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12:00 Noon - Chase Sanborn - Jazz Tactics |
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Written by Kevin Eisensmith
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Saturday, June 2 - 12:00 p.m.
(photos below)
With help from the ITG Conference rhythm section, Chase Sanborn presented an informative session on how just about anyone can start to make inroads into the field of improvisation. This highly educational, incredibly informative demonstration broke down all of the things we can do to make better music, play better melodies, and organize our ideas to make them interesting to others. Chase started by telling us that there are two things that are essential to making music. First, you need to be able to play what you hear. Second, you need hear something that is worth playing. He stressed that there is no "right" or "wrong" way to improvise, you simply need to be happy with what you are playing.
At this point, Sanborn used the tune It Could Happen to You to demonstrate how one might begin to put an improvised solo together. With the rhythm section laying down the changes, he started VERY sparsely, just a note here and a note there trying to simply hear and play notes he could identify from listening to the rhythm section. Gradually as the piece continued Sanborn started to fill in more and more of the blanks...always listening and paying attention to what he was hearing. It was interesting to watch this process. It was as though, in about 3 minutes time, he was taking us through IMPROV 101 and ended up a graduating senior at the top of his class. Well done Chase!
After this demonstration he made the following points and went on to discuss how these concepts fit into the context of the tune he had just played. These ideas included: 1) You want the harmonic structure of the piece to suggest your melodic lines. 2) You need to compose the melody as you play. 3) You need to learn the words to any piece you are learning (to learn the proper rhythmic nuance, inflection, and the original content of the meaning of that melody).
At this point Chase told us that his notes for this presentation are available at his web site and that you can easily access them at www.chasesanborn.com
As the demonstration progressed Sanborn offered us some great advice:
* Learn the original melody because it is always good!
* All musicians need to learn how to phrase in a vocally oriented fashion.
* The less you play the better you sound.
* At first just listen and play notes out of the voicings in the rhythm section.
* Anything that makes you stop playing and listen to the music is a good thing. Hear something, understand it, assimilate it, then try and add something to it.
* Play fewer notes, but make sure they are all good.
* Learn to make space in the music...remember that paintings in an art gallery are spaced so that we can give our full attention to each one.
* Work on hearing the melody until you cannot NOT hear it!
This was a phenomenal session that gave us a whole list of things to think about that will make us better communicators by focusing more on quality versus quantity in our melodic approach to jazz improvisation. This was great advice given in a convincing fashion through demonstration, and I could tell a lot of lightbulbs were going on throughout the session.
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