Summer Band Camp

After a week at the Mr. Goodchord workshop, I’ve come home refreshed and ready to implement certain ideas that I’ve been exposed to. There are three distinct (if not interrelated on some level) areas of practice which I can think of:

1. Group Playing
2. Guitar Duet
3. Individual harmonic development.

1. Group Playing

I’m not sure if I’m a big fan of free music. Although I quite enjoyed much of what I heard at the camp that could be called free music, I probably would never walk into a club because similar sounds were drifting into the street. The difference is that free music is an exercise for musicians to develop certain reflexes that are hard to pinpoint and articulate in more traditional contexts with defined roles, not something to submit a trusting and unsuspecting audience to. I understood the nature of the exercise and to a certain extent the personalities involved which made the experience more meaningful. Talking about the music before and after so as to understand the mindset of the musicians involved also greatly enriched the experience.

I am in a band with seven other people. We have struggled over the past year to find a way to elevate our playing as a whole. It seemed that we were either playing arranged parts or somebody was soloing and people’s ears were turned off because they could rely on their brains to make sure all the right sounds came out. We began our last practice with two hours of free jamming, where we not only changed instruments but also played them together (i.e. one person blowing into a trombone and the other moving the slide), talking along the way about what was successful or not about each piece of music. We were not concerned with aesthetic considerations because we try and suspend such judgements and habits when playing free. We talked more about how people listened and reacted and how certain gestures changed or directed the given piece. We also noticed that it was quite refreshing to watch someone with no experience on an instrument try and make sounds come out of it. Rather than laughing at the drummer who has no idea how to play guitar, we were kind of awed at the creative ways he used the instrument.

After this free jamming, we moved on to a piece which had always been a standard arrangement of a head (form of ABCA) followed by solos over the A section and then BCA to conclude. This time, with open ears, hearts and minds, the piece evolved into a much more organic, interesting, and emotional experience. The first time we played the piece it consisted entirely of the repeated A section. Rather than stick to the arrangement, the horns and rhythm section were feeding off of each other to create a much more dynamic and responsive atmosphere. The horns, feeling liberated from normal considerations of how to harmonize properly, which is why prearranged parts were always necessary, and trusting more in their instincts and intimate knowledge of the material, played the most beautiful contrapuntal development of the melody.

Everyone felt refreshed and invigorated by the experience. This was not free music, but it was free-er music. By entering a more sensitive and careful frame of mind, the horns were able to create a lush arrangement completely spontaneously which then inspired the rhythm section to find new areas of exploration. But we were still missing half the song. It should be noted that the A section of this song is a very relaxing and peaceful D mixolydian pedal in 7/4. The B section is a highly contrasting, dynamic and aggressive chromatic progression of altered chords which explodes into the C section, which then lowers gently back into the A section. Could we try to play the song again, this time steering the energy of the initial vamp in a more energetic direction, culminating in the chaotic B section, at which point the band would revert to the arranged composition before returning to the free approach when the A section returned? We could and it felt and sounded great.

Perhaps this is a new approach. Learn complex and intricate arrangements, and then keep parts, throw out others, and attempt to weave them together in more organic fashions utilizing the musicianship and sensitivity of the players. By having the discarded arranged sections as reference points harmonically and melodically, it firstly gives a group somewhere to fall back on if an experiment is failing, but also gives them material to draw from which is thematically related to the rest of the composition. This allows for possibilities which free playing alone cannot offer because some things can only be done with practice, premeditation and coordination. However it also allows for things which purely composed music doesn’t allow for by creating more organic, spontaneous and contrasting sections of a piece. Furthermore, it is a way to expose an audience to the emotional and creative wonders of free playing without them becoming bored or overwhelmed by placing these moments of freedom in the context of music which they already understand and are therefore more ready to enjoy.

1. Guitar Duet

Much of what is contained in the Mr. Goodchord Almanacs are impossible (at least for me) to play on the guitar. It is fairly easy to play for two or four guitarists in the fashion of a string quartet. Drawing on the repertoire and knowledge of the jazz musician, could it be possible to create an approach to playing with another musician that transcends the basic game of swapping functions at certain benchmarks in a form (i.e. comping and then soloing while the other person does the opposite). Take the song “All The Things You Are”. When moving through Cycle 4 the root (or 9th) of the first chord moves to the fifth of the next chord, and the fifth moves to the root. The same relationship exists between the 7th and 3rd.

If two guitarists played through All The Things You Are, which moves almost exclusively through cycle 4 (cycle means the ascending interval from chord to chord), one beginning on the root and 5th, the other on the 3rd and 7th, they would essentially sound like a single guitar or piano player comping. Once this could be done fairly easily in tempo the question begs: what else can be done? In the end of the day listening to two people do what would be totally uninteresting to hear one person do doesn’t make much sense, so in some way this formula must be enriched or elaborated upon so that it can go beyond what one person could do on their own.

1. Melodic embellishment: In the case of All The Things You Are, one person would have one common tone every time the chord changed, allowing for an easy way to start playing around with melodic embellishment since only one voice at at time really needs to be concentrated on.
2. Extensions: Slowly, and without losing track of the pulse, start integrating extensions into your note selection, but being careful to pick notes which are functionally similar to the guide tones you were originally playing. For instance, a 5th could be replaced with a 13th but not a 9th.
3. Basslines: Could it be possible to play more dynamic basslines because the complexity of the voicing you would grab above it is cut in half with the amount of notes you’re looking to play.
4. Chord Substitutes: Besides the obvious extra side slipping and tonicizations we all do on our own, perhaps the same systematic approach described above could be used while playing All The Things or some other standard completely with TBN 1 or 2(I/V or I/VII), or fourths or clusters. On a song like all the things you are it could even be done without writing the parts in advance because the harmony moves so systematically through the keys, but how hard would that be on other tunes?
5. How would this sound as two people combine all of these things at their own discretion?

Once you’ve finished doing this over a whole bunch of tunes with somebody and then basically remove all restrictions or limitations, how will it sound? How will the way you listen to each other have changed? How will your understanding of how the two instruments combine to create a sound have changed? Will it seem more that instead of having 1+1=2 that you have 0.5+0.5=1? I sure don’t know yet.

1. Individual Harmonic Development

The amount of material in the voice leading books is in fact staggering. For this reason I have decided to concern myself only with the triads from volume I for as long as possible (months, years?). Two days into my new practice routine and the amount of work becomes staggeringly clear but finite and doable, so long as you practice as systematically as the material is laid out.

1. Pick a Cycle. I started with 2.
2. Play through the cycle in all 3 modes.
3. Remember to start playing the cycle on every different inversion of the chord or else you will only be exploring a small portion of the actual possibilities on the guitar neck.
4. Try and come up with multiple places to switch strings/positions.
5. Play the chords in both directions so that you’re practicing cycle 2 and 7 at the same time.
6. Repeat in 11 other keys.
7. Repeat with spread voicings.
8. Move on to next cycle (there are really only 2 others, not 4).

Although according to the rules I laid out for myself I’m not supposed to, I find that after doing cycle two for a while, the other ones are less work. And the melodic ideas add up pretty fast as well, especially in harmonic and melodic minor.

What a week!