With this kind of post, I'm not planning to transcribe it all out for you-- the material is here for you to hear and think about. Some of it will be pretty advanced, perhaps even mystifying to you-- but I think it will still be helpful. I've spent many hours listening to players who were doing things I didn't understand-- I've spent a lot of time studying the work of non-guitarists (Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Mark O'Connor's early fiddle tune recordings, etc.) so that I could see how they put ideas together. I believe that you can learn a lot even from stuff you can't play. (I took a few lessons from my friend Eric Rose more than ten years ago, and I couldn't understand more than five per cent of what he was doing. Things he was trying to show me then crop up in my playing now just about every time I pick up the guitar. I'm not sure exactly how it happened, and it certainly didn't happen overnight, but I learned a hell of a lot more from him than was clear at the time.)
As you listen to this material, please feel free to email me or comment with questions about how I played something, why I played it, why it fits the chords, etc. I'm not going to blather endlessly about all of that right now, but if I get feedback I'll be happy to go into more detail.
PREPARING A SOLO
I've been listening a lot to Miles Davis's recording of "Some Day My Prince Will Come." This classic recording is in a 3/4 feel. I like to think of 3/4 as a series of waves that come breaking over my head, and I'm trying to swim over each of them. Listening to a great performance in 3 (even if the tune is otherwise very different, as in this case) helps me to start picturing the bar lines in this way. 3/4 can be a trap for the improviser, because you can start playing ideas that mimic the bar lines (i.e. each idea you play corresponds to a single bar). When this happens, your solo can have a clunky feel. My "wave breaking" analogy helps me create lines that play through the bar line, and instead of my ideas getting weak at the end of each bar, I try to put accents there.
Because this tune has a lot of chords in it (I was trying to write in a Richard Rodgers vein) I need to make sure I can find the changes in various places on the neck. Chord melody is a good preparation method.
(a note on these mp3s-- these are sketches, to give you an idea what the different approaches sound like. sometimes these takes are a little clumsy, esp. the one where I'm playing short ideas around chord shapes. If I'm really practicing in this way, I probably wouldn't play along with a track the whole time. I might spend spend a long time just playing stuff on one chord, really trying to burn it into my brain. I also would normally not play a whole solo with just one of these approaches, because that can sound choppy. These exercises are to help you find ideas around chords, and memorize where they are on the neck with respect to chord shapes. I should also point out, this rhythm track features Matt Tebo on drums and Jeff Muller on bass. I'm playing chords faintly in the background. This is a very rough recording at this point, so don't blame the band or the producer! We'll spiff it up later. )
My approach to chord melody uses a couple different kinds of ideas-- sometimes I put the melody line in the top voice above a chord shape,
www.karlstraubmusic.com/back in love chord melody.mp3
other times I play a chord and then play short ideas around it. (This helps me to memorize where little runs and licks relate to a chord shape.)
www.karlstraubmusic.com/back in love lines around chords.mp3
I may even play some chord-based "riff" ideas. By this I mean very minimal ideas that are more rhythmic then melodic; I might play a chord shape a couple times in a row with a punchy accent pattern, or I might play a note or two before playing the chord, etc.
www.karlstraubmusic.com/back in love riffs.mp3
After I do this for a while, I'm warmed up. After some work with chord melody (which can be a warmup, or a tough workout, depending on where you are in your development. It wasn't so long ago that putting together ideas like this on a set of chords could have me fumbling around for hours with few good results. It takes a lot of work to get it together), I'm seeing chord shapes on the neck, and I've got some ideas about playing in different positions.
Now I do some single note line playing, to warm up my picking.
www.karlstraubmusic.com/back in love single note.mp3
If I am disciplined, I'll try to resist playing bending and blues-based stuff. Probably I'll end up going in that direction for a bit, though.
www.karlstraubmusic.com/back in love bluesy.mp3
(The point here is that I don't want to just put a lot of pentatonic licks on the record. There are some nice changes there, and I want to play some lines that really bring out the tensions and resolutions built into the chords. Bluesy stuff is easier to do-- it sounds great, but it's kind of a default mode at this point. Ultimately, I'd like the solo to outline the harmony pretty well, and throw in some Roy Buchanan raunch here and there to give it some attitude. So I'll make sure I can play in that style around the changes, and in different places on the neck, so that if I run into trouble trying to follow the changes I can slip into that bag to get me out of a tight spot.)
at this point, I can listen to the various sketches, and try to get a sense of whether any of it is really strong enough to keep. I can also figure out what sounds weak, and why. Eventually, I can plan out a solo, using some combination of these approaches.
For the real solo, I'll try to use motivic techniques to make the solo melodic and "compositional," but practicing all of the above is essential for getting the terrain under my fingers. Once I've got a lot of these shapes and positions in my brain, I can start thinking about music, rather than licks, the neck, etc. That's when it gets interesting--
(TOOK A BREAK HERE FOR A FEW DAYS)
During a brief interlude for family life, gig, etc. I had a chance to think about all of the above. Here's an update--
I did a lot of listening to Miles Davis records recently. The "Miles in Person at the Blackhawk" album, now available with many more tracks, was a helpful point of reference. This Miles group, according to some commentators, was his most swinging and grooving band ever. I'm not sure that's literally true, but after a lot of listening to a lot of different Miles albums, I certainly don't disagree. Miles says in his "autobiography" that he wasn't very stimulated by Hank Mobley's tenor sax playing. Maybe, but I really started digging Mobley's work from listening to this live stuff. He's definitely old-fashioned by comparison with Coltrane, Cannonball, et al, but Mobley's Lester Young/Charlie Parker-influenced sound sounds pretty damn good in 2009. At any rate, along with the fact that they swing like hell on these recordings, Miles and his band play solos that have everything my playing has been lacking--
I've been working on developing my jazz/bebop vocabulary for a few years, and it's mostly clicked for me-- I'm doing a lot better at playing changes. All the Miles listening reminded me of something that I keep forgetting, though-- a solo doesn't make it if it's not cohesive and conversational. Miles is perhaps the ideal exponent of this philosophy. Although by comparison with most of us mere mortals, Miles had chops to burn, his improvising is not really about chops-- it's about ideas. Miles communicates with his lines-- while his sound is like someone singing, his ideas are like someone speaking. Unlike many of his contemporaries (Coltrane comes to mind) who were busy cramming as many notes into a bar as possible, Miles was creating statements with his instrument, by building phrases out of small licks, sentences out of phrases, paragraphs out of sentences, etc. As part of this approach, he was using space as an expressive device.
All of this is stuff I've known for years, but on the evidence of my recent playing I needed a reminder. There's a thing that happens in your improvising that I call "the drag." This is when you paint yourself into a corner, and you can't figure out where to go on your instrument to continue an idea. Using Miles as inspiration, I realized that I need to be able to continue ideas for longer without getting slammed by "the drag." Practicing with this in mind can help. One effective way to practice is to play lines until you get to a drag, then backtrack and figure out a solution. I did a lot of this kind of practicing, and then had a chance to try it out on a country gig. I'm a sideman in "Honky Tonk Heart," a band playing old honky-tonk country and western swing. On our recent gig at JV's, I tried to play more cohesive lines and avoid the drags. One way to get this together is to end an idea quickly and definitively when you feel a drag coming on. Then leave some space, and continue with a related idea.
I thought that at least some of what I played at this show used these ideas pretty well. When I get a chance to hear the recording of the gig, I'll check and see if there are some moments I can put on here for you to listen.
My next series of clips will demonstrate some of these concepts.
MORE TO COME!
text and music copyright 2008 Karl Straub
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