keeping good time. It is the entire flow of the music. When we work together at the rhythm, when we get in synch or flow, music truly happens and we, I firmly believe, are in touch with the music of the cosmos.

Our biological rhythms are the symphony of the cosmos, music embedded deep within us to which we dance, even when we can't name the tune.
― Deepak Chopra

For me it is easier to keep rhythm on the trumpet than on the steering wheel of my car or the table I am typing at. It is my way of expressing rhythm. It is part of my “biological rhythm.” This is one of the important things I have discovered (and rediscovered many times) over the years. The music I make has rhythm- and I have to learn to feel, hear, and reproduce it through the horn. Which in both the short- and long-term takes me back to basics- yep, Arban, Clarke, Schlossberg, etc. As I work through those routines I begin to feel rhythm. I begin to know what it feels like to be in the right rhythm for the song. Self 2 just goes there and I work with it. Fortunately it doesn’t matter whether we are jazz, classical, or polka musicians. In those basics we learn what rhythm is. And we discover how it touches us.

Build the ear for rhythm by working the rhythm of the basics, then moving on. Feel the movement of the song. Watch for the unexpected that means the rhythm is changing. It is more than keeping the right tempo. Metronomes don’t provide rhythm, for example. They only give us a guideline for what speed something is to move. That may be helpful sometimes in practice, but it will never help us develop a sense of rhythm. Time in music is a structure on which the rhythm is built. You start with the sound and make sure you have the best sound you can have.

Then you let it flow. The world will change!

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.
― Rabindranath Tagore

4.17- Tuning Slide: Mistakes or Not

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.
— George Bernard Shaw

Scanning some notes and articles on the Internet I came across an article that referenced some research. It was in Wired magazine and burst the bubble that we “learn from our mistakes.” There are many motivational quotes that would have us believe just the opposite. Or so I thought. I went looking and found that this idea about mistakes being learning is a short-cut in thinking. What many of the quotes really say is that mistakes are to be expected as we are learning. If we haven’t made any mistakes, we haven’t done anything. Einstein, Teddy Roosevelt, and Meister Eckhart, among others, lead us to understand that.

In essence though what mistakes teach us is what NOT to do. If we continue to do the same things and keep getting the same mistakes, we are not learning and growing in our musicianship. If we don’t do anything to correct the mistake, all we are doing is reinforcing the mistake. One I had to learn the hard way was missing accidentals or even key changes. I was adamant that as a good musician I should be able to learn what key I am playing in and not miss that F# or Eb. Yet time after time I would miss it. Or I would hit the F# when it wasn’t. What I wasn’t doing was marking the note I was regularly missing. You know, circle it or some other notation.

I was being stubborn- and perhaps not wanting my colleague on the left or right to know I had to (God forbid) mark a note that I should be playing correctly. (Even though they clearly heard every wrong note I played!) Instead of improving as a musician, I was stubbornly getting stuck where I was. Once I was willing to use a pencil correctly, things began to change. I also developed a series of notations that I use to remind myself of certain things that I have tended to get wrong or struggle with. I see that notation and I know what I need to do.

To say that mistakes are our friends and tell us what not to do can be a dangerous path- mistakes are not good things when we could have done something differently. Mistakes are not what we want to have happen in a performance. We will make mistakes, of course; notes will slip, something will be out of time or out of tune. Those mistakes will not improve our playing. The mistakes we learn from are the ones that we make in our practice rooms, or lessons- where they can be caught and corrected.

But there are other mistakes that we regularly fall into. These are more insidious that the missed accidental. They can go to the heart of who we are as performers. So here is a far from complete list of:

Mistakes musicians make that we can change:
Poor sound- We can’t truly hear ourselves when we are playing unless we are on stage and a monitor is giving us an idea. There are a number of reasons for this- we are on the wrong side of the horn, we get some of the sound through our facial bones and not from the air, we hear part of the sound in our imagination which “auto-tunes” the sound we are getting from the horn. In order to deal with these we can practice in places where there is a strong echo and we can record ourselves. The mistake we make is not finding out how we truly sound.

Lack of rhythm- timing and tempo are essential to good music. Some of it can be corrected by working with a metronome, but that will never give us rhythm. A metronome has no feeling, no rhythm. It is only tempo. Feeling the music is important, no essential. We will talk more about this next week when I talk a little about “flow.” Our big mistake in this area is to ignore how the music makes us feel and then translating that into the performing of the music.

Believing we can’t do it- actually, this is worse than a mistake. This is a killer of quality and creativity, a sure-fire way to fall into a hole we dig for ourselves. I know I may never be as good as Doc or Maynard, but that doesn’t mean I can’t continue to be better than I was last month. In order to get there, I must be pushing the limits in healthy, organized ways.

Not planning- if we don’t know where we want to go, we won’t get anywhere. That doesn’t mean we have to map out our whole musical journey. It does mean we have to have an idea where we need to go and where we want to go. This is where the errors we make or the recording we hear can guide us. When I discovered how poor my tone was, I knew what I had to work on. When I found my endurance decreasing, I went looking for ways to improve what I was doing.

Getting stuck on hardware- heavy caps and the latest version mouthpiece won’t correct what is wrong with our sound. For most of us we are no where near the best sound the instrument we own can make. A new instrument may be a good thing- and the right thing- for some of us. But it will still take practice, practice, and even more practice to continue to evolve as a musician.

Fearing mistakes so much that we don’t try- the ultimate mistake! Just do it. Move forward. Challenge yourself. Take lessons and get feedback. Record yourself and listen critically. Be ready to grow!

Don’t plan for mistakes; don’t build them into your practice. But listen for them; prepare for them; and when they happen discover what they can teach you about a better, more effective, more musical way.

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing something.
— Neil Gaiman

Tuning Slide 4.7-

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

The feeling of togetherness- not togetherness as in some rigid lock step, but togetherness as in dance- is vitally important in music making.
-Barry Green, The Mastery of Music

Barry Green is the author, with Tim Gallwey, of the classic book, The Inner Game of Music. His second book looked at The Mastery of Music: Ten Pathways to True Artistry. In this book Green expanded beyond the Inner Game ideas into developing “true artistry” in our music. Every couple weeks I am going to take one of these ten pathways and bring it to my life and the applications to the Tuning Slide goals.

In The Inner Game of Music Green talked about two of three disciplines than demands mastery. The first was the techniques, the second was concentration. These two are basic, essential, foundations of making music. The conflicts and agreements of our Self 1 which is always ready to remind us of our mistakes and Self 2 which is the innate and intuitive side that knows how to do it are the building blocks. The third discipline is developing what Green calls, “true artistry.” In my view this takes the technique and concentration and begins to develop musicality. To find these, Green looked at different instruments and different people who seem to live and even embody these 10 pathways. He interviewed them and put it all into this book. Let’s start the journey with Green.

