Can We Get Better Later In Life?
It's not easy, but it is possible...
So much of the focus of my practice is looking for things I’ve never heard before, and although that has been based around transcription and immersion in the basic sound of the music I want to play, it has almost always been more heavily weighted to what I do with the transcription after it’s done.
I essentially want to learn the vocabulary, but have something original to say with it as soon as possible so as to depart from what I’ve heard someone else do and explore what I can express.
This is a clip from a practice session a few days ago where I was playing over a slow moving vamp in C minor, adding some saturation to my sound, rolling in more tone than normal, and trying to be as free with my phrasing as possible.
As fun as it is to play blistering 8th notes through tough changes, I feel a change in my playing right now that allows me to say way more with way less. The ability to execute with laser-like precision has always been a fantastic discipline and a route to have control over the instrument. I find the time I’ve spent working on that has improved my internal clock to a point where I can really be completely loose with my phrasing while simultaneously being in control of every note and completely aware of where I am at all times.
And by “where I am”, I mean a few different things:
Where I am in the form
Where I am on the neck of the instrument
Where my phrasing is
Where the story of the improvisation is heading
Having so much of this ability saturated into my muscle memory through years of practice really frees up the performance aspect of my playing, and brings way more confidence when I step out on stage.
If you’re looking for something to work on this weekend, this week or even over the course of the rest of the year, you could apply this concept to almost any style of music.
Just make sure that no matter what it is you’re working on, it’s more than likely a small fragment of a much bigger picture or goal.
When I was working on the most complex John Coltrane or Herbie Hancock solo, I wasn’t always thinking ahead to how it might be helping me with confidence, with storytelling, or with being free in the music. Had I known that 30 years ago, I probably would have done more of it, but also been quicker to let it go and be patient with it coming out in my playing naturally.
I always worked on anything I transcribed for many weeks after the fact, but early on I think I expected results a lot sooner than they came. Maybe ten years ago I figured out the whole “letting go” thing, and even now I still catch myself asking why a certain thing hasn’t materialized in a performance yet.
It’s most likely just not ready to be heard, or I’m just not ready to let go of the repetition part of the process just yet. Last week I let go pretty good, and what you hear in the clip above is something I would consider moving in the right direction for what I’m hearing in my music right now.
More soon,
Janek
P.S. The new album is coming out August 8th (Next Friday!)
