DIGRESSIONS

 

I - The walking man

This approach, typically pianistic, was taught to me by Andrea Pozza, a great jazz pianist, renowned teacher and a person of great humility and sympathy. 

The principle underlying this exercise is very simple: to be able to improvise you need to know how to stay on time, or better yet, you need to know how to “create time”, just tapping some Bud Powell shell with your left hand on a steady, strong crotchet rhythm.

Only in this way will we obtain that inner relaxation – which some jazz musicians like Claudio Capurro call “lo scazzo” – which will allow us to move easily within the harmonic structure without feeling awkward, stiff or scared. 

Furthermore, if we concentrate on the rhythm, our subconscious mind will be facilitated in “bringing out” the improvised melodic line – but more than anything the whole thing will sound swinging and relaxed. 

And if we are not pianists? At first glance, I would suggest buying a piano and learning to play it – which would offer every musician an unexpected series of advantages and shortcuts, linked to the immediately visual approach that every keyboard instrument offers; but if you really can’t, or don’t want to, buy at least a “pianola”, at least tap your foot on the ground as if it were the left hand of a pianist. Always soft, relaxed, like a guy who is going his own way without a care in the world. Like, in fact, a “walking man”

II - The melodic skeleton 

The first step to understanding how to develop a phrase is to understand the concept of the melodic skeleton. 

If we wanted to be tedious late-nineteenth-century theorists, we would start rambling on about asides, repetitions, variations, harmonic regions and other beautiful Schoenbergian memory jokes… but we are here to learn the jazz phrase, so we will leave all these beautiful things for another time, okay? 

The melodic skeleton is essentially the phrase itself purified from any embellishment, passing note, melodic or rhythmic tension; in essence, a basic idea of ​​what a melodic skeleton is can be had by thinking of certain nursery rhymes or children's songs. 

The melodic skeleton par excellence is the arpeggio of the chord. Nothing more complicated than this: play the target note (maybe preceded by its chromatic/diatonic preparation) and then proceed by playing the notes of the chord arpeggio in eighths. 

Here several possibilities immediately open up: extend the arpeggio to the ninth, eleventh and thirteenth, develop the arpeggio over several octaves, go up and then down or finally create different motives using the notes of the arpeggio (both the triad and the extended one) in a “broken” way. 

Obviously depending on my initial note the arpeggio could start from the tonic, the third, the fifth, maybe even the seventh… and move both up and down. 

It is always important to seek musicality and avoid automatisms and mechanical execution; let's remember that, even if this is a preliminary exercise to prepare us to develop much more complex phrases, we are still making music and not pressing keys.

III - The blues

I met Andrea Pozza when we were little more than children, during a collective recital that some music teachers presented together at the small theater of the parish of Nostra Signora delle Grazie and San Gerolamo, located in the beautiful and elegant neighbourhood of Castelletto in Genoa.

Between the squeaking and the ending of Clementi sonatinas, contrapuntal babblings in the style of Notenbüchlein für Anna Magdalena, some sparse Bartokian modernism (I don't know why old Bela wasn't ruthlessly killed before he could write that horrendous cacophony that goes by the name of Mikrokosmos), I happened to present a beautiful Chopin waltz - perhaps a little pretentious for a thirteen-year-old boy - which I completed without too many errors and, according to those who had the patience to listen to me, without too many of those arrhythmic sweetnesses that usually mercilessly mark the amateur performances of the consumptive Pole. So young and already so incurably Prussian… 

What was the surprise when Andrea, with an innocent and sly smile, showed in front of the astonished audience of parents, bigots and idle spinsters a couple of transcriptions by Bill Evans so perfectly executed that they left everyone breathless. He was a beardless boy, but he already knew exactly what he was doing. 

The years passed and, while I was corrupting my childish soul between progressive rock and pop songs, I had only fragmentary news about Andrea that he was graduating in piano, on tour in Europe and a rising star on the Italian jazz scene. 

But one day, while I was anxiously waiting to go on stage at the Satura cultural association – but that's another story – I suddenly saw him sitting at the old Steinway that adorned the concert hall of the above-mentioned club. 

What a surprise: no more sumptuous inversions and complex harmonisations where the most esoteric substitutions dominated, but only sparse, nervous and elegant bebop lines. 

After the concert, sitting in front of a frothy cold beer, we told each other our lives, and to my question about how he had managed to transform his phrasing from a dazzling but “copied” Evans style to a very personal and impeccable bop lexicon, Andrea answered me seraphically: “for six months I only played the blues in Bb”.