Pathway #1— Communication: The Silent Rhythm (Ensembles and Conductors)
I am working under the assumption that we are musicians because we like to make music and that we practice so that we can do that with others. A solo recitals can be nice, but that isn’t really what making music is all about. Even practicing with a play-along CD doesn’t get to the real joy of music that playing in a combo or band can. In order to play well with others there has to be some way we learn to communicate with each other. There has to be some method, style, trick, or just plain intuition that leads us to do more than just be a collection of musicians doing our own things and hoping (or believing) it works together. And most of the time we have to do it without speaking, on the fly, in the midst of a piece.
Green calls this the “silent rhythm” that unites us in communicating with the audience. He calls it “non-verbal, rhythmic union.” Musicians playing in a group get into something called “entrainment.” They sense the rhythm of the music as played by their colleagues. No one is micromanaging the rhythm through conducting. They feel it. As the group locks into a pulse they become more in tune and more efficient and musical in their playing. Yes, there is a science behind it.

In 1665, Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens, inventor of the pendulum clock, was lying in bed with a minor illness and watching two of his clocks hanging on a wall…. He noticed something odd: No matter how the pendulums on these clocks began, within about a half-hour, they ended up swinging in exactly the opposite direction from each other.

Research has shown that the reason for what Huygens noticed is in vibrations (sounds) on the wall caused by the pendulums swinging works to move them into synch, in tune with each other. In reality this falling into synch is improving efficiency. The two pendulums are no longer working against each other. They are “in tune.” In order to get to that point as musicians we have to go back to the technique and concentration Green related to in the Inner Game. We have to know how to play the parts we have- mistakes, flubs, ineffective fingerings can get out of synch with the rhythm.

We must also give in to the group. We must cease being a lone musician who just happens to be playing with others and let Self 2 do its thing. Self 2 is not as worried about your own technique. Self 2 knows what you or I can do and just wants Self 1 to let us do it. Self 2 knows what’s needed- so let it happen. Distraction, whether by the hyper-critical or hyper-analytical Self 1 or a lapse in focus can easily get you out of synch. Concentration- mindfulness and surrendering to the music- keeps us on.

As we share that with each other, Green lets us know that we are receiving guidance from the music itself, from its pulses and chords, phrases and rhythm. In so doing we receive energy (those vibrations) from the music and our colleagues in the group. In Eastern philosophy there is the idea of “Qi” or “chi” as energy. (Hence Qigong and T’ai Chi). As we play in a group it is that same type of energy that is being shared, silently yet powerfully among us.

Green talked to both percussionists and conductors to explain this idea since it is they who must most fully embody that in the group for all of us. They can get the rhythm, or even set it and communicate non-verbally with the rest of us. As we all fall into it, the “groove” sets in and, well, then it “swings” no matter what the genre of music!

But it is not something that can be forced. One of the musicians Green talked to (Ralph Towner) called it a “zen thing— as soon as you think you have its you lose it.”

There are no secondary roles in music: everything you do affects the total music. So it is critical to be one hundred percent attentive to everything, all the time, and hear the whole as it evolves.

Is it any wonder that right behind “sound” is “rhythm” in the building of musicality? Green concludes:

We don’t just play notes: music is a live current, and we navigate it. This current can be shaped and gently guided, but not pinned down…. The moment we interfere too much, the music’s power, effectiveness, and flow will be disturbed…. We have to be silent, attentive, and sensitive to its shape. We have to intuit a silent rhythm that has the power to unite us. We each have unique capacities to respond to the music, and the better we understand, the more we feel, the closer we will come to the true spirit, and the more artistry we shall have to express.

Just like life.

"No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
— John Donne (1572-1631)

---

The Mastery of Music: Ten Pathways to True Artistry by Barry Green, chapter 1, pp 21-43.
(2003, Broadway Books.)

Tuning Slide 4.4- It's in the Basics

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Success is neither magical nor mysterious.
Success is the natural consequence of consistently
applying the basic fundamentals.
—Jim Rohn

I had already decided on this week’s theme before this year’s Shell Lake Trumpet Workshop. But right from the beginning of the week I realized that this was no coincidence. I return every year to Shell Lake to be reminded and renewed in the basics of being a trumpet player, musician, and human. Success is always in the basics- and working on the basics every day.

My thinking on this started a month or so ago when I had a trumpet lesson with a local musician. I knew that he would help me in a number of areas and I knew it would be about some of the fundamentals. I just didn’t know which ones- and what to do about it. That, of course, is why we need to have a teacher and take lessons. We don’t know what we don’t know, and we can’t be entirely objective about what we are doing. It takes someone outside of my own head to hear what I am doing and what I need to do about it.

It is always about the basics. First and always and forever, it’s about the sound. It is making the best sound, the sound that resonates with myself and others, the sound that “plays well with others,” the sound that I am hearing in my head and wants to come out through the horn. As my mentors at Shell Lake emphasize over and over, the sound is what we focus on. It is learning to listen to the rich harmonics possible in any given note for each note, as they tell me, is the whole universe in and of itself.

Second, and as essential as the first, is the rhythm. How do I work on rhythm? Articulation comes to mind. So does singing the part or exercise. Catching the rhythm is basic to sight reading I am finding out.

Third, and often overlooked by most of us in practice, is patient slowness. We want to play it up to speed as soon as possible. We want to sound like Clifford Brown in one of his incredible be-bop licks or take that whole Clarke etude in one breath like it indicates. But if I haven’t discovered the sound (tone) or rhythm (articulation and phrasing) it will be just a bunch of notes with no life in them. In order to get to that point, I have to take it slow! I can’t help but think of the lyrics of one of the songs in West Side Story when I hear this:

Boy, boy, crazy boy
Stay loose, boy!
Breeze it, buzz it, easy does it
Turn off the juice, boy!

So, in my lesson, what did the teacher do? He took me back to the basics, of course. Since he, like my Shell Lake mentors, was a student of the great trumpet instructor Bill Adam at Indiana University, he had me pull out the tuning slide and just “play the tube.” Breathe and let the air vibrate. Find the center of the tube- and the sound. Listen to it. Improve it. Breathe it. I could feel my sound relax and center. I could feel the tension decrease. It’s the basics, man, just the basics.

Next, still on sound, we started on long tones and long scale tones. Because of what I was hoping for, part of it was to make the sound as soft as possible. Pianissimo. Soft. Quiet. Breathe it soft. Keep the sound centered. Keep the breath moving. (Last week one of my teachers there noticed I needed to do some work on that as well. Another piece of my puzzle added.)

Now it’s the to add some rhythm work- articulation. He had me turn to one of the basic rhythm exercises in the Arban’s book (the ultimate basics of trumpet playing!) and play them keeping the sound and notes connected. After over 56 years of playing trumpet, I had never really ever worked on this before. (Amazing what happens when your last lesson before a few years ago was when Lyndon Johnson was president!) Listen to the sound! Keep the breath moving. Keep the notes connected as I articulate.

