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So maybe BS filler may be an offensive term but licks could fall in that category too. Something that doesn't require as much thought was continously creating original melodies.

I've hung out with a lot of players now from jam sessions and clearly the bulk of the output isn't sophisticated and original. I'm not sure the typical audience can even grasp it anyway.

When my sax player does the blues and repeats a 3 note sequence for 20 seconds, the audience goes wild but that wasn't sophisticated. It's a lick.

Obviously, it would be nice to be as creative as KJ but I'm just realizing that my expectations of what I can achieve have to be tempered with reality. This stuff isn't going to come overnight.

My first jazz teacher, who himself was a student at the time was trying to explain what he played. And apparently he didn't really know what to play so he became proficient at arpeggios and inversions thereof. He just played them fast and he admitted, it was BS filler. He didn't have the creative bent to come up with something original.

I thought that was an interesting memory...

You guys have been at this longer and maybe you have some insight as to how you progressed with idea development and solo shaping and doing it with some meat. What's your story? Give us a timeline.

Yes it is. But Wynton's swing is different from say Jarrett's, but they both swing.

examples: http://www.speech.kth.se/music/performance/Texts/inegales.htm

text: http://www.acoustics.org/press/137th/friberg.html

Faster the tempo, lower is the swing ratio:

Abstract: "At slow tempi, the swing ratio was as high as 3.5:1, whereas at fast tempi it reached 1:1. The often-mentioned "triple-feel," that is, a ratio of 2:1, was present only at a certain tempo. The absolute duration of the short note in the long-short pattern was constant at about 100 ms for medium to fast tempi, suggesting a practical limit on tone duration that may be due to perceptual factors. Another aspect of swing is the soloist's timing in relation to the accompaniment. For example, a soloist can be characterized as playing "behind the beat." In the second part, the swing ratio of the soloist and its relation to the cymbal accompaniment was measured from the same recordings. In slow tempi, the soloists were mostly playing their downbeats after the cymbal but were synchronized with the cymbal at the off-beats. This implied that the swing ratio of the soloist was considerably smaller than the cymbal accompaniment in slow tempi. It may give an impression of "playing behind" but at the same time keep the synchrony with the accompaniment at the off-beat positions."

Gotta love these guys . . .

More on the nature on swing:


"A spectrogram of a short passage of “My Funny Valentine” performed by Miles Davis Quintet, 1964, illustrating the timing relation between the ride cymbal and the soloist in jazz. The cymbal onsets appear as vertical lines in the high frequency part of the graph.
The saxophone onsets appear as breaks, or vertical shifts, in the horizontal lines in the lower part of the graph. In this
example, cymbal is being played with a swing ratio of about 4:1 and the saxophone with a swing ratio of approximately 3:2.
The downbeat saxophone tones are delayed relative to the cymbal by about 100 ms, but on the upbeats, the cymbal and the saxophone are synchronized.

". . . soloists deliberately play behind the beat. At each quarter-note beat, the soloist was delayed relative to the ride cymbal by up to about 100 ms at slow tempi"

"At the same time the soloist and drummer were synchronized at the upbeats, i.e., on the eighth-notes between the beats. The purpose here is probably not to highlight the soloist, which in this style is clearly audible, due to either large spectral
differences or the use of microphones. Rather, this timing combination creates both the impression of the laid-back soloist often strived for in jazz, and at the same time an impression of good synchronization"

jazzwee,scepticalforum guy

When I really get into really conversation with people, it almost feels as words just flow out of mean, and great ideas gets expressed without much effort. It feels like you are just letting the conversation happen. I guess what I get from my playing is the lack of that feeling, and those moments to me are still rare. I find that even if I play simple, that lingering feeling of not feeling convinced of your own playing is still there. I agree that playing simple and developing ideas is part of the answer, i guess it's matter of how I play simple.

Scott Coletta,

Great playing and thanks so much for the encouragement! You are doing the "whole conversation with myself" very gracefully. One thing though, like Beeboss said I do have similar concerns about the comping.. for me it seems like you are rushing them ever-so-slightly and that's contributing to the problem. I do this exercise where I record myself playing with the metronome on the keyboard and record it, do the same without the metronome at the same tempo using different patch, and play both at the same time. It made me realize just how much I rush certain rhythms, especially in comping. At first I felt really uncomfortable waiting/leaving so much space to play those rhythm like they are supposed to, but I feel like I am slowly figuring out when it feels right and when it doesn't

Chrisbell,

While scientific understanding of swing feel is interesting, I am guessing for most of us it's probably more helpful to have an more intuitive way of approaching them. It's not about knowing it in your head but knowing/feeling it in your ears and in your bodies.

As for myself, I do things like listen to this short Oscar Peterson clip and play it over and over again until I can sound just like his imitation of Nat King Cole. Hopefully with enough of that I can know/do what's right by instinct.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec-FrnaU0rs&t=1m10s

To focus at close to 100% is very tiring.
Another requirement for 100% concentration on the melodic is that you know the melody and sequence so well that it is virtually impossible to get lost, and another is that you have worked all the voicings harmonic devices scales arpeggios key centres enough that your fingers just know where to go so well that they can do so in virtual automatic pilot mode, leaving your mind free for higher level decisions about how to play the melody line. When that focus is achieved it is impossible to not play a great melody, but for most of it is almost impossible to sustain that degree of focus for a long time. The greats are in that zone all the time.

