Listening and Memorizing

When I was a classical trombone player, I was blessed with excellent teachers. I feel equally lucky to have hooked up with a terrific jazz guitar teacher. It's been interesting to experience high level teachers in two different genres and instruments. As you might imagine, jazz guitar lessons are quite different from classical trombone lessons.

The biggest difference between classical trombone and jazz guitar lessons seems to be the emphasis on listening and memorization as a jazz player. There was certainly emphasis on listening as a classical musician, particularly in ensemble playing. In my jazz guitar lessons, however, there is a heavy emphasis in playing by ear versus reading as a classical trombonist.

Reading is still important as a jazz guitarist. We usually spend some time sight-reading lead sheets or duets, but for the most part, we aren't even looking at music. It's assumed that I will memorize my assignments, and I always have an "ear assignment": transcribing an improvised solo, learning to play it, and stealing licks to apply to my own improvisations.

I take a lesson every other week. A little while ago, I realized that by the time I start my second week of practicing, I'm no longer using music. It's all memorized. Through memorization, I'm internalizing the music more than I ever did as a classical player – which makes me wish I had spent more time memorizing when I was a trombone player! It's also fun to be able to practice anywhere, anytime, because the music is all in my head.

The heavy emphasis on listening has been an overall benefit. When playing gigs, I'm more attuned to what is going on around me, and I find it easier to interact with the other players.

Since memorizing the music for my lessons is so beneficial, the next logical step is to memorize the music in my own book, especially the Tea for Two and Godfrey and Guy repertoire. That's a lot of music, but with practice, I'm finding that it's becoming easier to memorize new songs. I would love to someday show up to a gig with one of my groups and not have to pull out a single sheet of music!

Piano Debut

A few months ago, I started taking piano lessons. At the time, I wanted to learn both classical and jazz piano. With my busy schedule, I found it difficult to find time to work on both styles. I chose to focus on classical piano for a few different reasons. First of all, even though I'm a jazz guitarist, I found myself drawn more the classical side of piano. Second, my first major goal is to be able to play hymns for church services and choral piano accompaniments if my accompanist is absent. Classical piano focuses more on reading, which is a skill I'll need for those hymns and choir accompaniments.

My eventual goal is to be a well rounded pianist who can play classical and jazz, is a good sight-reader, is qualified to teach privately, and is equally comfortable playing for church or cocktails. I will eventually turn my attention to jazz piano, but I plan on spending a year or so getting comfortable with classical piano first.

Considering I've only been playing five months, I'm happy with my progress. Among other things, I'm working on Bach Two-Part Inventions and Chopin waltzes. That's not to say that this music is ready for performance or that I can even play it up to tempo, but I'm tackling piano music that I didn't expect to be able to play this soon.

I had planned on playing piano in public after about a year of lessons, but that timetable has been moved up. I'm playing guitar in a musical with Act3 Productions called By Wheel and By Wing. The Keyboard 2 player won't be there Friday, and I'll be covering the keyboard part for a song in which the guitar doesn't play. This is a very simple keyboard part…mostly sustained chords. Still, I'm looking forward to making my debut on keyboard, even if the part isn't challenging. It's not time to break out the candelabra just yet, but this should be fun.

Relevant Music Education

Today I spoke with a young guitar student after her lesson. She's been doing very well in her lessons, and I felt it was time she found a group to play with. It's one thing to learn your lesson material, but it's a whole new ball game when you start learning to play with others. I asked if there was a group at school or church that she could play in. She said something about her school that was disappointing. There was one period in school that was for music. The band kids would go to band. The orchestra kids would go to orchestra. The "other" kids went to a music appreciation class. If her music appreciation class was anything like those I attended as a youngster, it probably didn't go a long way toward developing an appreciation of music. Ironically, every one of the "non-musical" students in that class played an instrument…usually piano, but there were some guitarists, drummers, and bass players. While the band and orchestra students went to play in their groups, the other musicians who didn't play school sanctioned instruments languished in a music appreciation class when they could have been playing in a band of their own.

How relevant is formal music education? (And I'm writing mainly about instrumental music here.) I'm too lazy to look up statistics, but I'm guessing music education in middle school and high school is not that different from it was when I was a student. While there are a few schools that offer an outlet for, say, young guitar players, I'm betting that the vast majority of them focus almost entirely on classical music and marching band.

There's nothing wrong with a formal music education. Although I'm mainly a jazz guitarist now, I came up as a classical trombonist. I'm very much a product of a classic, classical music education, and I have a degree in music education from the University of Illinois. I don't play trombone anymore, but as a result of my education, I'm a strong sight-reader (rare in a guitarist), I can sing most anything on sight, I can arrange my own music (and write it down), I can read a score, I can lead an efficient rehearsal, and I can conduct a band, choir, or orchestra.

All that being said, I feel there's something missing. I stumbled into jazz guitar on my own just a few years ago. I had taken a few stabs at learning guitar earlier in life, but it never took. Perhaps if there had been a guitar class at my school, I would have started getting into guitar in my teens instead of my late 30s.

Like other institutions, the world of music education changes slowly in the public schools. Schools should continue to promote classical music through band and orchestra programs. Classical music is wonderful and worth pursuing, but it's just one style of many. I hope that in the future, we'll see more programs that promote the performance of jazz, blues, rock, reggae, folk, bluegrass, country, Celtic, Indian, African, and the list goes on. While it's important to study the music of the past, I hope more schools will stay relevant by teaching the music of today. In other words, I wish there was a program that gave my young guitar player an opportunity to play at school.

Stretching

I love playing musicals, but after a run of shows is over, I often feel a letdown. The musicals that I've played demand a lot of focus. I typically spend a couple months drilling the difficult guitar parts over and over (and over and over), and then my schedule and energy are both taken up by dress rehearsals and shows. When a show is over, I often feel directionless, because I've been concentrating on the show music so much that I almost don't know what to do when it's done.