Finally, the overall basic for this lesson- take it slow! Don’t rush through it. Do the long tones- slowly. Do the scales and chromatics- slowly. Do the rhythm and articulation exercises- slowly. Find the way to do them slowly but with purpose and energy. Slow can be dull and boring, or it can be filled with potential energy being released.

Two weeks after that lesson I went to the Brass Festival in North Carolina- and I was knocked over by the change in my sound and breath. I do not need to be convinced of the importance of the basics. I see the results in my playing. I hear and feel the results in my playing.

The basics. Now as much as ever. Perhaps even more so now. It is easy to get the feeling that one has learned all the simple stuff. That is for beginners. No. The trumpet, as many trumpet players have said, is a very unforgiving instrument. It will be putty in your hands one day and a piece of ice unwilling to bend the next. It is always in the basics that I learn to keep moving forward. If I do nothing else with my trumpet on any given day, I must always do the basics.

It is just as true in my own daily life. I can get complacent about what I am doing or what is happening around me. I can lose the center of my life, moving into the out-of-tune sections that can lead me to boredom, fear, or just plain laziness. Each day I need to work on my own basics.

• Sound- the tone of my life. Is my tone happy or sad, accepting or judging, willing to work with or working against others? That is the internal. It is my mood, my feelings, my inner reactions to what is happening around me. Mindfulness to these is basic.
• Articulation- how I show it. Do I act out my internal struggles or feelings, taking it out on others, blaming others for my stuff, ignore what is my responsibility? This is the external. How I respond to others is important for it can and will impact all my relationships.
• Patience- Stay loose and keep moving. I have to know I can’t be perfect, so don’t try to rush things in order to get past them and ignore them. Turn down the juice and keep cool.

Every day, in whatever ways I can, it is all about the basics. They are, after all, the only way to get where I want to be.

3.32- The Tuning Slide

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

The heavens, whose aspect makes our minds as still
As they themselves appear to be,
Innumerable voices fill
With everlasting harmony;
The towering headlands, crowned with mist,
Their feet among the billows, know
That Ocean is a mighty harmonist;
Thy pinions, universal Air,
Ever waving to and fro,
Are delegates of harmony, and bear
Strains that support the Seasons in their round…
-William Wordsworth, On the Power of Sound

One of the joys of our winter stay on the Gulf Coast in Alabama is the ability to practice on the balcony overlooking the beach and water. I put my silent mute in and do my daily routine whenever it is warm and sunny enough, which is at least 75% of my time there. One day recently I finished my 30-40 minutes of playing and then sat and meditated for another 15-20 minutes. The result was the following reflection on both the practice and how music itself pulls us in and we become part of something greater than any one of us could ever be.

The surf is the constant background. It is a rhythm without a pattern, or better yet, a rhythm and pattern combining into breath. Its constancy is a heartbeat, a watery drum keeping all in motion. There are days it is as soft as a baby’s sleeping breath. This is, after all the Gulf of Mexico, not the expansive ocean. Even at fifty yards it can easily be overpowered by my muted horn.

But it is never lost. It is a pianissimo of my inner heartbeat, a drum cadence. It allows, even invites, movement. My long tones follow in order. They fall in sync with the surf. Then I play scales and it becomes a counterpoint. Play the chromatics too fast and I can lose the rhythm, the pattern under it all.

Slow down, the surf calls.
Follow me, the rhythm beckons.

In my time frame the surf is infinite, perpetual. Any time of day or night I can walk out on the balcony and it will be there. When it isn’t, life itself will have come to an end. This surf, formed by the world-wide waters, has been the breeding source of life itself. It shapes and reshapes the shorelines, constantly changing and challenging what even human grandiosity thinks is permanent. It will destroy and remold what we- and it- have built.

Then come the louder days. Gale force winds whip the tops off large swells. Though it is still the Gulf, its power is beyond what we can know. Most such days I am forced back inside, unable to compete in sound or comfort to the surf. In between the extremes, though, after a storm has moved through, shifted the winds, and roiled the surf, I can take the routine back to the balcony. Now the sound and pattern of my playing shifts. I get a little more aggressive, a little more stubborn in my insistence that I be heard, even by me.

I never win, humbling for a trumpet player to admit. Perhaps if I removed the mute my sound would carry a little further but I don’t want to disturb neighbors- or the surf itself. I must be in tune and time with the surf. Chromatics, Clarke #1, have to fall into the proper places, not just the silence but the ebb and flow of sound. The exercise on thirds must find the note solid in the right place of the surf’s rhythm. Amazing how many things it takes to make music. But with time and experience they do fall into an intuitive second nature. Harmony.

At times I realize I am also hearing and seeing other parts merging in this chamber composition. The birds in the tree below, the silent hopping of the sparrows on the edge of the balcony, the gulls laughing, pelicans soaring and diving. Whom am I to intrude, to insist on the importance of my part over theirs? That’s the harmony. I am not here to force my will on that of the world. I must not or the music will be more than dissonant, it will be destructive.

In between exercises and runs I pause. One is to rest as much as one plays, is the old adage. Here, on the balcony, that is a pleasure. As I stop the surf remains. It brings a moment of refreshment before I pick up the horn again. The others instruments continue their own song, unaware that I am listening. The call and chatter of the gulls, Laughing Gulls, in fact, challenging my hubris that I of all creatures can think I can accompany the greater symphony. Or they just do what they are supposed to do simply because their melody is needed to fill out the sound.

I take an extra 15 minutes at the end of the routine to just improvise over different chords, working on my favorite tunes I want to play at jams- Amazing Grace, This Land is Your Land, and Horace Silver’s The Preacher. They are now my contributions to uniqueness, more than just routine, foundation, they are different every time, influenced I am sure by the mood of the Gulf and the melody playing around me.

I am both humbled (kept in my proper place)
And empowered (given the direction to do what I can do)
By these practice times on the balcony.

• Humbled at how little power I truly have;
• Humbled that I am allowed to accompany such beauty;
• Humbled that the surf and sand, birds and beach could care less!

Yet,

• Empowered because I, too, am part of this symphony simply by being here in this moment;
• Empowered to play and seek ongoing harmony with nature’s music;
• Empowered by the inner and outer beats of the Eternal Heart.

Music is a gift of God!

The Tuning Slide 3.21- Beyond Mediocre (2)

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

You have to, take a deep breath
and allow the music to flow through you.
Revel in it, allow yourself to awe.
When you play allow the music to
break your heart with its beauty.
― Kelly White

What else is there about practicing (this month's theme) that can help us rise above being simply mediocre? How about memorization built on sight-reading which itself is built on listening and rhythm?

If there is a secret - and easy - way to memorize, I haven’t found it. In fact I have seldom memorized a song all the way through. The only exceptions might be When the Saints Go Marching In and several songs I learned by ear. As I write that I also know that I have just given one of the not-so-secret ideas about memory work. Some of memory work goes back to what we talked about last week, listening. I have a hunch that memorization is more than just rote recall of something. Like I have said, you have to know the language. Sure, anyone can recite something in a different language without knowing what it means. But it will be lifeless compared to knowing the real feelings behind it.

