andrew colyer

Harold Galper (born April 18, 1938) is an American jazz pianist, composer, arranger, bandleader, educator, and writer. In the 1980’s, I had the good fortune to play with Clark Terry (referenced below).

This article from Hal’s Facebook page is so good, I want anyone who aspires to be a great player to see this. So I’m sharing it here for posterity.
The link to the original post is at the bottom of this page.
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Jazz Proverbs as Embodied Knowledge

Webster’s Dictionary defines a “proverb” as a ” maxim of wisdom… An allegorical saying of the wise that requires interpretation. The roots of jazz are firmly planted in the oral tradition of African music, a tradition the Masters of the music used to efficiently pass musical wisdom down to succeeding generations of apprentices. This wisdom is difficult to record in written form. Jazz proverbs are ubiquitous throughout the history of jazz. The Masters never explain proverbs. They want you to figure it out your own way. It’s the nature of these proverbs that one may, or may not, gain a complete understanding of their meaning for decades. As they are designed to be individualized, the interpretations herein are solely the results of my reflections, not intended for use by others. The only good ones are your own.

At first, these proverbs appear one dimensional. Enlightenment comes only after extensive reflection, self-analysis and the requisite experience and knowledge to relate to the proverb. Jazz proverbs are powerful. Functioning on a conceptual level, they have the effect of changing inappropriate emotional and physical actions, mental states, attitudes, conceptions and perceptions, the way you think and feel about yourself, the music and your relationships to your instrument, practice, performance and other players.

“Learn it then forget it.” Charlie Parker

What Bird doesn’t mention is it’s going to happen many times during your career. It’s an on-going process. Musical growth doesn’t happen in a smoothly ascending curve but in stages. There’s too much to learn and never enough time to learn it all. There will always be learning gaps within each stage of your self-education. You don’t find this out until you run into a particular problem, a problem you didn’t know you had but have been sensing it for a while. Something wasn’t “quite right” but you couldn’t quite figure out what it is. The answer will always be in the history and traditions of the music, and you’ll have to go back to the tradition to try to figure out what it was you missed, otherwise you won’t get to the next stage. You’ll have to do a lot of research at each stage of the learning process and devise efficient practice regimens crafted specifically for each solution. There are as many ways to practice as there are people practicing. The way you organize your practicing will have a major effect on how you’ll eventually sound. Because the learning process never stops, you’ll need to develop efficient research strategies you’ll use for the rest of your life. Once you’ve figured out the solution, or part of one, you’ll have to “learn and forget it.”

“Forget it,” describes the process of trusting the intuitional training and instincts you’ve been refining for years. It’s not really forgetting as the brain retains every bit of experience. To me, it meant “stop thinking about what you practiced.” It’s difficult to put aside everything you worked so hard on and natural to want to enjoy the fruits of one’s labors, but playing what you practiced are gross rewards, mere self-gratification. The compulsion to self-evaluate yourself while playing is the same, a manifestation of Ego, the greatest impediment to accessing “The Zone” from whence all creativity springs. Bird was advising us to forget thinking and trust your trained instincts to do the job. I’ll be explaining more about “The Zone” in detail in a separate essay.

I’ve been through many of these “learn and forget” stages over the decades. It took me 15 years to “learn and forget” how to play Pentatonics. In 1963 there weren’t any books published on the theory and McCoy and Coltrane weren’t telling. I had to figure out the theory myself. Don’t know if it was the theory Trane and McCoy used but it was my theory. It wasn’t until 1978 I’d figured out all the theory’s elements, filling two practice books with my own exercises and could “forget it.”

“Imitate, Assimilate, Innovate.” Clark Terry.

Imitate

“Imitation is an advanced behavior whereby an individual observes and replicates another’s behavior.” Wikipedia (edits mine).

No jazz musician knows how they want to play in the beginning. It’s an on-going process of self-discovery in which the “process” of learning is given greater weight than the goal. When someone’s playing strikes you on an intuitive level you’re having a “I want to play like that!” moment. A resonance has occurred between you and the player, attracting you that sound. You may think you want to imitate that sound, “to play like that,” but in essence, the artist is trying to tell you something about how you want to play, not how to play like them. The process of selectivity comes from within, not from without.

Selecting a model is the first step to building your musical identity. Some select only one model as their guide, other’s select a series of models. No two people hear the same way; therefore, no one can exactly copy how someone else plays. It will always be your own version of a model’s playing.

I chose a series of models because I wanted to play everything, I heard everybody else play. Starting with short-term models Dave Brubeck, then John Lewis, I next discovered Red Garland. It was a “I want to play like that,” moment and embarked on a long-term study of his playing. I was still a student at Berklee when transcriptions were not as ubiquitous as they are now. My ears weren’t good enough to transcribe myself at that stage. Luckily, a grand gentleman, Harry Smith, who mostly played piano for vocalists, could read anything and had perfect pitch, was on the faculty. You could ask Harry to transcribe any solo and in two weeks later he’d hand you the transcription written in an almost perfect hand. Clutched in my grubby hands, I rushed back to my room with my Red Garland transcriptions to play Red’s solo, but it didn’t sound like him. Harry had also copied out some of Red’s voicings, but they also didn’t sound like Red’s when I played them. Though somewhat chagrined, I got a valuable lesson out of the experience. I realized how important touch would be a factor in deciding how and what I wanted to play. Some things will sound good under my hands, and some won’t. It wasn’t until many years later that I came to understand that touch and tone were the priority, at the top of the list. I expect this would also ring true for any instrumentalist as well.

