You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 5 "Swing Thoughts" to Play Less Notes but Better Phrases - #98

Episode Date: May 7, 2018

Today, Adam and Peter talk about some things to think about to get you playing more melodic phrases throughout your solo. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Menace and I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear It Podcast. Today we're going to give you five swing thoughts to play less notes but better phrases. Question. What is a swing thought? Well, I was just about to ask you that. Oh, yeah, I wrote this one. Yeah.

And mine is not a rhetorical question. It's an actual question. So a swing thought is, well, if you play golf, you probably know what a swing thought is. A swing thought is kind of, it's one thing to think about in your golf swing. And it's used because there's a lot going on in the golf swing. It's a big motion. A lot can go wrong before that little face of the club hits that little ball and it goes into the woods. So oftentimes you'll use a swing thought to think about one thing that'll just kind of focus you.

Your body then just kind of goes through the motions of what you've practiced. And I kind of use these two with music. And it's not lost on me that it's a swing thought and we play jazz. Right. That definitely wasn't lost. I was like, man, think swing, think swing, think swing. I'm swinging. No, so sometimes when I'm on gigs, I'll use swing thoughts to kind of accomplish things that I want to accomplish, you know, and focus myself a little bit.

And one of the things I've been thinking about lately is, is, you know, playing a lot of notes, trying not to play too much, trying to be more patient and be a better phraser, you know, in my improvised solos. And so I have some swing thoughts that I thought could be useful. And I'll kick it off with number one. And this is the one that I think most often as I started solo, which is I have more time than I think that I have. You don't have to go in blazing every single time. Now, you don't have to not go in blazing either, but you have a lot more time than you think. Even when you're on your second, third chorus, you have more time than you think you have. The audience isn't waiting for you to just tear off some kind of 16-note runs over and over and over again.

In fact, that gets really boring, and it's usually not serving the music. at all. Are they even listening until the second course? I'm never even sure. No, man, you've got to set yourself up a little bit. So the number one thing that I think of as far as like how to play less and when I want to play less, when I want to be more lyrical, when I want to phrase better, is I have more time than I think I have to be patient. So yeah, though that's great. And I actually think that a lot. So I actually have swing thoughts, even though I'm just learning what they are. But the thing I love about that one is I think that once you start to adopt this and actively, think about it, you know, you may need to remind yourself every now and then, but you do it enough,

like any kind of mantra, it starts to kind of become part of who you are, part of your playing, part of your personality, and you don't have, you can kind of unconsciously think about these swing thoughts, because I know that's something I, because when I was younger, I listened to so many recordings of myself. I used to record myself on gigs all the times, then I had some students that were always recording and playing it for me. And I always, I never would listen to them and say, like, wow, I'm so glad I played all that stuff at the beginning of it. I really just jumped right in there. That never happened.

Yeah, yeah, things that never happened. And so I was always, you know, actively thinking about ways that I could adjust that mentality specifically at the beginning of solo. So I think that's certainly number one. So next, I'm going to go with the kind of interactive thing where you could think, for example, of giving, the process of giving, not just. about you, even if it's at the beginning of your solos, and that would be something like,

I'm going to play something that the drummer can really dig into, that can enhance their playing, that can get some interaction going, that makes it easy and fun for them, thus making the whole thing sound better. And there's so many different ways you can do this because there's all the different players on the stage. You can kind of just do it by who you look at,

or maybe sometimes if you're like doing a tour or a series of regular gigs every week with the same musicians, especially if you, and this is why it's so important to record yourself or to at least go look at some videos, maybe somebody in the audience posted. But you'll start to notice like, wow, I notice I'm not really interacting with the bass player. And a lot of times it's the bass player because you take them for granted or whatever.

And so you kind of say, you know what, I'm going to think of this one thing on this gig or this tune to make a conscious effort to really connect with them. And so that can be a nice way to kind of bridge that. Yeah, I like to give sometimes like kind of repetitive rhythmic phrases, maybe over the bar, where I'm not doing a lot. And it's good for me too because I'm getting more, mileage out of, you know, thinking less, right?