The other thing that I have found that helps is having a better feel for the rhythm and style. This starts with the basics we always talk about- scales, chromatics, arpeggios, and the like. As we get to know the feel of these basics they become natural. We don’t have to think about them with Self One and will give appropriate control to Self Two. Then, when that run comes up in a performance piece or rehearsal, it just happens. Listening and rhythm then lead to what I have found to be the next pre-memorization step- sight-reading.

Sight reading
Expertise with sight-reading belongs
at the top of your list of priorities.
–The Musician’s Way, p. 99

This was one of my greatest weaknesses for years. Way back in high school I was a mediocre sight reader- at best. Even though I was first chair I had difficulty with sight reading. Part of that may be my somewhat ADD personality, but I didn’t know how to move beyond that. I would then take the music home and woodshed it and be able to play it like a first-chair should play it the next rehearsal. (We had an excellent second-chair who could sight read and was right there to support me and the section. Something every section needs!) Without going into the many decades since then, It was not until the last five or six years that I learned you can actually practice sight-reading.

Enter Getchell’s Second Book of Practical Studies for Cornet and Trumpet. They are amazing- and fun to play! They are based, among other things, on rhythm and time. The more I worked on that, the better my sight reading got. I then learned how to deal with a new piece of music and the “steps” of sight-reading. These include the obvious mental checklist of key signature, time signature, key changes, repeats, dynamics. But they also include a quick look at what appear to be difficult passages- and then humming or singing them. All this can be done in a relatively short time. The more time, the better. By the time the conductor raises the baton to start, I found I am no longer truly reading it for the first time. It is almost not sight-reading.

But here is where a paradox shows up for me. The more I get into the printed notes on the page, the less I am able to do it from memory. I have tried for years to memorize the closing section of Stars and Stripes Forever. Trumpets always stand to play it and I can’t read the music. Put the music in front of me and I can play it flawlessly. Take the music away and I easily get lost. Last year I worked on it using a lot of the new ideas and techniques I have been gathering for the last three years and I had it almost complete. In the end it became a melding together of all that I know about playing that came from listening enough to know the song including the rhythm and progressions (from sight-reading practice).

How then do I move on to greater ability to memorize? On the Your Music Lessons website I found this: (https://yourmusiclessons.com/blog/how-to-memorize-music-5-times-faster/)

The steps to memorizing can be broken down as follows:
• Put information into short term memory.
• Repeat the information in your short term memory multiple times.
• Sleep. [Important to moving information from short- to long-term memory.]
• Repeat steps 1 through 3.
• Do the whole process again after some time has passed.

(I like the sleep idea!) How then do I put these steps into practice? From The Musician's Way website here are The Four Stages of Memorization
https://www.musiciansway.com/blog/2010/05/the-four-stages-of-memorization/

Stage 1: Perception

Deep perception makes for solid memory. When we grasp the inner workings of a composition as well as how we want to shape each phrase, those rich connections lead to steadfast recall.

• What’s the structure, how does it flow, what are the emotions? This is the start of getting information into the short-term memory.

Stage 2: Ingraining
Ingraining is the means whereby we lay down enduring memory tracks. But beware: ingraining necessarily involves repetition, yet only mindful repetitions will do.

• This takes us back to all the elements of mindful practice. Just practicing doesn’t do it; practicing with images and goals will do a great deal. We need to make the music part of us, ingrained in us.

Stage 3: Maintenance
Even if we ingrain deeply, unless we maintain our memory, the mental connections we form will gradually disintegrate. Here are strategies that keep memories strong.

• Here we do things like record ourselves and listen or do mental reviews of what we have memorized. It keeps it alive.

Stage 4: Recall

• This is performance. Be relaxed and mindful, feel the emotions and trust in your preparation. With some of the music I have been working on this means getting myself out to a jazz jam or volunteering for the improvised solo in a gig.

This is exactly what I have been trying to do with some of the jazz work I have been developing. I have seen that as I work on playing by ear it allows the music to be more than just short-term since I cannot rely on visual memory alone. That in itself is a big piece of memorizing for me.

With all that here are some final thoughts on memory and music from Your Music Lessons: https://yourmusiclessons.com/blog/the-four-types-of-musical-memory/

“Muscle memory” is not even memory, it’s purely habit. Habits are formed in the most primitive parts of our brains. Studies have shown that people with no ability to form new memories, because of accidents or disease, are still able to form new habits. This shows that habits are not technically memories. When musicians depend on “muscle memory” what they really are doing is repeating patterns mindlessly.

This type of “memory” is also very prone to memory slips because the music is actually not in the musicians memory at all, and any small break from the habit (like a mistake or someone in the audience coughing) can cause the habit to break down.

Real music comes from our actively engaged minds. If the musician cannot sit down and write out an entire piece of music from memory, the piece is not memorized. Never try to acquire “finger memory”. It will come naturally because of constant repetitions. You should always seek an intellectual understanding and memory of the music first.

So, memorization, connected with playing/transcribing by ear, will be one of my goals over the next six-months. I’ll see if this old dog can still learn these new tricks.

The Tuning Slide 3.20- Beyond Mediocre (1)

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

If you need to be inspired to practice,
you should probably do something else
-Ted Nash

“You didn’t wake up today to be mediocre,” says a common meme easily found on the Internet. But many, myself included, spend way too much time avoiding the things that can help us move beyond mediocre or keep us stuck in ways that don’t move us forward. Which, in the end, keeps us mediocre.

Definition: of only moderate quality; not very good.
Synonyms: ordinary, average, middling, uninspired, undistinguished, unexceptional, unexciting, unremarkable, run-of-the-mill, lackluster, forgettable;
Informal -OK, so-so, fair-to-middling, no great shakes, not up to much, bush-league

That’s why so much of the research and writing on expertise and improvement focus on “deliberate” practice, working on the things that will make us better and consciously doing things that challenge us to grow. Just playing something two hours a day every day won’t necessarily make us better. With bad habits we may just become fair at being mediocre.

Brent Vaartstra on the Learn Jazz Standards website has an article outlining the Four Ways to Stay Mediocre as a Jazz Musician.

Specifically related to jazz musicians, his thoughts are just as applicable to all musicians who want to improve. I have reversed the themes into four ways to get beyond mediocre, but the idea is still the same:

• Don’t get stuck on scales
• Get out of the practice room
• Work on rhythm and time.
• Don’t beat yourself up

Let me sum up what these mean for me.
• Don’t get stuck on scales
⁃ As Vaartstra says, scales are essential, but how are we playing them? Are they just some rote exercise that we do because we want to learn the scales and let them fall smoothly under our fingers? Good. But what about the style and sound? Can we play them smoothly, with feeling and movement? Can we play them staccato with a sense of musicality? What about the tone? Do they sound like we are just rushing through them to get on with the real stuff? Talking with one of the Shell Lake Workshop participants the other day, he said that he has been working to make part of the Routine"musical". That’s the point. Every time we play we are making music! Then when that scale comes up in a piece, we can play it musically and not just by memory.

