These days, the saying “Close enough for jazz” has less meaning for me than it did when I first heard it.
One thing that gets on my nerves is when non-jazz musicians assume that playing jazz does not require accuracy – it most certainly does. Randomly throwing together a collection of notes and ignoring the structure of the chart, in most cases, does not automatically make it jazz.
Keep Up!
Yes, many improvised solos sound unrehearsed, because that’s exactly what they are – improvised. Making up a melody on the spot is tough! Not only do you need to play notes that belong in the different chords as they go by—sometimes quite fast—but stay in tempo, listen to the other players, and keep count so you know when to gracefully exit when you’re done soloing.
A former mentor once told me that some players spend their whole lives trying to master improvisation. That’s how challenging it is!
“Some days you get up and put the horn to your chops and it sounds pretty good and you win. Some days you try and nothing works and the horn wins. This goes on and on and then you die and the horn wins.” ~ Dizzy Gillespie
What Does It Take?
Having only intermittent opportunities to improvise, and having experienced only one year of full immersion in the local jazz combo scene, I see the art of improvising as being truly mastered by only a handful of amazing musicians at any one time. I’m talking names like Clark Terry, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Herbie Hancock, Wynton Marsalis, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, and plenty of others. They have:
- acquired an insanely high level of expertise on their chosen instrument, so much so that it becomes a natural extension of their body,
- learned and practiced a wide variety of tunes within the lexicon of jazz music, remembering all those chord changes, tempos, and rhythms, and
- achieved a level of confidence that allows them to walk onto any stage in front of any audience, flex those musical muscles, and blow the listeners away (in a good way).
This last one—the outward-facing calmness—sometimes appears to happen without a second thought, but I’m guessing that as they’re letting the music move them and allowing the creativity to naturally bubble up, another part of their brain is focusing on what’s coming up.
So knowing the roadmap, keeping up with the chord changes, playing consistently within the style, playing the same articulations, starting and stopping together – these are details that ALL musicians must abide by, no matter what type of music is being played. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the Royal Albert Hall or Blues Alley, if your group’s players aren’t of one mind and playing together, it’s just a hot mess.
If you’re an amateur jazz player and you improvise:
How often do you rely on your bag of tricks when soloing?
What are thinking or feeling during the “heat of battle”?
Has it been easy? Hard? Did you have a learning curve?
Who do you emulate the most?