"People of the Book"

Bones

This really got me thinking. When I first learned rhythm guitar it was in the classic jazz genre, not GJ. I started out in blues fingerstyle and this was back in the mid-late 80s. No internet at our house until many years later. I didn't really even have many books. I took lessons from Kenny Sultan in blues and a lot of what I heard was on the college radio shows since that's the only place to find blues. But as it turned out like the next show was classic jazz, Louis A., Count Basie, etc. Hey that sounded cool but I had not clue at all. I asked Kenny and he said to take lessons from a woman who he said played violin but also knew the jazz chords. So she taught me the basic 3 or 4 note chord voicings and some of the more common standards in that genre. Still I really didn't have any access to info other than the radio shows so I used to tape the classic jazz shows like 'Riverwalk Live at the Landing' and they would also have special guests (Milt Hinton, Marty Grosz, etc.). Then I would play the tape over and over and try to transcribe the chords by ear and play along with the band and as I did more of that it got easier. After a bit I found a couple classic jazz 'fakebooks' in the local music store but still I'd hear a lot of songs that I didn't have charts for and had to figure them out but like I said, above post, you start recognizing common changes.

Anyway, now that I think about it, long story short, I think despite not being formally trained, learning songs pre-internet, pre-having a lot of fakebooks gave me the opportunity to try to think about the harmonic structure of the songs without the help of charts. Sort of an informal education in a bit of a vacuum. Conversely, I think if you use books too much you get kind of dependent on them kind of like a drug. If you have the book why bother to memorize it. To get away from them you have to make a conscious decision to not use them so that you can get your mind to be used to not having the chart in front of you.

dennis

Russell Letson wrote: »

Dennis' essay makes some of these points, while, I think, pushing a bit hard on what casual players might expect of themselves.

I totally forgot I wrote that article! I was surprised by your statement because I usually specify what I mean, and after rereading it, I was right. I did say that what I had to write was for people who were thinking about pursuing music seriously/professionally; my target audience would be people in their teens/20s. I also specifically wrote that casual players should do whatever feels right for them.

In fact, I take a person's personal background and life situation into consideration when they come study with me. People who have full time jobs outside of music don't get the same kind of lessons as someone who practices 8 hours a day. It would be ridiculous to insist that everyone practice the same way! For casual players, I just try to do what I can to give little tidbits to make their casual playing a little bit more enjoyable. The young eager student, however, gets the hardcore treatment!!!

The main point I wanted to make with the article is that the ability to play music isn't "easy" but people who play Gypsy Jazz or almost any style of music went through a lot of trouble to be able to do the things that they can do. Think about your earliest memories as a guitarist; being able to play an F or B barre chord was extremely challenging for most of us. It certainly was for me, and I remember as a child feeling discouraged that I would never actually be able to play those barre chords because something was wrong with my fingers! Well obviously, a few months later, I managed to play F and B and then it became easy, and all other chords eventually became easy too. I just kept practicing and practicing until I was able to pull it off.

So what I'm saying is that the effort to learn by ear, was the same effort to play an F and B barre chord. OF course, it's gonna be challenging in the beginning, but if you do it, you eventually get better.

Yet, for some reason, people just never even bother to work on it. It would've been like me giving up on practicing the F and B chords and finding some sort of way to cheat with those chords... Actually I have seen guitar players do that too, which I just find unfortunate.

If you go back even earlier to your earliest years, even putting your fingers on the guitar fretboard is brutal! yet we practice putting our fingers on the frets until it becomes easy... Where do I draw the line?

Re: the fakebook; I'm currently in Taiwan and I've been going to jam sessions , and there's a new generation of young players graduating from Berklee, MI, and all those fancy schools, and they all have freakin ipads! I was the only one on stage without an ipad! Then a singer would call Autumn Leaves in a different key, and boom with the ipad they automatically transpose the song! This is absolutely ridiculous to me! One pianist called On Green Dolphin Street in a key that I never playerd it in; it's also a standard that I hadn't played in maybe 10 years. It took me one chorus to remember the chords and figure out the transposition, but I managed to do it while everyone just used the ipad. What's the point of a 20,000$ a year tuition if you're just gonna take all the shortcuts? And you can hear it in the playing too, the technique is there, but the interaction/musicality is robotic.