A good analogy

I'm finding that knowing is not enough, one has to really be in the music - or rather be the music.
I believe that the tiredness thing is a sign that one is trying and pushing too hard.
Practise consciously, then at the gig let the sub-concious do its thing.
Remember it's "playing" music, not working music.

Lick / Conversation.

What's a lick?
To take the analogy of speech, a lick is a short phrase, one that is easy to understand, but carries great power and meaning. Put in the right place, its effect can be tremendous. In the wrong place, well, it just sounds wrong.

Examples of licks:
"I Love You!"
"You look like $%$"
"I'll make you an offer you can't refuse"
"Make no mistake"
"Show me the money"

What do you think?
I am guilty of not practicing licks. I remember that being one of the "How to stay mediocre" article tips.

Now you're riffing . . .

Yes, definitely. Playing needs to be sort of effortless. I meant the kind of tiredness you get afterwards. If I focus hard for 3 or 4 hours (with breaks) then afterwards I am pretty finished.

I'm asking you guys about the journey to getting to the level of concentration you already have now. First you need to confirm to yourself that the point when your melodies are perfect for a whole tune or portion of a tune are actually good. Rely on your own conscience and ego for that.

But how long did it take you to get there? Or did you even get there?

Thanks jazzwee! Glad you enjoyed it.



Of course, don't you all record a separate track of grunting?

No, but seriously, I'm just trying to keep the time. Seems to help.



Thanks Scep. I need to just get more control over comping while walking bass. Hopefully I can soften it up.

Actually, while I can reach 10ths, it's quite a stretch. Especially white to black/black to white. So I would have some trouble walking 10ths much I think. I guess I could try it.

This is exactly why I'm trying to get to where I can lock into a metronome playing only on the "and"... the off-beat. I think that's where the beat really is.

Yes as we discussed long ago. This is the secret. But I've lost focus of this lately.

Thanks etcetera. That's a good idea for an exercise. I definitely agree about the slight rushing on the comping. It happens when I walk with the left. For some reason, I just have trouble with the relationship between the downbeat and the upbeat. But I really think it's mostly a problem with feeling the upbeat steadily.



I would say it's both. I've always felt that one of the problems with learning jazz, especially the rhythm, is that people have a hard time explaining what they do. They just say that they feel it and try to teach the feeling only. Of course you need the feeling. It can't be done without it. But I think it might help with learning the subtleties of the feeling if it could be explained in more tangible terms.

I guess I will know on the day I play a perfect melody ;-)

I think focus is a quality that needs work just like groove or speed.
I try to play simple things perfectly, Bach or Mozart maybe, or just a ballad with a fairly straight melody.
It is very very hard even to play one phrase so perfectly that it would be impossible for anyone to play it better. But you can learn a lot whilst trying.

I agree with Chris about the being present while you play. More and more I find that ideas just come out when I don't force it. Of course it's alot of concentration, but more like the kind of concentration it takes to focus on your breathing and block all other thoughts out of your mind. Like meditating.

But there's no way I could have done this during the first years of learning to play. I've found that it's been a process of getting so comfortable with things that you start to have greater and greater intuitive certainty about what sound you will get before you play it. And, just as much so, a stronger and stronger connection to the sound of the changes to keep from losing your place no matter what you play. So when you do surprise yourself, you stay connected to your direction and adapt to the change of course without losing your focus.

For me, I've noticed this coming on gradually over the last few years and it's really exciting. It's a level of control that I never really knew could exist when I was starting out. I just tried to "muscle" my way through everything and thought that pure thinking power would get me there. But it's more like speaking your native language... it just happens because you know it. You don't have to think about the words, just what you are saying. While I have noticed a change over the years in how my playing sounds, the biggest change is inside...the way I feel about what I play. I'm getting more in control all the time. But, I still have a long way to go. I guess it never ends, but the journey is great.

Very nice thoughts Scott. It's interesting to see what goes through each person's head as we do this.

What's different from "speech" though is that you're under time pressure (milliseconds). Most of us can have a nice conversation and story but we don't have to partition our words within the beats exactly and time it to the swing beat LOL.

So the "speech" or "speech idioms = licks" isn't a precise analogy. This thing we do is really different.

And of course most of us don't speak like orators. We have accents, flubs, irritating repetitiveness, boring stories, and so on.

LOL - at least you passed the "ego" test.

I like hearing about everyone's journey. It's encouraging to me and the relentless slogging through every skill that you do reminds me to make a list of every weakness and hit it at all times. Sometimes focus is lost. Like when I focused on melody and then I lost the groove.

Now this used to bother me a lot. But I guess all of us are in this continuous struggle, though at various phases.

Yeah, I agree. The time is different. But there is still an element of rhythm to speech, in the way things are phrased, accented, and even in how we have breaks in thoughts or stumble over words. We of course notice the difference in non-native English speakers and people from different regions. When the rhythms in speech are disrupted it's noticeable, and for those who aren't native speakers of a language, its not easy to articulate your thoughts. And obviously most people aren't artists when they speak. I just think that it's the closest thing that we all understand to what improvising music should be like... with artistry of course.