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yeah there were some basic ideas that I didn't get about jazz. It is a bit painful to think about because I think I wasted years and years being frustrated. The Lego like nature of plugging in ii V or other sort of licks into tunes seemed uncreative to me and I thought there must be some other better way but really it's pretty elementary to be able to do that. CVH has been super helpful, that's a big part of his stuff is different ways to plug in different licks on different chord progressions. But I could have gotten that from a lot of people, it was mostly my own pre-conceived ideas that screwed me up.
Oh well, I'm glad I learned sometime....
It really surprises me but I know people, good musicians too, who think, at least the way I understand it, that if they learn the phrases to use in the improvising context, it's not improvised any more. I'm like, well you have to have some sort of building blocks, whether they're learned phrases or triadic shapes or scales or...and then practice them over and over. How else is it going to happen? By divine intervention? No, it won't. However once you have those building blocks truly mastered, you can get creative with them on the spot and not repeat them by rote.
I did hear people like Jimmy Bruno say, I just choose colors I want to use from the 12 notes available. Ok fine, he's at that level but there's no way to get to that level by starting there. You have to walk the path. Then Tim Lerch, he said, oh I just play what I hear. Same thing, that's not what he did his entire life. You have to get there step by step. It's like belts in martial arts, you have to earn each color to eventually get to the black belt and continue further.
Yeah I think that stuff is unhelpful and damaging. You hear stuff because you practiced it probably a million times.
It's like I'm going to France and I want to learn French and someone is like well I just make words out of the alphabet and I say what I feel.
I remember watching the wonder in my son's face as he learned how to open a basic door knob. What previously was closed to him suddenly was able to be opened at whim. He spent a half hour or so just closing the door and then proving to himself that he could open it again at any time. I remember being struck by this and how the world is full of similar wonders that I've learned and summarily forgotten the "wonder" of them. Now, I doubt any of us think twice about the mechanism when we twist the knob to let ourselves in (or out!).
So it is I think with some of these musicians. Maybe they don't remember a time when they heard something but didn't know how to play it or didn't hear "colors." They've been playing so long and playing a certain way so long (with the ability to either know or instinctively know how to play what they hear), that they might as well just be opening door knobs. They are speaking a language over which they have absolute fluency.
That's a really elegant analogy, Bill. And my kid made me remember when reading felt like an astonishingly amazing superpower.
Adding this what I wrote in a different, Anki, thread for my own notes keeping...
Well, this is my update to this topic. Anki is cool, great tool. I still use it.
However I'm coming to think that acquiring and retaining the musical language that's to be used in the improvising context comes only through the brute force repetitions. I think you need to take a small piece of information and cram it in there. For an hour or longer. A single ii V I at the most. Nothing longer than that. Even that you should break down into smaller chunks and take it through the paces in various contexts.
Because what needs to happen is it needs to be accessible instantly. You don't have any time to think about it. It just needs to happen. So not only that you need to learn it, that might happen in a few minutes, not only that it needs to be fluid, that might happen in 10-20-30 minutes, it needs to be sent to the unconscious part of the brain. Sometimes you hear music educators talk about that as something negative, like they might say you always need to be aware of what you're playing and practicing. Well now I believe you need to go further past that and send it to the parts of the brain where the playing just happens without you thinking about it or being aware, if that makes sense.
Top players don't really go into the specifics regarding this. We know they work/worked extremely hard; several hours a day, every day, for several years. But there's been only a few instances where I heard someone say that they would take extremely small piece of musical information and practice it for an hour or longer.
A few years ago that was kinda unthinkable for me. Recently I did it with a few things I practiced. I felt it worked better than anything before. Something that would start as challenging, would then feel completely effortless towards the end of the hour. And it seems to stick much better. I might even have to repeat it several times. But in the end it's actually a lot faster way to retain stuff, than what I've been doing before.
Remi talks about that here