Buco

Note to self: "learn The Lady is a Tramp in case you find yourself next to Bireli".

If you decide to do so then there's no reason for any person to play majority of the time chart free, be it paper or a tablet. It won't take long either. I started doubting my own memory until last year at around this time I decided next DiJ I'm not going to look at iReal most of the time. I only practiced this, gaining the repertoire. Then funny thing happened, after about 3 months doing this daily and struggling, it was like a floodgates opened and I started soaking chord progressions in. By June I had about 120 songs down compared to maybe 20. So it wasn't an empty pot where my brain was supposed to be after all as I worried. That's still not a lot but it was enough to be mostly chart free during the week.
Now, maintenance is a whole another issue...

billyshakes

I definitely agree that this can be done, even for people who are at an amateur level and don't practice 8 hrs a day. I found the chart (ireal/ipad/etc) to be nothing more than a crutch. I'd have it up but then wouldn't really need it. However, every so often I'd get to a chord change and would momentarily be thinking...o crap, does this go to G7 or Gm7. Not because I knew what the key and context of the song was but because I was picturing one of 100 charts I'd played and was doubting where I was supposed to go rather than trusting my ears, my fingers, and my experience. If I had that crutch chart up there, I'd try to look real quickly but perhaps look at the wrong line and then get lost. When I took the chart away, I was forced to do it in my head. This self-reliance made me accountable and made me better.

Even when you are away from the guitar, i.e. at work, on the drive home, etc, you can go through the chord changes in your head. If you are listening to the song, you can go through the chord changes and visualize what you'd be playing over each. As you learn, if you get to that turnaround that you still haven't learned, you quickly reference it and then put the chart away & continue to practice/visualize until you do remember it. Then continue to play the songs and keep them fresh in your head. Jam regularly with people where you are forced to play different songs other than the 3 most recent tunes you've woodshedded. The experience of needing to recall and then playing them will quickly make you better at memorizing. And once you've learned to trust your memory, you'll have more capacity to listen to other things that are going on in the jam. It isn't easy to do, but it also isn't that hard. It just takes time, as others have said, but you can see the benefits of the work quickly.

Bones

Yup, what D and B said exactly. Just put the book down and look up/around. After a while it is natural and the book becomes distracting. Sure if you want to learn a new song glance at a chart or two of it (a lot of times they have 'wrong' chords anyway) and check out how the author notated the melody. Then close the book. I play mostly every day and never open a chart except to see someone's take on a new (to me) song or quickly remember one I have not played in a long time. I think if you never close the book you will always be dependent on it. And if they give the chord inversions in the chart... take that with a big grain of salt. Pick inversions that sound good and fit what is going on. Another good reason to close the book. Listen to how the inversion sounds against the soloist and adjust if need be. That also becomes more natural with time. Again, play along with recordings that you like when you are shedding and make sure that your tone/feel and inversions fit with the rest of the band and are not clashing.

Same thing for melodies. No one plays the head 'straight' as written in some guys chart anyway, right? As far as the melody, make it your 'own' to a certain extent and it will be easier to remember (of course, keep the essence of it). When has anyone ever seen someone get up and play the melody note for note off of some chart? Never, this is supposed to be improvised music. Of course you need to be 'able' to state the head. And melodies are way harder to memorize than grilles (at least for me but I've played mostly rhythm). If you can memorize a head you should definitely be able to memorize a grille.

Bones

Oh, I just had a 'duh' moment. It's simply like everything else, how you practice is how you will play. If you want to be chart free then practice that way. Conversely, if you always practice with a chart in front of you then you will definitely need it at a gig.

