The Mountain Climber

Often when people start playing guitar they have serious misconceptions about what they’re going to be doing. They think it’s going to be easier or more fun than some other instrument like piano or violin that they hated playing as a kid. This is especially true of young people around the age of 12. Nowadays, many of them may have become inspired by Guitar Hero or Rock Band to go for the real thing. They don’t understand that as hard as it may be to play on expert mode, it’s a whole lot harder to play the real thing on beginner.

My first goal is to make them excited about music. They will never succeed if they are not self motivated. There can be no external awards, no marks or distinctions, only their own sense of satisfaction at attacking a problem. I want them to see that music is a beautiful and deep thing, that it is more than an iTunes playlist on shuffle, more than the next hit single which sounds like the last one and is deliberately ‘manufactured’ to generate profits. I want them to want to learn.

I give them no theory. They don’t read music. There’s no set game plan. We don’t have to finish what we start. Every consideration is secondary to keeping these young people interested. Months will go by where everybody involved, including myself and the parents, wonder if progress is really being made.

 Eventually, the day comes where I realize the child is much more mature than they were before. They are beginning to ask questions, beginning to wonder how and why things work the way they do, beginning to practice more without anybody bothering them because they want to know.

Often, however, their excitement about the questions is followed by a very underwhelming reaction to the answer. This is because the answer is so much huger than they can be made to see in an hour or even a year. If a child who can strum a few chords, barely remembers their name, can find notes by ear but can’t be bothered to know what they’re called, asks you how the G major chord got its name, or how to figure out a tune by ear, the explanation is quite massive. They must be made to understand the major scale, the concept of a triad, the names of the notes, intervals (which is not intuitively represented spatially on the guitar), as well as keys and tonality, to really understand the answer to these questions. And of course, they must understand it in the least abstract sense. They must connect all these concepts to sounds, to the physical act of playing their instruments, or else the whole exercise is completely meaningless.

So when the big questions start rolling in, I like to tell them a story about mountain climbing. They ask me what appears to be a very simple question, and they see me sigh and refuse to answer them. The next week they are learning the major scale, being forced to sing out pitches, and doing all these things that don’t seem to matter. Why am I making them do it?

I tell them that the answer to their question is on the other side of a giant mountain. There is no possible way for them to see the place to which they are heading, and the path there is long, winding, and difficult, and it is very easy to get lost or detoured. It is going to take a long time to climb the mountain to reach a point where they can see their destination. Furthermore, they must be guided by someone who knows the way. I am their guide and they must trust that I know the mountain path because I have travelled it before with someone who taught me how to navigate the treacherous route. If they truly want to reach their destination, they need to have faith in their mountain guide, their musical sherpa, to know how to get to the mountain’s peak. That’s good teaching.

Evening Blue

Why Do?

I mean the solfège syllable. Sing the C below middle C. Sing it for a minute, for five minutes, for ten minutes. Sing it as an act of meditation. Let me know when you hear the note G above middle C resonating inside your head as clear as day. Make sure it’s quiet when you do this. It might take you a while the first time to hear that your voice has layers and you can peel them back and guide your concentration towards aspects of your voice that you may have never noticed before. Just like a piano or guitar string, our voices produce overtones and some of them are more resonant than others. I find myself excited by the realization that after 23 years I’m only starting to become conscious of sounds being produced unconsciously by my own throat. It also makes me think about the beginnings of polyphony and Gregorian chant and how those monks must have heard sound with such clarity, and the order in which harmonic intervals were introduced.

Fun Clusters With Open Strings

The 5th bar is the most interesting shape to try and find a picking pattern for because there are two separate sets of strings where the note on the higher string is the lower sounding one.

