Since I am absolutely convinced that the world of jazz teaching (but perhaps the whole world in general) is now going backwards, I will allow myself a brief rant not so much about the general principles or the basic concepts that underlie jazz didactic, but rather about a brief excursus on the systems that - although sometimes containing ideas of a certain value - have proven in practice to be inefficient as teaching tools within the reach of everyone, and not only the talented and the geeks - who in any case would have managed to learn to play jazz even in the absence of any organised method.
Sometimes I suspect - yes, I am a bit paranoid - that those who really know how to improvise do so on purpose not to reveal to anyone (except a few, trusted and lucky privileged people) what the "secret" is that has allowed them to successfully enter the perilous jungle of jazz... but immediately rationality takes over and I remember the fact that knowing how to do something does not necessarily equate to knowing "why you know how to do it", and even less to knowing how to teach it; proof of this is that a pre-adolescent, perfectly (well, "almost perfectly") able to express himself in Italian is almost never an expert teacher of spelling, grammar and creative writing. In short, teaching “how to do it” requires much more than just knowing how to do it.
It requires a deep study of the principles of the matter and at the same time a refined knowledge of the learning strategies of the human being; but that’s another story - we’re not here to discuss pedagogical science but, more modestly, what in practice works (or doesn’t work) to learn to improvise jazz.
The scale/chord relationship
If ever there was a concept that was harmful to jazz teaching, it was the infamous scale/chord relationship – not for nothing theorised and taught by the frigid white teachers of the Berkley School. These jokers, evidently envious of the old professors of the European conservatories - professors who at least knew how to teach how to create a figured bass and compose a school fugue or a piano sonatina - not knowing where to turn to find some novelty that would allow them to establish themselves as new luminaries of the theory of improvisation, had at a certain point this brilliant illumination: why don't we teach how to improvise with the scale/chord relationship method? And it was a flood of hectolitres of ink spilled to split hairs on the modes (among other things ignoring the whole quarrel about Greek, ecclesiastical, authentic and plagal modes - but you certainly can't ask a Yankee to be aware of these old school philosopher's minutiae) and on their relationship with every type of natural and altered chord; all accompanied by a fertile flowering of urban legends (first of all the fact that the Slonimsky Thesaurus was Charlie Parker's "secret system") and multiplication tables of mind-blowing detail, capable of predicting which mode should be used on a given chord at a given time of day in relation to the soloist's zodiac sign and his specific biorhythm.
All beautiful, all very academic but... now that we know that on the dominant seventh chord the mixolydian mode is used (it is still not clear how it differs from the major scale that originates it), which notes will we choose within it to build our phrases?
Obvious question, but evidently completely irrelevant for the Berkeley wise guys and their sanctimonious European followers: all it takes is a little “speed school” and playing the said modes up and down for a few octaves – of course at the maximum possible speed – we will obtain the result we have been hoping for… that is, to play so badly that it would make vomit an Aztec priest, one of those who are responsible for extracting the hearts from the chests of poor enemies to be sacrificed alive.
Imitation
One day I happened to attend a nice little sketch between Papa Fausto Rossi - the dean of New Orleans trumpeters from Genoa - and James Morrison, a great trumpet player capable of expressing himself on the trumpet and trombone in every type of jazz subgenre, from Dixieland to the most extreme modal.
Discussing some difficulties that Papa Fausto (moreover an excellent amateur capable of playing the New Orleans with great command of language and intense intention) found in developing his phrasing in a truly complete and professional manner, James said with seraphic simplicity: "Fausto, do you know Louis Armstrong? Here, do as he does".
What a brilliant intuition! In fact, it would be enough to do, for example, like Charlie Parker, and the bebop language would no longer have secrets for us. It's a shame that this approach is only available to those very few natural talents with perfect pitch and acute musical sensitivity, capable of repeating at first sight, without hesitation, anything they happen to hear - and I knew one, Fabrizio Meloni, first clarinet at La Scala, who in addition to having the ability to read at first sight anything put in front of him, was also able to repeat the most intricate piece of transcendental dodecaphony after having heard it only once. For us dullards with little talent and a slow head, this path is too arduous and steep.