• Get out of the practice room
⁃ There are two aspects going on here. One is to get out and listen to live music when you can. It can (and should) be just about any kind of music. It is the opportunity to hear how other people make music and inspire us to improve out own. The other aspect is to get out and play with others. In jazz that can be going to an open jam. It can also be any bands or groups you can play with. Find ways to play with others! Even the best soloist must know how to play in balance and blend with others.

• Work on rhythm and time.
⁃ We often overlook this aspect of deliberate practice. Being able to read more complex rhythm takes time. For my money the two best methods for that are the Arban exercises, especially the syncopation and dotted eighth-sixteenth sections, and Getchell’s Second Book of Practical Studies for Cornet and Trumpet. More about why this is important when we talk about sight-reading. To sum it up now though, it is the rhythm that can often through us off. Rhythm is the dialect and emphasis of the music. When we can get those in our practice, we will be able to play more music.

• Don’t beat yourself up
⁃ It seems we often get back to these underlying concerns that we have often called Self One and Self Two from the Inner Game disciplines. As we work on our pieces, our less accomplished techniques, the more difficult exercises, it is easy to be unkind to ourselves- or worse, give up. Stay steady, let Self Two do what Self Two can do and tell Self One to relax and enjoy the music.

With that in mind here are the two of four ways I have discovered that these movements beyond mediocre can be of great value. I have found some of this on The Musician’s Way website (https://www.musiciansway.com/practice/) and reflect on them from my own experience in practice and performance.

Warm-up and basics.

Like sensuous opening ceremonies, warm-ups prepare the body, mind, and spirit for making music.
– The Musician’s Way, p. 37

I still haven’t found warm-ups and basics to be “sensuous”, but they are the obvious place to start in the movement beyond mediocre. As I mentioned above this can be a place to develop musicality and tone. To play that “simple” Arban routine with beauty and tone is always the goal. Some of the exercises are even performance etudes. They are how we learn to do it. A good warm-up routine, appropriate to your needs and growth is worth it’s weight in gold- and time. So are things like mindfulness and exercises like T’ai Chi and Qigong in getting the body into a healthy spot.

Listening and learning

“For you to perform with native inflection, you have to listen and listen until you break through to the soul of a style.”
–The Musician’s Way, p. 98

The more you listen, the more you learn. On one website I read the more than obvious statement that we actually learn to speak- by listening. No one tells us how to talk. It is natural. We are designed that way. The same is true for music. But there are different types of music- just as there are different languages. They all share the same notes, though not always played the same way or in the same order. Some have different rhythms and different time frames. Some are “straight” and some “swing”. How do we know how to play it if we haven’t heard it.

I was reminded of this last weekend. One of the big bands I play with had a gig at a local dance venue. It was an amazing evening for me. I found myself moving along in time (mostly) and able to go with the rhythm. I realized that I am now truly beginning to understand and “speak” the language of jazz big band. I can more regularly look at a passage and know what it probably sounds like because it is in a pattern that is commonly used in the music. I realized I was no longer reading it “note for note” but playing it out of what was called above the “soul of the style.” It is just like when I have learned a new language and found myself thinking in the language. I was no longer translating from an English thought to a German or Spanish thought. On Friday evening I was not translating a written note from one style to another- it was more often just coming out that way.

This is actually more important than it may seem at first glance. All music is language. Music is perhaps a “generic” term for different languages. Like learning any new language we do not start with the most complex words and sentences. Trying to read War and Peace before a first-reader would be most difficult. As I was watching the John Coltrane documentary the other evening I was reminded of this truism. There is much in Coltrane’s later music that I do not understand. It was a different language than any most I have known in music. It was clearly powerful and transformative. I could feel it- but I don’t yet understand it. I want to- and have been working on that for years. I know more about it today. Someday it may all fall into place.

For that to happen I have to keep listening. The many styles and languages of music will enrich my overall understanding of the depths of music and increase my vocabulary. I will be a better musician- and a better person for it.

Which, next week, will bring me to two other aspects of practice that will help us all move beyond mediocre- sight-reading and memorization.

The Tuning Slide: What It's All About

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

There are two kinds of music.
Good music, and the other kind.
-Duke Ellington

Back in the first of this series on jazz I wondered where to begin. I am still wondering and asking that question. Nine weeks (and one more to go) is nothing in the great flow of this music. In it’s past century, jazz has transformed American life and been transformed by it. Yet its power has never diminished. Hearing a Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, or Buddy Bolden recording today is just as transformative as ever. The music lives! I could explore all the ideas and sidelights of jazz for the rest of my life and probably only scratch the surface.

I turned to Wynton Marsalis for some insight, then, as I came to this incomplete ending to the series. I have mentioned his book, written with Geoffrey Ward, Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life (2008, Random House). It is a good introduction to jazz on a popular level. In his opening chapter he describes his experience in learning and experiencing jazz:

This is some of what I found:
The most prized possession in this music is your own unique sound. Through sound, jazz leads you to the core of yourself and says “Express that.” Through jazz, we learn that people are never all one way. Each musician has strengths and weaknesses.

Jazz also reminds you that you can work things out with other people. It’s hard, but it can be done. … Jazz urges you to accept the decisions of others. Sometimes you lead, sometimes you follow- but you can’t give up, no matter what….

On a basic level, this music led me to a deeper respect for myself. In order to improvise something meaningful, I had to find and express whatever I had inside me worth sharing with other people. But at the same time it led me to a new awareness of others, because my freedom of expression was directly linked to the freedom of others on the bandstand.
—pp. 11-12.

Marsalis clearly understands the inner power of music to make each of us who play it more than we are without it. Each of those paragraphs speaks to us as musicians. First he talks about us finding our “sound.” On one level this means he skills and development of our technique. Because it is “jazz” we find a freedom to develop and express that. While there may be variations, it is very difficult for a musician to express those sounds in a “classical” piece.

Second Marsalis sees the interpersonal musical interactions in jazz as a great paradigm for getting along with others. You can’t take your horn and go home in the middle of a gig because you didn’t like the way the tenor player took the theme. Instead you have to pay attention to the tenor’s message and expressions and see where it fits into your experience. Maybe that will mean developing a contrasting style or building the theme on a different chord. But you can’t deny the tenor player the right to his freedom of expression. It could start an interesting dialogue- musically on the bandstand, afterward while relaxing, or as a metaphor for how you can learn to interact with others day in and day out.