On Green Dolphin Street

The Song Remains The Same/The Return Of The Almighty Triad/Wish You Were Here

Once we’re on the topic of teaching, I’d like to point out something that should seem obvious yet also seems to not be reflected in much of jazz education. I’d also like to note right away that this ties into the free jazz conversation dating back to my first blog entry and much thanks to my free jazz guru, Mitch Haupers. The skill of improvisation and listening is a skill which is distinct and separate from the acquisition of a musical vocabulary. But when we improvise, you ask quite rightly, don’t we use a vocabulary? How can you possibly mean that? Well, improvising means to me having a message and a distinct logic in the way ideas are put together in a sequence. In a way this article is not so different from improvisation. I know where I want to be at the end and I know where I’m starting but I have not mapped out how I will proceed in the middle. Yet inside I can feel intuitively that all the points are there and that I can have this discussion logically. Now, I could write this article in French or Italian or Chinese or Hindu or any other language (if I actually knew any of them well enough) but the content would remain the same and my methodology in the way I go about creating my story, my point, my thought process, would also remain the same.

With that said, I find it strange that most beginning jazz students are introduced to the art of improvisation at the same time they are introduced to the vocabulary of jazz, which happens to be more complicated than some other available vocabularies. As I mentioned in my last article, I discuss with student’s in the context of simple songs, triadic in nature with slow moving harmonic progressions, or even pedals, how to create a complex interaction between the different components of music (i.e. using multiple skills at the same time). This might mean playing a continuous melody which involves two or three closed positions and transitioning between them using the skill of playing on one string. This might involve working triadic arpeggios or chordal gestures into our melodic playing or embellishing triads using the knowledge we have acquired through the playing on one string or in closed position. This whole idea of synthesizing concepts which were originally introduced as separate and unrelated lies at the heart of improvisation, in my opinion. If a young student can master complex ideas with a simple vocabulary, to extend these ideas to a more complicated vocabulary will come much more naturally to them. Why are they trying to solo using fourths or chord substitutions or drop 2 voicings if they can’t even solo using triads?

The study that follows serves two purposes for two different skill levels. The first group is the maturing student who I was just describing. They will be pushed to analyze the piece and name all the notes on the neck of the guitar and in doing so they will build stronger fundamentals and have an easier time playing closed positions triads. Although they probably will never play open triads anytime soon, it will be a good exercise to help them with their closed triads. For this reason, tabs have been included.

Oh, I forgot. This exercise is about open triads. A sound which I find very interesting and particularly beautiful on the lower five strings of the guitar. I have already spent much time exploring the possibilities of triads in this blog as either vehicles for melodic inventions or chord substitutions. Perhaps in working on open triads I might unlock new possibilities in both these areas. And just like my students, I think it would be good to start with something simple just to get started. Naturally, since this exercise is much less mind-blowing for an advanced jazz musician than a young and inexperienced rock musician, it should be transposed into all twelve keys.

The Big Jug and the Little Jug

I like to bombard students with more information than they could ever possibly absorb in the amount of time I say it in. Furthermore, I sum up numerous concepts in an hour and tell them to get them done even though these ideas probably took me years to learn in any kind of meaningful and practical way. I give them a completely impossible task knowing that they are going to fail. Why would I do such a thing? Am I sadistic? Do I like destroying the confidence of children?

Contrary to what some might say, the answer would be no to all those questions. There are a couple of reasons for teaching this way.

The first and most important principle is that a teacher’s job should be to help a student find their voice and understand that this is going to differ from their own voice. With that said, one way to help a student make the decisions which will shape their personality and playing style is to over-inform them. What they are forced to do is to edit the information you provide them and choose to focus on what is important to them and what resonates with them. If I tell a student to work on four things knowing they will only work on one or two of them very well, what I learn the next week is which thing is of the most interest to them and this helps me focus on what they need. They’ve made a selection without being conscious of the fact that they were offered a choice. The student thinks that they have failed to complete all their tasks but that was never the point. The question was not whether they would succeed but how they would choose to fail.

This is the first level of over-information. Once we have discovered and begun to pursue a specific thread in the student's development and found something specific to work on for a given period of time (perhaps two to three weeks of intense focus, always good to change the subject within a month), the next level of over-information begins.