I was fortunate to have apprenticed with many great masters, most of whom played completely by ear and knew no theory. They learned how to play by copying their masters. They didn’t “know” the “rules” of music in an intellectual sense. If, as Miles Davis suggested, you “only copy from the best” you’ll learn the rules of music and “know” what you’re doing on an intuitive level, by ear. As in Miles’s advice: if it sounds good the rules were used correctly. If you copy good sounds you’re learning the rules of music by ear.

A great example of effective copying is, in the last half of the wonderful documentary “The Jazz Loft.” The film shows Monk and Hall Overton developing the music for Monk’s historic Town Hall concert. Monk is showing Hall his voicings as he writes them down. During a break in the rehearsal, everyone got up and hit the bar downstairs. Monk noticed the classically trained French Horn player still sitting in his seat. Sensing he was having some difficulty with the rhythms, Monk walked over to an empty corner of the room and tap danced the rhythms of the French horn part. The horn player had no trouble with his part after that.

During my early days as a Berklee student, 905 Boylston St. was situated directly behind the school which was then situated on the corner of Fairfield and Newbury streets. 905 was a five story SRO populated by fledgling students who could just manage the $25 per month to rent a room, some of which had upright pianos. We were all broke, so we often shared money for food sometimes helped one another with their rent. When someone got a new Miles album, a bunch of us would jam ourselves into a room and play it over and over, the whole room singing every solo until memorized. We’d then retire to our own rooms to play the solos. If you read interviews of how the masters learned to play, they’d often mention copying from radio broadcasts, records and when possible, they’d memorize salient ideas from live performances, rushing home to try them out.

Assimilate

There are no discrete divisions between “Imitate, Assimilate, then Innovate” or for that matter, any other processes and techniques we employ to teach ourselves how to play jazz. They blend into each other having the elements of each in common. Complex Adaptive Systems has increased our understanding of how the brain processes information, i.e. all information is shared throughout the brain, therefore, all change is global.

The term “Internalization” is in common usage, but it doesn’t mean the same thing as assimilation. According to Wikipedia (edits mine), “internalization describes the psychological outcome of a conscious mind reasoning about a specific subject; the subject is internalized, and the consideration of the subject is internal. Internalization is directly associated with learning within an organism and recalling what has been learned.”

The word “recalling,” without the word “memorization” wouldn’t make any sense. The only way one could recall something is if were memorized. I think we could reasonably entertain the idea internalization also means memorization. To be sure, the process of memorization is an integral element of the learning process, but it is not assimilation.

Internalization and assimilation both have their place in the learning process. The latter cannot be achieved without the former. The difference between internalization and assimilation is the former is conscious, and the latter is unconscious!

Billy Taylor describes, in his book “Jazz Piano, A Jazz History” the “cutting sessions” in New York City in the 30’s and 40’s. “In an informal setting, creative musicians could exchange ideas, experiment, test one another, and bear witness to the ingenuity of the “special” players among them. There are legends about music contest between giants: but not enough was heard about the other side of the coin, the educational component — what the creative individual gained from spontaneous exchanges with his or her peers, as well as older and younger musicians.”

Cutting sessions instilled a healthy competitive spirit of comradery among their attendees. If you were challenged to a duel, you had to accept, or you’d never be invited back. The pressure would be intense. Under stress, your brain pumps out epinephrine, one of the family of adrenalines. Doctors, treating Afghan War returnees with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, discovered epinephrine bonded emotional trauma to traumatic experience. Administering a beta blocker could eliminate the effect of the epinephrine, separating the emotional content from the experience allowing their patients to talk freely about their experiences. If epinephrine bonds emotion to experience, then the epinephrine released under the pressure of a cutting session is a learning drug embedding the experience on a sub-cortical level.

Thus is the way experiential knowledge is assimilated i.e., The Apprenticeship System. Explicated, that means is you are getting your ass kicked around the bandstand every night by giants and no one ever tells you, you sound good. It’s the pressure and the only place you can get that pressure it is on the bandstand. There is no real substitute for this process (and I’ve cried the blues enough in the past).

Innovate

Jazz great Miles Davis was quoted saying there were no innovators left, only stylists. Whether an accurate assessment of the state of jazz or not, one thing’s for sure, there are certainly less of the former and more of the latter. Most of us would aspire to be innovative but it is a rare event, achieved only by a few. What we are best left with then is the ability to develop our own voice. To be sure, most of the great jazz innovators, for example, Bird, Dizzy, Miles, Coltrane, Monk, Ornette, to mention just a few, all started out as stylists and transcended style to become innovators. Very few of us exited the womb as full-fledged innovators. Only by developing your own musical voice can you hope to ever transcend style to achieve the rare status of innovator.

Play a recording of any jazz great from 1900 to now. Start at any point in the recording and there’s no doubt to whom you’re listening. It was a point of pride to have a personal style anyone could recognize within a few bars. The basic elements of a personal voice are, an individual sound or touch on your instrument, your own musical vocabulary developed from the tradition, and your particular manner of articulating that vocabulary. No two musicians hear the same way or have the same physical structure or touch or tone. You have your own voice within you but have yet to recognize it, most likely because you didn’t know you had one in the first place and haven’t spent the time looking for it. It’s there, somewhere in the back of your head, but you won’t find it until you look for it. It may be just a whisper but it’s there. When you find it, try to duplicate it on your instrument.

The key to The Oral Tradition is more a process of bringing things out of us than a matter of putting things in. Otherwise, how can we account for the almost universal reaction “gee, I kind of felt something like that but didn’t know what it was until you pointed it out.”

Y’all have been so encouraging it’s got my brain poppin’. Got me stimulated about a long article on The Oral Tradition I thought I might never finish. Got “researched” out and couldn’t put all the parts together in the right place. I realized I didn’t have a complete picture of the process and stopped. That was a while ago. This is an excerpt. Coming soon.

Thanks.”
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Galper | https://halgalper.com/