It was pointed out to me that I had trouble playing basslines. Being a guitarist and having spent little time devoted to coming up with melodic ways to imply chords in my lower register, I wasn’t shocked to find this out. What did shock me, was how shaky my time became when practicing something that I found uncomfortable. The split second required to calculate the truly new motion would gather momentum and create an avalanche until the time was backwards. So I sat down with a buddy and we started to play through a few standards, alternating between bassline and soloing every chorus. After a few days we seemed to get the hang of it. There was still obviously lots of room to improve, but we’d crossed that border from not being very comfortable at all to being able to deliver an average or adequate performance. We would obviously continue to work together in this format, but we also wanted to push ourselves a bit and extend our comfort level to its very limit. So we decided to make things more interesting.
You might say that all my energy right now is devoted to learning how to hear and listen better. This applies to more technical considerations such as recognizing chords, scales, intervals, progressions etc. but also to more nuanced considerations such as how to play with and respond to other musicians. So I sat down with my friend and we decided we were going to do the same exercise again but this time we would trade fours. On top of the fact that our sense of time and comfort with basslines would both be tested, as well keeping track of the form, we were going to make our lives truly difficult by forcing ourselves to stick to very strict motivic development and make as great an effort as possible to hear everything the other was playing.
There was a lot to think about and be conscious of so as not to screw up. All those things mentioned before are fundamentals of performance and cannot be compromised, so how much of our focus could we draw away from them to listen to what the other person was playing? Not only were we required to hear what they were playing, but pick out something significant about their statement and begin formulating an appropriate response, all the while continuing to play basslines which we were not particularly comfortable with.
A few interesting things happened. Firstly, there were definitely multiple four bar stretches over a couple of choruses where we did not hear a single note the other person played. We simply were not comfortable enough with the material and were forced to become totally preoccupied with ourselves in order to maintain the time and form. We also found that we seemed to have a very clear development of only a couple of ideas over a stretch of at least 64 bars, something we both found hard to be disciplined enough to do when soloing alone. One reason is that we could only communicate with very small ideas because we were doing so much, and the other is that at times where we became unable to listen, we would simply fall back on the motive we remembered from an earlier point in the song.
I think of this as the juggling exercise because we are forced to pay attention to so many things and there simply isn’t enough to go around all the time. We are alternating between playing something that makes us slightly uncomfortable, focusing on the metronome, and attempting to create a responsive performance with a fellow musician, and it begins to feel like two people juggling a bunch of balls and that any second they can all come tumbling down with one small glitch in coordination or timing.
In my opinion there are are a couple of lessons to take from doing this exercise. The first is that our level of comfort and familiarity with a tune and how we plan to play over it needs to be very high if we stand a chance of performing musically. The more experimenting we do, the more involved the mental process we have during performance, or in the case of these basslines where it simply boiled down to not having enough experience yet, the less we are able to listen. It becomes unbelievably important to have all tunes memorized to start. But more importantly, perhaps we need to specify what it means to improvise and come up with a definition based on how we can maximize our ability to listen. What we find is that the word improvise takes on different meanings within different contexts.
We’ve talked already about free jazz. Within this context, there is not necessarily a key center, tempo, meter etc. and even if there is you might be inclined to and completely entitled to ignore any of them. In short, there are fewer balls to juggle. It becomes more a game of pitch and catch, of bonding and working up a trust, rhythm, and chemistry. In this context, a person does in fact have much more attention to spread around to both listening to others, and searching out sounds and the motions to execute those sounds which lie outside of their reflexive habits.
Now, if we introduce a more rigid song structure, the juggling game begins. Depending on tempo and other factors, a person has less and less time to think about what to do. Searching for completely new sounds and textures can become unbelievably difficult and if we’re all being honest, it happens most of the time by accident anyways. The point is that all this draws even more attention away from listening to the others. The rhythm section listening to the soloist, as well as the soloist listening to the rhythm section. So how can we define what it means for us to be improvisers in this context in such a way that we maximize our ability to be conscious of the collective sound of all the musicians? The answer is obvious but sometimes it helps to hear it anyways. This is because we often do what we do without actually knowing what it is that we’re doing, and understanding the nature of the activity can help us practice and develop our abilities more efficiently.
What we do in the context of a song as improvisers is build up a network of colors (if you’re thinking more in terms of sound) or shapes (if you’re thinking more in terms of sight, be it on your instrument or sheet music). This can be expressed as all the scales and modes we know and also all the chords we know. What we then proceed to do is combine our palette of colors to form a landscape, to tell a story. It is rare that we accidently discover a new mode in the middle of an improvisation, but much more likely that we accidently play an atypical mode over a chord. In other words, we exploit an unusual cross-relationship. Just the other day this happened to me when I accidentally played C# dorian over an Amaj7. I now love and exploit this chord-scale relationship regularly however the first time it happened it was not something I had consciously set out to do.
When you see an A7b13 on a page, there are only a finite number of things your hand will do. You might know three voicings or thirty, but in the end of the day you can’t escape the fact that if you’d like to discover a new one it will take you at least a few minutes, and then probably lots of practice to integrate it into your playing. There is no way that this can ever happen spontaneously. Much more likely is that you will play a voicing you already know which maybe fits or maybe doesn’t but either way you have never thought of it as an A7b13 before.
Does a painter have a hundred shades of blue on his palette? a hundred shades of yellow? Purple? Green? Of course not. This is totally unrealistic. A painter creates a large range of colors by combining simple colors to create more complicated or subtler ones. Even the most basic jazz harmony can be seen in this way. A Cmaj7 chord can be seen as a C triad and an E minor triad put together. It is the creation of a new color based on the combination of preexisting and more basic colors.
So we see that from an exercise which serves a very practical purpose, that is to help us get better at playing basslines, switching between soloing and walking without fumbling the time, and sharpening our ability to maintain awareness of others while doing so, a much deeper question is raised. What is it we are doing when we sit down to do this thing called improvising? What is more important: playing chops or listening chops? Or is it about finding a balance between the two? What a juggling act!
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