Here’s an example. I might telling the student to work on playing scales in five keys horizontally on a single string, to practice all seven modes in closed position, to work on combining triads with the pentatonic scale to develop cool rhythmic gestures, and to be able to improvise competently on a simple progression (think Wish You Here Here) using all these techniques and combining and interchanging them fluidly. In a week. Even though I know that what I’m asking for is simply not something that happens in a week. But what are they going to do that week and when they come back what will they be playing? What will have been worked more on? What will have been overlooked or considered to be a dead-end? Where did they see the possibilities? And from there we can then dive into the topic of their (unconscious) choice in greater detail and begin the process of over-stimulation again. Suppose they seem to be interested in single string scales. Not only should you do five keys, but practice playing thirds and sixths on all available combinations of strings trying to understand them as either harmonic progressions or as doing the one string exercise but on two strings at the same time. Once you can feel their creativity turning stale and their interest beginning to wane over the following weeks you can slowly pull their focus back to a more global perspective of all the different areas, and then bombard them with the same assignment again and see what they come up with the next time. Maybe they will be interested in triads. Come up with some unbelievably ridiculous task involving triads to be completed in a week and see what they do. This allows them to mould their own voice. You simply point them in a direction and see if they walk there. If they decide to walk somewhere else that is also fine. Whether they choose to follow or not, they are reacting to your guidance and you have positively affected them.

Name a subject and there will be a million things to try, a million different exercises to work, too much for any human being to do. There is always a next level within each little tiny nook of technique and then there is the combination of all techniques which is itself a never ending technique. So we have to choose. Allow the student to make the choices for themselves. Present them with options.

Mick Goodrick talks about the Chinese food menu approach to practicing. Write down all the different things you can work on and then every day pick out an item or two (like ordering from a menu). The menu of practicing and the menu of music period is endless and infinite. You could eat the same meal every day or try something new every day or build up a network of dishes you like and maybe try a different one when you’re feeling adventurous. That’s gone far enough and you get the point. Present students with a menu of their own and allow them to pick their own dishes. Don’t be like an obnoxious parent and tell them what to order.

Finally, we get to the jugs. We have a big jug in the back of our heads and a small jug in front. You, as a teacher, are holding the jug in the back of your brain, which, having more experience, is much fuller than the jug in the back of your student’s brain. Every lesson you pour your entire jug over your student and they catch whatever they can in their small jug. The small jug passes this on to the big jug, and probably spills some stuff along the way. The next lesson you return and poor the whole jug over the student and again they catch what they can in the smaller jug. And again they transfer to the larger jug, which is very slowly getting fuller and again they lose some water along the way. This is the transfer of knowledge.

Even when we teach ourselves, we have to understand this about our capacity to understand. We run to the well of knowledge and become greedy for information. We sometimes ignore the fact that our little jugs are full and continue to poor water into it, watching it overflow but desperately refusing to admit it. We need to stop and allow the little jug to carry itself back to the big jug. We are only wasting our energy. We all know what it feels like to reach the point in our practice when we have gone too long and start to get worse instead of better. We must respect the process of learning, of deep learning, and understand that our little jugs are only so big, not to become too concerned with filling our big jugs. Because there is simply no rushing this process.

So failure is a beautiful and necessary part of learning. As we acquire skills, we must understand that what we seek to learn is most probably massively huge and could never fit in our small jugs. So we must be patient in the way that we practice and adjust our expectations about our results. We must recognize that some things cannot be learned in a single session, that they are a process which takes time and therefore are pointless to rush. And we must embrace failure as an important part of transmitting information because the best way to help a student flourish involves designing tasks for them which they absolutely cannot complete. We must accept and enjoy their failures with mutually felt humour and lightheartedness. The point is exactly not to get things right the first time. The point is to fill up one jug at a time and not be afraid to spill a bit.