Third, Marsalis makes the obvious- and essential connection. In order for these first two to happen, we have to dig into ourselves. And we must respect ourselves. We must believe that in our solos, duets, or even just section work, we have something worth sharing. Maybe my section work as a fourth trumpet doesn’t get out into the crowd like the solos do. But how can I make that chord sound out when I have the one “blue note” in the section? How do I play that note so it enhances the sound of the section and the band? Do I believe I have a right to make that simple statement in that single note? Next it leads me to pay attention to the rest of the section and the group and give them the same freedom I want for myself and the same respect I would hope to get from them.

Marsalis then adds:

The value of jazz is the same for listeners and players alike because the music, in its connection to feelings, personal uniqueness, and improvising together, provides solutions to basic problems of living. -p. 13

Couldn’t say it any better! So I won’t.

One more thought comes out of Marsalis’s reflections. First, though, to introduce it, here is a quote, again, from Duke Ellington:

Put it this way: Jazz is a good barometer of freedom…
In its beginnings, the United States of America spawned certain ideals of freedom
and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved,
and the music is so free that many people say it is the only
unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom
yet produced in this country.
-Duke Ellington

Here’s where Marsalis takes the same thought. He puts jazz into the flow of American life, not just in the past 115 years, but representative of the flow of our overall evolution as a nation:

Knowing jazz music adds another dimension to your historical perspective…. Jazz music is America’s past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves to come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.
-p.13

The melding of musical styles, melodies, and history may be nowhere more clear than in jazz’s development. European folk styles from the colonies and songs from Africa laid foundations of rhythm and emotion. The Black Church added the preaching style of call and response. Ethnic roots of Irish music and New Orleans parades gave movement to the musicians. Listen closely to jazz and these will echo from the past and into our collective subconscious imagination. Feel it move YOU.

But even more to the point may be the role jazz itself played in the 20th Century in creating a revolution in racial acceptance. When the music began, and for decades after that, it was impossible for white and black musicians to play together. Even when they could it was impossible for the black musicians to stay in the hotels where white musicians did. Movies were edited so they could edit OUT for southern audiences of the black musicians scenes showed them playing with their white colleagues. Jazz music’s influence on the civil rights movement is an essential part of its long-term success. Miles Davis saw this when he said:
Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.

We have covered a lot of ground very superficially in these eight posts. Any one of them could be the start of a series on its own connecting music as a whole and jazz in particular, musicians and listeners, and finally, music and life. Jazz plays an important part in my life and will continue to do so. I keep learning and experimenting. It is a never-ending joy and experience. There will be more jazz posts as part of the regular weekly writing here on The Tuning Slide. I hope it will continue to open new paths for you as it has for me.

It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.
-Dizzy Gillespie

The Tuning Slide: What Makes Jazz, Jazz?

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Jazz does not belong to one race or culture,
but is a gift that America has given the world.
-Ahmad Alaadeen

I remember a discussion I had with a teenager in my church youth group some 30+ years ago. We had been listening to some live rock song that had a great guitar solo. We started talking about different styles of music and came up with a question.

What makes jazz jazz? Why isn’t it rock or vice versa?

Neither of us had an answer, although we did, in general, agree that we knew it when we heard it. Here, then, decades later, I am going to attempt to answer that question from my experiences. As I said in the previous post, I have been enthralled by jazz in all its forms for over 50 years. I’m not out to give an in-depth analysis of jazz and what makes it what it is. There are countless books that do that. Some are history like Ted Gioia’s History of Jazz, a remarkable story of how jazz got to be what it is. Some are on video like Ken Burns’ mini-series documentary, Jazz, from PBS. Barry Kernfeld’s What to Listen For in Jazz has informed this particular post. All three of these are 16 - 20 years old, but capture the story that has become jazz.

Since one of my goals is to relate the music and the experience of jazz to my life and experience, musicology is not my goal. Living jazz is. So, I found in Kernfeld’s book seven things that are essential ingredients to understand about jazz. These, I think, give a little more to work with than just saying “I know it when I hear it.” While all of them can be found in most other musical genres, how they apply to this genre begins to answer the greater question of what makes this music what it is.

First comes rhythm. This should come as no surprise. Jazz started as music for movement. It was street music, dance music, walking and marching music. The power of the “beat” is unmistakable. It is almost impossible to call it “jazz” if it doesn’t have rhythm. It must constantly be supported and carried by the rhythm section- drums or bass, piano or guitar. I know that sometimes that rhythm is pretty hard to find, especially in more free-form jazz, but if you ask the musicians they will say there is something there. It will go nowhere without a living, breathing pulse.

All music breathes. The rise and fall of dynamics, crescendo and decrescendo, are the active elements that make it something more than a one-level sound. In jazz, that breath becomes a rhythm. Some of this is what is called articulation. When you emphasize what note, how you flow from one section to another. But it is always alive, always moving.

When jazz musicians say the music is “in the groove” this is part of what they mean. It is alive and moving. The two most common rhythms can be described as

• Swing and
• Duple.

Swing is a movement of triplets enhanced or bounded by accentuations. Duple is doubles, also enhanced and defined by accentuations. While recognizing that there are numerous variations and exceptions, we can take Dixieland and “big band” traditional jazz as the best examples of “swing.” Duple is more straightforward and can be seen in Latin jazz. I will talk more about rhythm, especially swing, in the next post.

The connection of rhythm and breathing with living is obvious. Drumming has been one of those human endeavors most likely since the first time an ancient relative hit a hollow log with a stick. In so doing they were mimicking the action at the center of our lives- the heartbeat. Rhythm is more than primitive in its origins. It is primal. It is basic, essential. A heart arrhythmia can be fatal- it is out of rhythm.

Second is form. With tens of thousands of possible songs to play, a jazz group and its musicians would be hard pressed to memorize everything out there. That would clearly limit their repertoire and challenge the skill of even the greatest among them. What has developed to make this job relatively easy is the form of jazz music. The most common of these was adapted from the basic “song” form- the music of the Great American Songbook. Very simply this form is the beginning theme, the “head”, the first description of which is usually done twice, the chorus in the middle and then closing with the theme. This often referred to as the AABA form.

There can be many variations on how long these individual sections can be. The song form would, in general, be 32 bars, 8 in each section. Other variations can have a repeating pattern of measures and chord changes such as the 12-bar blues which can be adapted to 8- or 16-bars. Chord changes are often sort of standardized with the 12-bar blues being the grandaddy of them and the progression of the chords of I’ve Got Rhythm (referred to as “rhythm changes”) being another.

One other form is the march and ragtime form. These are usually 16-bar phrases with two, three, or four themes as the song progresses.

Now, in general, a jazz musician can pick up a book of songs and all it might have are the head, chord changes, and the closing. When you understand the basic form of these songs, you have the greater possibility of playing more music and not being completely lost.