PS- full disclosure. Written stuff is handy for archival purposes. I used to spend a lot more time transcribing and I would write out the tab just because once I had gone thru all the work to transcribe a solo I didn't want to have to do it all over again if I wanted to remember parts years later. Use paper for archiving/long term storage if you like. Or not...truth be told, I rarely look at all that tab anymore. It's probably full of 'errors' anyway. :-)

Lango-Django

Thanks everyone for chiming in with your own experiences! Its made for a lot of interesting reading.

Now I'm still just wondering if anybody else had had the experience I talked about in my original post: you are a sideman, and the leader just starts right in without telling you what key or tune?

I'm still curious as to why people would do that...? Anybody have a clue?

To the naked eye, this would seem to indicate some kind of contempt for the rhythm section...? Perhaps I'm misreading it though?

******

Another aspect of going chartless which nobody mentioned was that sometimes there are chord choices upon which the band may not totally agree.

This is a kind of silly example, but it illustrates my point...

Take the tune "All of Me" key of C... in the last eight bars, the lyrics go "You took the part that once was my heart..."

On the word "part" I've heard about 50% of jazz players go from F to Fm6, and the other 50% go from F to F#dim...

Now myself, since the melody note is "D", I'd be kind of inclined toward the Fm6, but one could also argue that using a "D" instead of "Eb" over an F# dim chord gives it that extra complexity...?

Probably a simple google search would reveal which chord choice was used by the original composer... but then again some players would say "Who cares what chords the original composer used? I'm gonna play it my way!"

Will

Buco

Lango-Django wrote: »

Now I'm still just wondering if anybody else had had the experience I talked about in my original post: you are a sideman, and the leader just starts right in without telling you what key or tune?

I didn't but I witnessed it in Chicago's Green Mill. Alfonso Ponticelli with Stephane Wrembel. Alfonso called a song and I saw and heard Stephane telling him "I don't know that one". Alfonso gave him a casual look and went away with it. Stephane watched and listened, trying out a few chords along the way the first time through and then he continued playing it as any of the songs he played till this one.

Shemi

I'm going to confess to using TAB or written notation quite a bit. One of the things I enjoy about written music is reading through it and hearing it in my head, learning it at then going to different recordings and seeing how it differs from my initial ideas, like phrasing, etc. To begin with I learned solos in this style by TAB, simply because I find it so quick and can memorise the solo very quickly, in part because I was trained classically and always did recitals without any sheet music so my brain seems good at memorising music.

I'm currently trying to learn as many songs in preparation for the March Manouche festival. I have a list of about 40 tunes to learn that are common jam rep and I don't want to be playing from a chart. I do use grilles initially, I'm not great at working out chords from recordings but I know that is something I would like to get better at, but generally once or twice through and I know it from memory. I'm quite visual, so if I have someone playing in front of me I can work it out much more quickly. I know probably 30 of the changes to the songs so far, with maybe 20 of those with the heads as well. The hardest part is confusing songs with similar changes but a few little differences. With no jam session to go to, I've made a playlist of all the songs to play along with, then when I have learned a song I practice playing to other videos to mimic playing with other people and reacting to different the different arrangements.

I never did much transcribing, but since starting this style I have transcribed quite a bit and my ear has improved which has been a benefit to the other styles I play. I can hear the harmonies, I just feel like I have a bit of a mental block with chord progressions that need working out. I just wish I had more time to spend on it, but family commitments and staying on top of the other styles I teach along with my cello keeps me pretty busy. I don't rely on TAB or sheet music but I definitely find it helpful.

Lango-Django

Here's one thing I wonder is just me, or is it common with other guitar players, too?

Memorizing/hearing the chords to the song to play rhythm is one thing, and that usually comes to me pretty easily...

The problem comes when it's my turn to play lead and somehow the arps for those same chords don't just automatically flow through my brain/fingers like I would wish them to...

Looking back over the years, I suppose I've made some progress with this problem so maybe it's something that 10,000 hours of practice may eventually cure...