Right. And oftentimes when I do stuff like that, better music happens. The solo is better. You know, people get way more into it because people love to see that interaction. It usually is much, makes for a much better performance. And like you said, you know, you can involve the other players. And you can, and it's another kind of way to like take your time and not feel like you just have to do these waves of lines and lines and lines and lines.

It's just another kind of thing to pull out of your bag of tricks. So number three, the number three swing thought that you can think to get better phrasing. And I think this quite a bit is more notes does not equal more intensity. I think it's kind of... Wait, did you say does not or does? Does not equal. Okay, does not. That's important to catch that.

And maybe I should say it does not always equal more intensity. Sometimes it's totally the appropriate thing to do and it's where the song is going and it's what you. you want to do, just rip off a bunch of notes and big lines. But it doesn't always equal more intensity. In fact, sometimes it could really kind of like be a downer, you know, for the vibe. If the vibe is not going there, you know, the thing is, and we, I was going back to this, but listen, you know, understand where the vibe of the song is going, where the other musicians are at.

You know, don't think that, okay, we're building here. I have to play more. That doesn't necessarily have to be the case. And in fact, sometimes it can kill it. Well, I like that too. And some of you may think, well, that's sort of like the same as number one. I have more time than I think. But it's really what we're starting to combine now and isolate is that is about time.

This is about really intensity of the lines. Because we're talking about how to do better phrases. And phrases are never isolated. Just like a sentence isn't isolated. It's part of a paragraph. There's spacing and whatever. And so this is kind of starting to look on a little bit bigger. bigger level.

And then that would lead to number four, and I'll say that the thought that we would have to get that better phrase going, the next one would be, I'll save the longer lines for the end. So now we're getting into not only the phrases and how intense they are and the timing of them, but the actual length of them and where they're placed within the solo. So it's a very overt thing that we're thinking. But longer lines, and just like all these other ones, there's exceptions, and we're always listening to make sure that it fits in. But when you save those longer lines

for the end, you're giving the listener a great gift of leading them up. Just like within a movie, like the concepts in a movie or a story. And this always comes back to storytelling. You're setting things up, the characters. You're starting simple. You're introducing elements. You're introducing the

setting, the language, all these different things. And then you're preparing the audience so that they can accept more later, longer, more intensity, push together, louder, whatever it is, whatever the flow is, but you're putting some thought into that. And yes, of course, we want that to always automatically happen when we sit down in solo. But we have to think these things and introduce them into our playing and come back to them and be conscious of them and reiterate them to really make

sure that they're there. I mean, and it goes back to what you were saying before about context, right? So some of the best solos that you will ever hear are spent a lot of time just kind of like laying in the pocket, laying in the groove, throwing quick jabs, quick punches, short little phrases. Yeah. And then at the end, maybe unleash something on the last chorus that's like you're, you're just amazed by it, but you're amazed by it because they set you up for that. Yeah. If they would unleash that in the first 10 seconds, then whatever they do after that is dictated by that. Well, I love the boxing metaphor.

And just like, you know, if two boxers come out and they're not very well matched and the better boxer just like a flurry of punches and knocks them out in 20 seconds, you know, most people think, wow, that's so exciting. It's not. I saw that. Mike Tyson and Michael. Spinks in like 1987 or whatever that fight was. And it was the like least exciting thing. I mean, yeah, for 10 seconds is exciting. But everybody wants a story.

You want an arc to it, a back and forth. Well, but also you can punch yourself out too. Don't forget. Like if the boxer or tune you're playing against has good defense, you could punch yourself out and find yourself in a world of trouble of like not having anywhere to go with your story. Absolutely. Okay.

And so for number five for swing tharts. Now I'm getting the swing of things. Oh, yeah. But I think those four are so good and so complimentary that, you know, the last thought I would have is, you know, I always like to talk about when things don't go perfectly or things are going downhill and you can't do anything not only to save yourself, but the whole situation. And that thought would be think of a happy place. Okay. Think of a happy place. Think of a happy place. You know, what is it, Dorothy and Wizard of Oz, you know, clicking her things.

Think, I want to go home. I want to go home. I always think of a happy Gilmore. Happy Gilmore, right. But I think if you stick with one through four, you won't have to go to number five very often, hopefully. Because... Thanks for listening to this episode of the You'll Hearat podcast.

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