Third is arrangement. This is the first of three elements of jazz that are about “writing” the music. Arrangement is taking something that already exists and adapting it. Arrangers can do it note-for-note adding embellishments with their group playing as close to the original as possible. They can also take the original and add embellishments to it to change the patterns around the original. The third is to orchestrate the song differently. Having a saxophone-based combo play a song will give a very different experience from a piano-based one. For example taking a Lennon-McCartney song and arranging it for a big band would take all these into account. What instruments do you want to play when? How close to the original will it be? Will you divide it into sections that build on or riff on the theme?

Fourth is composition. Simply put this is basically writing new music. You are composing a new song. It can be based on the chord progressions from another song, such as the many on the changes of I’ve Got Rhythm or the 12-bar blues. It will be a new melody, a new song.

Fifth is improvisation. Improvisation is so essential to what call jazz in all its forms, I will take at least two posts to deal with that. Suffice it to say here, that being able to improvise is what can help all of us succeed in the ups and downs of life. It is not simply flying by the seat of ones pants. It is the ability to call on our knowledge, experiences, hard work, and creativity to solve problems and enhance our lives. Kernfeld called improvisation the “most fascinating and mysterious” element of jazz. It will be featured prominently in all that we do in jazz.

Sixth is sound. This is where orchestration comes in. Different instruments sound different. Different combinations sound different. How you put them together can make a huge difference in what you hear- or don’t hear. It is also the tuning of the notes and how they fit together. Miles Davis famously said that “there are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places.” Thelonius Monk added to that sentiment. "There are no wrong notes; some are just more right than others.”

The ultimate in the jazz sound is what has been called the “blue note.” Simply put the “blue note” is a note that is played or sung a half-step off from what would be expected. Blue notes add a sense of tension, surprise, or worry to the sound. It comes from its use in the blues progression. The “sound” of jazz is what has led many to say they may not know what jazz is, but they know when they hear it.

Finally, the seventh element of jazz is style. Jazz is not one style of music- it is a genre made up of these elements and then flowing into numerous styles. Kernfeld, in What to Listen for in Jazz, leaves the idea of style to an epilogue. That way he could look at the elements that can be found in one way or another in different styles. Here are some of the styles that have developed in jazz, and are still breathing life into the genre:

• New Orleans Jazz
• Big Band
• Bebop
• Hard Bop
• Fusion
• Free Jazz
• Latin Jazz
• Acid Jazz
• Jazz Rock
• Kansas City Jazz
• Modal Jazz
• West Coast Jazz

And Wikipedia goes on to list another 30 sub-genres.

Talk about diversity. Talk about having an abundance of opportunities. Talk about a perfect music to have developed in a little more than only 100 years in the United States.

That’s jazz. That’s all there is to it. In 2000 words or less.
The details, are in the hands of the musicians- and of you and me as listeners. That’s where we will go in the next six posts, seeing how these are good metaphors for life and how, when we learn jazz, we are also learning how to live.

Jazz is the type of music
that can absorb so many things
and still be jazz.
-Sonny Rollins

The Tuning Slide: 2.29

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

I spent some time at the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City yesterday. As you walk into one section you see a series of displays about the construction of jazz. They talked about the different instrument groups and what roles they play, but they made clear that there are three important elements to the “language of jazz:”
• Melody
• Harmony
• Rhythm.
A strong reminder on how all music is tied together. It doesn’t matter what style of music you play, it will have it’s own language built on the foundational language of musical concepts and theory. It will build that language with the words, sentences, paragraphs and volume after volume of music on those three basic elements. Music can be said to be built by the interplay of melody, harmony and rhythm. Without getting too deep into music theory, periods, styles and all that (which is too western) let’s link those three concepts.

Music is:

the succession of single tones in musical compositions, as distinguished from harmony and rhythm. the principal part in a harmonic composition; the air. a rhythmical succession of single tones producing a distinct musical phrase or idea. -Link

Here's more that puts all these together:

Melody is what results from playing notes of different pitches - sometimes pitches can be repeated too - one after the other in an 'organised' way. Melodies are very distinguishable and are often singable. However, just the succession of pitches doesn't make a melody. Each note played has a duration. The relation between durations refers to rhythm.

But, before rhythm, lets talk about pulse. Like every living organism, music has a pulse - beats (like that of the heart). And although we not always hear it, it is always there. Do you remember when children learn to clap their hands to follow songs? There is a constant, implicit, beat that happens periodically. In some cases, it is in fact played by instruments. For example, in Australian aboriginal music it is often played by clap sticks.

But rhythm is not just a constant periodic beat. The beat or pulse is like its skeleton. Rhythm is how you inhabit the pulse. Rhythm is what results of combining notes of different durations, sometimes coinciding with the beat and sometimes not. For example, if you can notice in Reggae or Ska music, the guitar or keyboards most of the times play, at times, exactly opposite to the beat.

And, last but not least: harmony. Usually, melodies are not just played alone by a solo instrument or a group of instruments playing the same thing. Very frequently there are 'lead' instruments which play melodies (such as the voice, wind instruments, etc.) and, at the same time, others that accompany them doing something else. This relationship between different notes played at the same time is what we call harmony.

Sometimes this can be done by one instrument such as guitar or piano, but other times by several instruments (like brass ensembles). There are many types of relations between two or more notes played at the same time, but they can be classified into two main divisions: consonance and dissonance. -Link

Again- it is in the interaction of these that what we call music is made. How do we learn to do that? Beyond the obvious issue of scales and listening to your music and those you are playing with, I have a hunch that rhythm is where we need to most practice. The “rhythm” section of any band needs to be solid or the group can’t hold together. I have probably seen many a director work hard with the percussion section in order not to lose the beat, the pulse, the groove no matter what the style of music. Soloists who lose the feel of the music can potentially go off on their own leaving the band either far behind or a couple measures ahead. It is as important to learn how to feel the music as much as it is to play it.

On the website, Learn Jazz Standards, they have a post about four ways to remain mediocre- number 3 is:

Ignore working on rhythm and time.
I find that a lot of mediocre jazz players spend the majority of their time working on their solos and navigating the vast array of harmonic structures jazz has to offer. Everyone wants to be a great soloist, and you will need to work on these things if you want to become one.

But it doesn’t matter if you play the hippest lines or have the best technique if you don’t groove. If your time feel is off, and you neglect all rhythmic studies you will be missing a key ingredient for jazz [or any musical] excellence.

When it comes down to it, if your music doesn’t make people dance on some level, your music will feel off. It has to groove. Your single note lines need to groove, and your accompaniment needs to groove. If you rush or drag too much, it won’t groove.

So if you want to stay mediocre, ignore these things. But if you want to become an excellent jazz musician, start shifting some of your practice time from soloing to rhythm and time. -Link

People may not be dancing in the aisles at a concert band performance, but it must make them move internally. It must make them connect with some pulse. Rhythm is essential.

