I realized during my last post on practicing, that there are quite a number of ideas I have about practicing and if I could organize it, I’d probably have a book’s worth. Anyway, practicing jazz is a peculiar process, because learning jazz is a peculiar process. We strive for the ability to play creative ideas that are interactive and emotionally evocative. Most jazz musicians describe the process of accumulating vocabulary. Improvisation is usually described in lay terms as being equivalent to making things up as you go along. But much of what jazz musicians play while ‘improvising’ is worked out way ahead of time. There are names for what is worked out ahead of time. I’ve already described it here as “vocabulary” which evokes an apt comparison to spoken language. But there are many other terms for a musicians “vocabulary”: “bag of tricks”,”arsenal”, “crips”, “licks”, “ideas” and “patterns” being among them.
The term “licks” has a negative connotation for many. “He’s just a lick player” being a common put-down. Although when you consider the licks “he” is playing came from ‘Trane and Bird and they played them, too, I wonder what the problem is. “Ideas” is more politically correct and easier for most musicians to discuss, because it does not suffer from the same stigma as “lick”. I’ve never heard anyone being accused of being “just an ideas player”. So for the sake of my discussion here, I will use these terms interchangeably. “Patterns” has been synonymous with “licks” for most musicians as long as I’ve been studying. But for me, “pattern” is short for scale pattern which is slightly different although some sequences of notes fall under both categories: They are scale patterns that the greats played often.
I call the process of learning improvisation “peculiar” because in effect we are preparing and training ourselves to be spontaneous. I imagine actors experience a similar contradiction in their practicing. But spontaneity is strange commodity in improvisation. There are moments in a performance when something “original” comes in to my mind and with heavy concentration I’m able to realize the idea through my instrument. There is a knowing that accompanies this experience. The knowing is that the idea is perfect. Not perfect in that its execution is perfect or the pitch or anything about it in a measurable attribute is perfect, but that I’ve achieved what I intended or what was intended for me. And there is always external acknowledgment. Now that’s weird, I know, but somebody is going to offer some sort of encouragement or approval or what have you. I know its coming and it does. Its very strange and very fitting at the same time. Frequently the approval distracts the pure concentration that lead to the event in the first place. Then, too frequently, my ego tries to recreate the experience in order to gain more approval and it never works. The only thing that works for me then is to withdraw hope of more, and wait until the Process can resume. What’s interesting to me about this process and why I’m discussing it under the heading of “Practicing” is its relationship to the preparation that went into producing it. The idea might have nothing to do with the notes or sequence of notes, but with the inflection, rhythm, timbre of the idea. The creative event happens because of the ideas relationship to its emergence. If I struggle to seek it out of a “hidden” place in my mind and it successfully emerges, that is all that it takes. It can be almost anything, a quote, a lick I worked out 20 years ago, a passage from a record I’ve listened to. But it can also be something I worked out that afternoon, and that’s what’s curious. But it is the struggle to bring it out, to get to it, that brings out this other Presence. It’s a similar experience to what I have (on a less profound level, I hope) when doing the crossword: staring at a clue that is annoying, almost condescending in it’s simplicity, for long periods, even leaving it and coming back to it hours later, and then “Eureka!”; its there and gives you seven other words you were looking for. Although with the crossword, less people shout “yeah!”
