My Foolish Heart

One Way Road

Kurt Rosenwinkel recently gave a talk in Montreal which despite his total lack of enthusiasm and interest managed to be useful at moments. One thing he mentioned which is a neat exercise everybody should try is to play a scale in one direction over fast and complicated changes (such as Giant Steps) and change chord scales without changing directions or leaping.



Could this be done with whole or half notes and chords? Could we take a voicing and plane it up in whole or semi-tones, allowing ourselves to alter 1 or 2 notes by a semitone in either direction to compensate for the changing chord functions, all the while moving in a single direction up the fretboard for as long as possible? I think so. Definitely to be done with a bass player.

Ted Meets Mick

I had an idea. I wanted to find out just how much new material working on all these studies had created. How many voicings did they contain which I had honestly never played before and had discovered as I was writing them? Well the answer was actually less than I expected even though it sounds like a lot: 38. The reason this surprised me was because I’d already had almost 30 by the time I was done the first study, the always aptly named All The Things You Are.

If I had generated so little new material while creating all the following studies, why was it that they all felt fresh and as if I was constantly coming up with new voicings? The answer is that I was recycling voicings, but not only in different keys, I was also changing their function. This strange voicing sounds bright on a Cmaj7 in All The Things You Are, but dark on Am(maj7) in Blue In Green.

This shouldn’t surprise me because I wrote and thought a lot about how this is the “green” way to use new material. Yet it wasn’t a point I had consciously set out to illustrate in the studies, however I recognize my following my own advice in hindsight.

So why Ted meets Mick? Well, if you’ve ever opened a Ted Greene book, you’ve been overwhelmed and quickly exhausted by the amount of material within. Nevertheless, something should be said for the systematic layout of the material using chord diagrams, not tabs or sheet music.

If you’ve opened up Mick Goodrick’s Voice-Leading Almanacs, then you also know that the same musical information can be applied and combined in ways with other information which no longer make it sound the same.

Seriously, have you ever tried cataloguing your knowledge? I just did, and I got an answer: 38 (plus probably another 30-40 voicings which I ignore because they’re very basic or I’ve been using them for a long time and know who they came from). It’s kind of liberating.

The Voice-Leading Almanac volume II is called “Don’t Name That Chord.” It deals with clusters and fourths which defy easy tonal categorization. But really, this is a good idea for any and all chord voicings we have. An Em7 is a Cmaj9 is a Am11 is a Dbm7(b9b5). So when I made my charts of all the interesting chords I’ve been experimenting with, I purposefully didn’t give them any names or write down what key I originally used them in or anything like that. All I’ve got is a bunch of ambiguous blobs on an undefined area of fretboard.

Now, my job is to take each of these chords and play with them. Rather than only deciding that a chord is a Cmaj7 and then going through all the songs where Maj7 chords are and using it there, I’m going to try and look at each voicing with an open mind. What could this voicing be? Could it also be a m7b5 voicing? Well, let me see where I can use it in that context. Let me see how I can take 38 and turn it into 380 without ever creating a genuinely new shape or intervallic structure.

However, if I were going to try and find new shapes, I think my next step, following in those of Mick Goodrick, would be to plane any and all of these shapes modally through major and melodic minor.

An Intellectual Framework for Improvising

A student of mine who has been playing guitar for many years before coming to me for lessons has brought to my attention an issue which I have always understood but never consciously acknowledged or had a need to articulate. This is literally how we think about what we’re doing on the guitar. Do we think of our fingers, of the notes, of sounds?

The lowest level of improvisation and musicianship, in my opinion, is finger-focused. In other words, the musician’s relationship with the instrument is very visual, and whether conscious or not, his understanding of what he is doing is very much about shapes. This musician can only play in exact fingerings and executing exact patterns which he has already practiced extensively. This is something we all need to do, so again I stress the word “only”. You can tell who these people are by asking them to play a passage and then repeat the same passage not even in a different area of the guitar, but even with a different fingering. They simply can’t do it. This is because their understanding of their actions is limited to the physical activity they execute with their hands. For them technique is not a means to an ends, but the experience itself of music making.