That’s where the metronome can also come into play. I have previously indicated that I am not very good at working with a metronome. I hate being that regimented. I’d rather just go off and do it at whatever pace I want to, thank you very much! Which is why I am still just barely beyond mediocre in some things. My fear has always been that the metronome will make me too tied in a mechanical way to the beat. In the meantime I haven’t learned the discipline of the beat or learned how the song’s groove moves. Until I learn that discipline I am not ready to move beyond it and bring it alive. Until I can play it smoothly while remaining disciplined, I haven’t learned it.

Music is a living thing. Musicians make those broad kind of statements all the time. But the pulse of music, the heartbeat is in the rhythm. When building athletic or physical endurance we start with a baseline. We often call that our “resting heart rate.” That is exactly where we start with the music. The metronome is the guide to where to start. As time moves on we begin in our physical training to pay attention to optimal heart rates for activities and to know when the rate has gotten out of the groove. Every athlete know the signs of that- whether they name it as part of the rhythm or not. They know the groove that works for them. Once they get it, they can learn when and how to push it.

So I am finally talking myself into using that metronome more often.

Won’t I be surprised when it actually works?

As I said a couple weeks ago, I am going to end year 2 of the Tuning Slide next week. Last year I kept the posts going and ran out of time to get it published before Shell Lake in August. This year the posts will continue after next week, but on a different scope. I will be repeating the jazz series from last summer and adding some new thoughts I have learned from John Raymond. While a lot of it will be jazz related until the end of June, I will try to also in the new posts relate them to music in general. Not to mention how this all makes us better at whatever we do.

The Tuning Slide: 2.26- Watching and Listening

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Sometime it is just neat to be in the audience when music is being made. Part of the discipline of being a musician is to go and hear others playing in performance. I have had a number of opportunities to do that over the past few months and have come away with some insights that I hope I can apply to my own public performance. In particular I have had the time to hear some types of music that I don’t personally play. When I go to a concert where I am hearing different types of music, I kind of mentally prepare myself with five questions. These help me focus on the music, not so much from a technical aspect but from the perspective of a music fan. These questions:

• What’s familiar?
• What’s different?
• What’s new and interesting?
• What do I like about it?

What can help me in my own playing and performance?

The most interesting concert for me was the Russian String Orchestra in a relatively small (500 seat) venue. It wasn’t quite like sitting by the stage in a club environment, but it was close. I very seldom get to hear strings in person. And even less do I get to hear “just strings” in person. Strings have a unique and wondrous sound in an orchestral setting. I can still remember the first time I heard an orchestra in person. I was 22 and just about to graduate from college. I spent the summer in Austria and there I heard a chamber orchestra perform in a local cathedral. I was swept away. The sound of such an ensemble is hard to match.

The Russian String Orchestra consists of 16 string players, violin to double bass. My first thought was, “Gee, that’s about how many we have in our big band.” But there wasn’t a trumpet, trombone, saxophone - or amplifier- in sight. Which is the first thing that caught me up short; this is a 100% acoustic performance. There’s no manipulation of the sound, what is there is what you hear. It is not a “large” sound, but it does get through. It has an amazing range of dynamics. The quiet subtlety of a pianissimo section is almost breathtaking in its simplicity- and wonder. That they can easily move from that to a fortissimo that brings thunderstorms to mind is even more amazing. The ability to have that kind of control over one’s instrument is almost miraculous.

Which is the first thing I took away from the concert. The hours of practice it takes to be that controlled in your music is critical, as I have talked about before. But to hear the results of that practice shows what a great gift it can be to the audience. Trumpet players aren’t traditionally known for their subtlety. Maybe it is worth working on that. Yes, it is difficult in a big band of brass and woodwinds to get that, but the result- for the audience- is priceless. Music is not just blasting away or developing high screaming notes or even a fast chromatic run. The silence between the notes may be just as important, which is where the subtlety can be born.

The concert itself was purely “classical” string music-style. No pop numbers adapted for strings. It was the real deal. And, no surprise, it used all the same notes that every other band I play in uses. The rich variety of music available to us to hear and play is remarkable. On top of that, it also follows many of the same rules that I have been working on with my jazz improvisational learning, and most certainly what I find in Arban’s, Clarke, or Charlier etudes.

The second thing I did was I listened more closely to get the groove of the music. I could pick out certain musical progressions that I am trying to become intimate with- variations on the ii-V7-I cadence found in so many jazz and popular numbers were there. So was the eight-bar phrasing at times, giving me the movement I could flow with. Hearing the music being moved around the different instruments, allowing each section and, on one piece, each member, to show off their virtuosity was entrancing. I moved with the music- and it became even more alive.

Again, how much work goes into that? These musicians were more than proficient- they were professionally expert! Part of what they have done is to learn the music, feel the rhythm, and then allow the music to transfer through them and their instrument to their fellow musicians and to the audience. That is back to the control of their instrument (remember self one) allowing the natural development of the music to intuitively come out (remember self two.) But what I took away for me, beyond the practice and “Inner Game” thoughts, is again those three things we have talked about before:

1. Every time you play you have a great- not a good- sound.
2. You have great- not good- rhythm.
3. You have great- not good- ears to hear the sound.

All three of those came together with what I was hearing.

The third thing that I have learned to watch when musicians are performing is how do they look? Are they just doing a job, or are they interested, engaged, even excited. I had seen that in a concert of Irish music and dancing the week before. Those young people were remarkable in their raw energy and their ability to harness it for the show. They were not polished like, say, Riverdance. But they were every bit as good. They were excited by the performance and the engagement with us the audience.

I saw that same kind of excitement with the Russian Strings. They were having fun. Being in such a small venue I could easily watch their faces, their eyes, the movement of their bodies. I saw them look across the orchestra and smile when someone did a great job. I watched them lean into the music and get ready for the next section that was important to them personally. I saw the little communications that passed information from one to the other. They were intensely involved in the music, they liked the music, and they were excited to be able to play it.

Part of that comes from their incredible intimacy with the music and the way they have learned to listen and work with each other. They may all be highly skilled, but they clearly know at this point in their careers that they need each other. I hope they never lose that. Part of it, too, is that they, like the Irish group the week before, truly like what they are doing. They get that from their conductor. He loved directing the music; he loved the opportunities this orchestra gives young people; he is excited by sharing it with us in the audience, even when the microphone didn’t work as well as he wanted it to. He was contagious- the orchestra caught it. The orchestra was contagious- and we caught it.

It was a great evening of music. But it was also a great evening of learning for me and a reminder of why I do what I do with my music. Yes, it feels great to be able to build my chops and, for example, move through 12 major scales with little effort, or (Mr. Baca, Steve, and Warren take note) regularly hitting that high “C” and “D”. But if that is all I do, it will be nothing more than a selfish endeavor. It is in the performance that the true magic of music does its work. Therefore:

• Deliberate practice to be able to give better performances. Develop the breadth and subtlety of the music.
• Maintain the interest in finding new ways to be excited by what I am doing.
• Stay engaged with the music and the groove in performance so it can fit together.
• Put all these together on the bandstand or concert stage.
• Be contagious and let the audience catch it.