We will never be able to learn by pure imitation, and soon disappointment and discouragement will get the better of us, pushing us to abandon and fall back on an activity that is decidedly less difficult and elusive (such as neomelodic music, tennis or, God forbid, bridge). That said, listening and trying to imitate the greats is definitely something to include in our daily practice. For my part, I have noticed that strangely enough, I benefit more from listening to a single piece while I am about to fall asleep - or am already half asleep - rather than listening to one with maximum attention and the antennas of rationality and theory perfectly alert. Who knows why, probably I need to "let go" to learn in an almost subconscious way. Who knows.
Patterns for jazz
There was a period in the late seventies - while, as a pimply teenager, I was shyly and cautiously approaching the magical and terrible world of jazz - in which every good student did nothing but swear by the great, only bible of improvisation: the famous "Patterns for Jazz" by Jerry Coker.
And so it was that a nice and effective book of exercises - let's say a sort of "Hanon Jazz" - was transformed by enchantment into the only, magical text capable of teaching Italian disciples that elusive art that is jazz improvisation.
The classrooms of Jazz schools throughout Italy - I remember with nostalgia the jazz school of Quarto, very conveniently housed in the former psychiatric hospital of Genoa, eighth division "madmen" - resounded without stopping with these melodic "blocks", often simple diatonic patterns or at most exercises on some chromatic motif, repeated obsessively until they became unconscious nuclear elements of every attempt at jazz improvisation worthy of the name.
It mattered little that the typical student was completely ignorant of why a given pattern “sounded good” and what the principles were behind the construction of these melodic incisions: the “naked monkey” of jazz only had to learn to press the keys in the appropriate sequence and – miracle! – the long-awaited solo appeared without any effort that was not eminently mnemonic-muscular.
It was the beginning of that generation of musicians that I like to call “lego soloists”, skilled jugglers in possession of an adequate arsenal of patterns to string together one after the other with metal-mechanical expertise, that generation of button-pressing monkeys that all sounded the same, some more swinging than others, some with more richness (they had learned more patterns by heart) and some with a poverty and aridity to make ashamed a beggar from Calcutta. A generation that fortunately died out early, but that unfortunately passed the unenviable baton of “enemy of music” to the aforementioned devotees of the scale/chord method.
Now, the use of a pattern – let’s call it a motif in Italian, which is less pretentious – remains a useful stratagem for building both technical exercises and for the development of improvisation, but only on the condition that its internal compositional mechanism is understood – the “why” those notes lined up sound so good – and that any hint of automatism and mechanical execution is avoided like the bubonic plague.
We will see later how to use the blocks to help us build the development of the phrase and above all the fluid transition between one chord and the next.
Transcribing
There are some musicians - and many of them very good - who maintain that the only way to learn to improvise is to transcribe the solos of the masters. Listening to how they play, it is impossible to disagree with them: certainly by transcribing solos you learn to improvise, as long as you do not limit yourself to slavishly transcribing without understanding.
Obviously the act of transcribing by ear has its value, and the advantage of improving the ability to perceive intervals and horizontal and vertical relationships between notes: moreover, things done by yourself, with sweat and effort, often have a psychological value much more important than the mere fact of reading a solo in the classic "Omnibook" by Charlie Parker - I do not want to reach the malicious extreme that Omnibooks are useless anyway because jazz musicians do not know how to read.
But there is a "but": learning everything by transcribing is a long and exhausting job. Personally, I spent years - maybe because I'm a hard-necked blockhead - transcribing and studying the solos of the greats, losing sleep over it because I didn't understand what principles were behind the fact that some of their phrases sounded perfect while when
I tried, the result would have made a baboon constipated. Then, suddenly I understood a concept - like the target note on the downbeat, or the displacement - I slapped my hand on my forehead soaked in cold sweat and exclaimed: "If only someone had told me before"!
There, this is the meaning of the work that I am about to develop in the following pages: "tell you first" what are the principles that are behind the solos of the greats and propose a method to study these principles in a gradual, organic and structured way - applying them not on paper but on the keyboard of your instruments.
Which, of course, does not mean that we should no longer transcribe and study the solos of the greats, an activity that remains of fundamental importance for developing the sensitivity and musical credibility of every artist who truly wants to be sincere.
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