The next level of improvisation and musicianship, in my opinion, is someone who is conscious of the notes beneath their fingers and their corresponding sounds, but who focuses on technical virtuosity, requiring them to often be stuck in repetitive patterns. Their interaction with music is deeper than the first group of people, but their ability to interact meaningfully with other musicians is limited by their lack of control and ability to both listen and react to others.

The next level of improvisation and musicianship, in my opinion, is someone who can find a genuine balance between static virtuosity and listening/reacting to others in a controlled fashion. The problem with these musicians is that they do not practice enough. This lack of preparation forces them to place an unbalanced amount of concentration on their own actions rather than an equal amount of concentration on their sound as well as the sound of the other people they make music with. Not that they aren’t listening, but they could be listening better if they weren’t struggling to remember what to do as it was happening.

The highest level of improvisation and musicianship, in my opinion, is someone who has the technical freedom to create truly spontaneous music. While I’ve already spent time explaining that we can never create a new scale or chord shape on the fly but only rearrange preexisting patterns, these musicians derive their spontaneity from their ability to respond with a high degree of versatility, sensitivity, and freedom to the actions of the other musicians they play with. Because they are extremely well prepared to play, their reaction time is minimal and they have more awareness as to what other people are playing.

It should be noted that somewhere along the line we all probably oscillate between any and all of these descriptions, perhaps even within the same night or even within the same song.

I would also like to note that I’m fully aware of how subjective, personal and arbitrary this is and how everybody has the right to prescribe their own set of criteria and standards when evaluating a person’s competency.

I would also like to note that my degrees are ranked in order of expressiveness as I see it, with the person not who can play the fastest or anything like that, but the person who is most capable of freely expressing themselves on their instrument at the top. It is not the amount of material we are able to digest or the speed at which we can regurgitate it, but the meaning and emotionality of how it is implemented as well as our consciousness of what everybody else is doing.

I would also like to note that this scale refers to musicianship and improvisation. It would be silly to take what I’m saying out of that context. A singer-songwriter may only play five or six chords, may have no real understanding of harmony or the guitar, but this is not an essential skill for their mode of expression. Simply put, their skill as a musician is a secondary concern. They may not be very good musicians, and they may note have a clue how to improvise, but this is not the means they have chosen to convey their emotions and is an irrelevant criteria for judging their artistic merit.

Finally, I would like to note that among the two “highest” levels their is an ability to think of all the available notes in a scale when creating melodies, and to have the technical freedom to play any notes in any order they can think of and, tempo permitting (the faster the tempo the more linear any new idea will be), have the technical freedom to create spontaneously and play the new melody.

For instance, why practice playing a scale in series of intervals or triads or four note chords or any other pattern (some of which I have spent much time discussing)? Is it to play those patterns at wickedly fast speeds and wow people with your technical virtuosity? Or is it so that no matter where you are on the fretboard, and no matter what finger you are playing whichever note with, if the next note you want is a 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, or anything else away, your fingers are prepared to play that note with a seemingly instant reflex? Not that there isn’t a time and place for mechanical and “prerecorded” sequences at high velocities. They are useful for creating transitional and exciting material. But is it more (or at the very least equally) about systematically playing through all the possibilities of which music can be made up?

Think of chemical and physical description of the world. The periodic table has 117 elements, but all these elements can be described as combination of protons, neutrons and electrons. And even these protons and neutrons can be broken up into smaller components. So all the known matter and physical events which take place in the universe can be reduced to the interactive relationships between a handful of forces on a handful of particles.

Music can be thought of in a similar light, so to speak. By taking our instruments and practicing musical material on them, not by practicing licks, but by practicing the very building blocks of all music, from serial music to Gregorian chant (intervals), we can react in the most free way possible.

DISCLAIMER: Principles of this article might seem to contradict in spirit the previous article. If spontaneity is an illusion, why then spend so much time talking about levels of spontaneity and the various degrees to which it can be achieved? Well, let’s think about it. If you play every interval possible on a guitar from every note to every other note, than no melody from that point on could ever be considered truly spontaneous because it is made up of tiny elements all of which you have already experienced. Furthermore if you take steps to consciously try not to spew out long and repetitive strings or sequences of these limited number of elements (much like DNA), than you are making fresher music. Certain small patterns of strings constantly reappear (arpeggios for instance) and this cannot be helped, but there are random mutations and variations that can also take place.