After my latest musical, Once on This Island, I felt the usual letdown. To give myself a break, I didn't touch a guitar for two days after the last show. I couldn't rest for long, though, because I was scheduled to provide the music for NWUUC the following Sunday, and Tea for Two has a couple gigs coming up.

When I got back into a normal practice routine, I didn't want to do the same old thing, so I'm shaking things up, stretching my guitar playing in a couple areas.

Lately, I've been spending as much time playing my nylon string guitar as my electric. That's because I'm practicing quite a bit of classical music, plus some guitar parts for a number of Celtic songs that I arranged for flute and guitar a couple years ago. I'm having a lot of fun with this. I had originally intended to focus on Irish folk music before a jazzer turned me to the dark side, so it's a blast to return to a style of music I've always loved.

As far as classical music, I'm practicing parts for flute/guitar duos. While I enjoy this type of playing, I'm also working on this music for practical reasons. I have a wedding gig in September with a flute player friend of mine, Julie, who's flute playing is so far beyond my level guitar playing that it's kind of intimidating, and my main goal is to not fall on my face! Also, my Tea for Two partner, Lynnette, and I are adding classical flute/guitar duos to our repertoire to make us more attractive for wedding jobs.

Classical guitar is a totally different animal than jazz guitar. There's a little bit of crossover with my personal style, which involves a lot of fingerstyle solo arrangements, but there are also big differences. Jazz guitar involves a lot of improvisation. You're free to embellish melodies, you make up the accompaniment as you go along, and you need to be familiar with a huge array of chords. With classical guitar, the chords are usually much simpler, but then there's the discipline of reading exactly what's on the page and being able to play two independent lines at the same time.

While I'm playing a good bit of classical music these days, I'm not switching camps. Jazz guitar remains my number one pursuit. I'll be stretching in this area, too. Lately, I've felt that my jazz playing has gone stale. I need some new ideas and challenges. I've made it pretty far on my own these past few years, but I felt it was time to find a teacher again to push me along. This week, I'll begin taking guitar lessons with Charles Williams, who is one of the best guitarists in Atlanta, is an excellent jazz player, and is particularly good at Gypsy jazz (a la Django Reinhardt). I'm really looking forward to getting together with him and pushing my jazz playing to the next level.

Whether it's Broadway, classical, Celtic, or jazz, guitar playing offers an endless array of challenges. I don't think I'll ever be bored with this instrument.

Classical and Jazz

I have to admit that when I was in college, studying classical trombone, I looked down my nose at the jazzers. Maybe college has changed these days, but back in the dark ages, when I was an undergrad at the University of Illinois (1984-1988), there were clear factions in the music school. We classical musicians tended to dismiss jazzers as an inferior species, and I'm sure the jazzers held some similar notion of us. I had a small taste of the jazz world, playing bass trombone in some of the jazz bands, but I was never a full fledged member. Although I held myself in higher regard than those mere jazz mortals, I was secretly jealous of their ability to improvise.

It took living in the real world to figure out that neither kind of music is "better." It's all a matter of taste and preference. As Ellington said, there are only two types of music: good and bad.

In my experience, the biggest difference between classical and jazz is improvisation. There can be a certain amount of improvisation in classical music, but nothing like what you'll find in jazz. In small instrumental settings, the improvisation is often more important than the original melody. The emphasis is on the process of making music. The classical composer sits down and writes out the music in detail. When you listen to a live jazz performance, you're witnessing the musicians make it up as they go along. Sometimes they bomb, and sometimes it's pure magic. To me, playing jazz is often like stepping off a cliff and trusting that a bridge will appear.

There is less emphasis on music reading for jazz players. This can be a detriment. I've heard some jazz players joke that they read just enough so that it doesn't get in the way. Frankly, this sounds like an excuse for not learning to read as well as you could. I've never heard a good sight-reader complain that they read too well. Classical musicians, on the other hand, read extremely well. Their job is to stick to the script, playing the music note for note, with all the correct rhythms, dynamics, articulations, and anything else that's written. If you're a jazzer, you can get away with not being a good reader if you only play in small group settings, where you're expected to play around with the melody and make up your own accompaniment, but if you're going to play in a big band, you're going to need to be able to read, and that goes for guitar players, too. Even though I haven't been playing guitar very long, I'm the first call sub for a couple big bands in Atlanta, simply because I can read down the parts.

Although I'm a jazz guitar player now, I still draw on my experience as a classical trombonist. Sight-reading is probably the best example. Guitar players tend not to be very good readers, but this is my greatest strength. There are plenty of guitar players in town who can play faster, know more licks, and have a bigger repertoire, but I'd wager there are very few who can sight-read like I can. I've only been playing guitar for six years. Eventually, my technique is going to catch up with my reading ability. When it does, watch out!

Ironically, even though I reached a much higher level of playing on the trombone than I have reached thus far on the guitar, I'm a better improviser on the guitar than I ever was as a trombone player. Maybe I was too uptight as a trombonist. I was afraid of sounding bad, and when you're learning to improvise, you're going to sound plenty bad for a while. When I first started learning how to improvise on the guitar, I already knew I was going to sound bad at first, so it didn't matter. My self-consciousness was gone, and I simply allowed myself to sound bad until I started sounding better!

Whatever differences there may be in the music, I've found both classical and jazz musicians to be the same in one respect. For the most part, the musicians I've met are friendly and generous of spirit. It doesn't matter if you're donning a tux or a beret, reading note for note or playing it loose. What matters is that you play to the best of your ability, be supportive of whoever is playing the melody, and sing out with all your heart when it's your turn to lead. Classical or jazz, if it sounds good, it is good.