JAZZ GUITAR HARDBALL
JIM BASTIAN
New Ideas on Practicing
Let’s talk about practicing! I got the idea
for this column from a recent PG interview
with Carl Verheyen [December, 2008]. When
asked, “What do you do to further your
craft in terms of practicing?” Carl replied,
“I’m a serious practicer. To me, practicing is
where I find my center as a person. If I go
a day without practicing, I feel useless… To
practice, I’ve always kept a lick book. It’s an
ongoing musical diary that’s always on my
music stand.” Carl went on to say that his
personal style is a “direct result of the lick
book,” and that “practicing is finding new
things or getting the impossible stuff you
already know down better.”
In recent decades, in jazz curricula especially, teachers (often younger teachers who
are themselves coming from an academic
jazz curriculum) seemed to be focused on
the technical aspects of jazz improvisation,
such as developing the technique of playing a wide variety of scales and matching
those with their parent chords. The focus
has been on the technical aspect of how
jazz works. This is necessary stuff, but
it’s not the heart and soul of the matter.
A more important focus of our practice
should be: When preparing to express
something spiritual, emotive, and unique
through the vehicle of improvisation, what,
and how, should I practice? I think Carl
nailed it when he talked about both the
center and the lick book. Goals such as
these refocus practice into a spiritual discipline in which we evolve as a player and as
a person, while at the same time developing a personal, unique performance style.
In spiritual disciplines, ideas, techniques and
prayers, etc., are repeated over and over as
a way of gaining mastery over some part of
the material, and as a way of developing a
core and center. For musicians, this may be
the repetitive (and often slow) practice of
transcribed solos, licks we have transcribed
from one of the masters, tunes, play-along
pieces, singing what we practice, etc. Kenny
Werner emphasizes this approach as the
path to effortless mastery in his book by
the same title. The idea behind this is that
the material is known so well, and can be
performed with such ease, that a path is
opened for spiritual expression in the music.
The recordings and solos that really move us
in this way are able to take us to a different
plane of existence, and our feelings change
in some way as a result. For the ancient
Greeks, this was known as mimesis. It is the
unique spirit of the performer, whose soul
somehow becomes present in the music,
that allows this process to happen.
When you keep
an active musical
diary—a kind of
spiritual journal of
practice—your
music starts going in
a different direction
than when you’re
simply learning the
technical aspects of
scales and chords.
When you keep an active musical diary—a
kind of spiritual journal of practice—your
music starts going in a different direction
than when you’re simply learning the technical aspects of scales and chords. Carl’s diary
consists of a lick book: the writing down and
repetitious practice of ideas that he wants to
incorporate into his own unique vocabulary.
Personally, I have found this approach to be
helpful. All players have a stock collection of
licks and phrases that they regularly refer to.
It is true among all styles. Listen to Dexter
Gordon, Chet Baker, Terry Kath and you’ll
hear many licks repeated—or repeated with
variation—from solo to solo. The musical
diary aims at helping us develop that kind of
unique vocabulary and recognizable style.
There is no timeline for when this integration might begin to occur. Some players
experience it earlier in life, some later.
Below are some quotes that I found insightful on practicing and developing a spiritual
approach to the music.
Barry Harris: “It’s amazing, but lately I’ve
been suddenly feeling myself getting better
and better each time I play. I don’t know
why it’s happening now, at this late stage
of my career, but it is happening... I must
hope that I live long enough to solve more
of the mysteries.”
Howard Alden: “Develop your repertoire.
You’re better off spending time learning
and practicing tunes rather than running
scales up and down the neck. Play with
other people as much as possible. An hour
spent playing with other musicians is worth
six hours practicing by yourself.”
Ken Karsh: “Do as much recording of
yourself as you can. Listen to yourself with
‘tough love’ and don’t put yourself down.
That attitude only works against you.”
Jimmy Ponder: “I put everything I have into
the music, and hopefully the spirituality about
my music is what prevails. It’s not the mathematics of it or the articulation, insofar as dealing with the amount of notes I can play within
a given span of time. It is how it feels to the
people that hear the music. How it makes
them feel. That is my purpose—to please.”
Transform your practice time into a spiritual
art: keep a musical diary, and a new path
for the music will emerge.
Jim Bastian
A clinician and jazz educator, Jim Bastian is a ten year
veteran of teaching guitar in higher education. Jim holds
two masters degrees and has published six jazz studies
texts, including the best-selling How to Play Chordal
Bebop Lines for Guitar (Jamey Aebersold Jazz). He actively
performs on both guitar and bass on the East Coast.