Definition of Improvising Revisited

I’ve already discussed what it means to improvise once before. The notion of navigation through an established network of possibilities, creating endless variations on a theme, be it a sequence of notes or of chord voicings, implies that nothing truly new can ever be created on the spot. When we practice we acquire and mold new musical pieces of lego, when we play we continually reconfigure them.

Ironically, my first discussion (The Upward Spiral) was centered around the notion of closed position and working extensively on the interesting possibilities that can arise from an extended study of one position. I was thinking about how I could spend years working on that idea. Well I was definitely right on that one because I’ve abandoned the concept in my practice for the time being. That’s ok though, maybe I’ll pick it up again in the future. At the time I was playing rhythmically complex and harmonically simple modal music, so these were the kinds of ideas floating around. Now I’m back in school and reexamining some more standard jazz and tonal contexts and all those ideas just don’t seem very relevant right now. Still, they’ve definitely had their influence on the way I think of and hear single line solo and melodic construction.

So for the last month and a half, I’ve been working on building small studies using chords that were new to me over standard tunes, all of which are posted here, most of which have accompanying videos. Now I’m faced with a new problem, how to integrate dozens of new voicings into contexts outside of the ones I originally used them. Every song has voicings that arose from the colors and mood of that song’s harmonic progression and melody. How can I generalize this information so I can better use it in any situation and make it a working part of my vocabulary?

The answer is old and obvious. Isolate the information and then transpose it all into all 12 keys, perhaps choosing a voicing every day or week and forcing myself to use it in a variety of different tunes and keys. But I’m feeling a little philosophical, and I’d like to dive into what exactly I think happens to our minds when we go through that process.

I sometimes hear people say how they have trouble feeling spontaneous when playing jazz. Everything seems to be prerecorded and regurgitated not in the organic fashion described above, but in a way that seems contrived and unemotional. They wonder how they can take their playing to the next level. I always ask the same question: How do you feel when you take a rock solo in a music idiom you’re more used to, say rock or blues? They usually say that this is the kind of freedom and feeling that they wish they could attain within the context of jazz music. So already half the battle is won because we’re aware of the feeling we wish we could capture with our new vocabulary.

But how did we all get to this place as young guitarists within the simpler context of rock, usually modal or blues in nature? Well, my belief is that we simply waited. We all had to spend months and months, if not years, learning the positions of the modes and developing our technique. Did our solos feel organic back then? Did we feel at ease and in control over the sounds we made? Probably not. But now, five, ten, twenty years later, depending on how old we are, our fingers somehow “know” how to navigate seamlessly through the notes of a major or minor scale, and any musical idea we can think of, our two hands cooperate effectively to execute. The truth is, we simply forget doing the work, and that distance allows us to approach the structure of the scale with a freshness and freedom that seems to help us express what is deep inside.

So how do we get to a place where we feel at home and emotional in a musical scenario that is intellectual and perhaps complex? We wait patiently. Practicing is not the answer. It is a step in the process. But not practicing is also a step. We have to take the time to thoroughly learn whatever material we are struggling with, but also take time to let things sink in, to forget them, and then upon remembering them later on, to use them in a way which is more satisfying.

In other words: improvising is an illusion. Nothing we do is truly improvised. Only the passage of time and the chemistry of our consciousness allows us the feeling of spontaneity. That’s ok. It’s the feeling we’re after, not some abstract notion of absolute and distilled invention. Especially as the tempo we play at goes up, our ability to forge new patterns within preexisting patterns continually diminishes, but nonetheless we are left with the feeling that we are doing something new and exciting.

When I see Am7 written on a page, there are probably 10 chords that I do 95% of the time. But rearranging and combining those 10 things, as well as leading into and out of them in different ways, results in an infinite number of possibilities. I move to these chords and shapes by carefully forged instincts created through diligent practice. Once again, the excitement and meaning I experience when playing comes from not remembering the process of creating those very reflexes.

To sum up, jazz, much like composition, is the very experience of maturing itself.

A Child Is Born