You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Become a Better Composer - #15

Episode Date: February 14, 2018

Score study and transcriptions are just a few of the things you can do to up your composition game. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Peter Martin. And I'm Adam Manus. Welcome to the You'll Hear It podcast. Today, we're going to talk about how you can become a better composer. And if this works out well, we're going to talk about how we can become better composers as well. We're always growing, always learning. Right, Adam? That's right, man.

I'm going to be out of this jazz thing. I'm going to be a professional composer. I'll see you all later. And, well, you bring up a good point because I think all jazz musicians kind of think about themselves and should think about themselves as composers because we do a lot of improvisation. But I think it's an interesting thing to think about. A lot of you guys are interested in composing. And Adam, I know you've done a lot of great composing and arranging,

and I've done a little bit. But it's fun as jazz musicians to think about how the improv that we always do informs our composition and maybe vice versa. Yeah, I think jazz musicians have a huge advantage in composing because we compose all the time. We totally understand how to do it and it's right. It should be right at our fingertips as players. Absolutely.

Okay, so the first thing I think about always, with this is from the great Ray Brown, who's a bassist, of course, who needs no introduction, but in case we got any ignorant folks out there, go Google him. But Ray Brown, you know, just one of the greatest jazz bassist ever.

But I had a little bit of a chance to play with him and be around him, and I'm so grateful that I had that. But I remember him talking about, you know, how you become a better composer. And his thing was compose every day. It wasn't like, you know, study Duke Ellington scores, which maybe we'll talk about that, but it was just composed every day.

And it really got me thinking that, you know, you have to do it in order to develop. And composition is such a personal thing that you're getting into an area like improvisation that there's only so far as somebody else can tell you what to do because you have to have it personalized. So, yes, there's things that you can learn and you can study and you can learn form and harmony and all these different things, which are great. But if you're not composing every day, are you really a composer? I don't even know.

Yeah, you should definitely include it in your regular routine, as you would, any other part of your practice. And it doesn't have to be, you know, this, I think people get caught up like, well, I have to compose this big thing and it's going to take all this time. Just compose four bars every day. Exactly. You compose four bars every day. You're going to have a bunch of tunes in about a month. Right. And I mean, if you want to write, you know, and I remember doing this, it was like, I wanted to write a blues because I thought that would be easy.

And I kept writing these tunes and they were so corny. Yeah. But I kept, I was just, you know, like, I want to have. have my own tunes. And finally, I kind of stumbled upon something that was okay, but it was going through that process. You got to get through a lot of crap before you get to the promised land. Well, I don't know about, you might have been different, but my first, I don't know, 150 improvised solos were terrible. And it's the same thing with composing. You have to write some bad stuff before you figure out how to write some good stuff. That's right. There's no getting around that.

And I think it's just the whole concept, too, of how do you know what's good and bad for yourself, until you actually do it. You almost have to do that. You know, it's like, how do you learn what hot and cold is? You're little and you go by your mom or your dad, and they're like, don't touch the stove. It's hot, but you don't know what hot means, and then you touch it, and then you're like, oh, that's what hot is. Definitely. Well, and so another way to get better is our second point, and that's to study scores. So there's an amazing wealth of knowledge available to you. There's a great website. It's a free nonprofit website called IMSLP, IMSLP.org. And they have, a ton of free scores you can check out.

It's an awesome organization, Beethoven and Mozart, and just every classical composer you can think of up until copyright stuff starts coming, which is the 20th century. But all of the great scores you can study, and then you can go on YouTube or Spotify and follow along with the music to this score, and you are going to see some things that you're not hearing.

And it's pretty cool, because, you know, I just was orchestrating this thing that involved Prokofiev score for Romeo and Juliet, and there's this rumble that was happening, and I was like, what the how is he getting that sound? It turns out he's putting like these dissonant triads and the low brass, and it doesn't make any sense, but it creates this rumble, and you're like, well, now I know how to create this rumble. It's by that. And I wouldn't have known that without looking up the score and seeing what Pocchio was doing.

Do it with jazz musicians, too. Duke Ellington scores are available online. Check out Thelonious Monks charts. You know, there's Art Blakey charts available to check out. You know, we're so lucky now with the Internet to have all these resources available. pretty much instantly. And you can, there's no excuse not to see how these great composers and arrangers, you know, orchestrated things and composed things. Yeah. And I mean, you know, some of the giants you mentioned, Duke Ellington, Monk, but one you mentioned, Art Blakey, I think

that's so important. And maybe we're even thinking like Wayne Shorter. Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, arrangements to look at those scores and listen to those along. I mean, there's such, especially for that style of writing for three horns, there's a wealth of great things. Thad Jones, I mean, the list goes on on. Right. You know, next I'm thinking just let's really make sure that if you're a jazz musician out there and you want to work on composing, you know, draw, you have such an advantage. We have such an advantage in that we're constantly composing as we improvise. So start with that. If you're sitting down to write and you're going to commit to compose every day, you know, there shouldn't really be the stage of the tortured artist sitting at the typewriter, a blank page, and then going

and having to drink a fifth of Jack Daniels because you can't even get one word out. I mean, you know, every time you get on the stage, you have to play something. So maybe you just have to be forced into playing in real time and just say, okay, this is the form I'm going to choose. I don't have any ideas today, so I'm going to write something over rhythm changes. And just play for a course, put together a simple improvisation, record yourself, and then transcribe it. Now you're composing, you know. And then you'll be able to take that and extend it from there. But basically, we're taking and applying our improvisational skills as jazz musicians to compositions.

That's right. And, you know, for jazz composition, you can transcribe tunes of great composers, transcribe tunes by Monk, transcribed tunes by Coltrane, transcribed tunes by Bill Evans and Wayne Shorter. I mean, transcribed tunes by people that you love by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. These are amazing compositions. And then once you transcribe the melody and the chord changes and it's right and you can play it and you can hear it and you know what it is, start analyzing those transcriptions. You know, when you transcribe Herbie Hancock's Dolphin Dance, and you can see how he moves this melody and these rhythmic devices around, these amazing core changes, and how he changes keys,

it's a pretty great lesson in jazz composition. Yes, so I'm thinking even the difference between studying a score, like a lot of you might say, well, you already said study the score, so I don't have to transcribe. But if you transcribe the composition, and, you know, generally this is a lot easier than transcribing a solo, So it's not going to take you as long. It's not as arduous as the process.

But going through it, phrase by phrase, core by chord, like what you develop with your ears is so great. And also, your understanding of the actual construction of the composition will be at such a deeper level than just looking at the scores when someone else has done the work for you. I would just caution you to really heed that part of it. Even though it just seems easier, everything's available to us. Now, you don't have to do this on every song, I mean, because you're going to get stuck and bogged down by doing that.

But try to commit to at least, you know, every couple of weeks really getting a transcription project going because you really will be rewarded from that work. Yeah, and you know what? If you're feeling a little discouraged from transcribing, you know what you could tell yourself? What? You'll hear it. I like it. That's it for today's episode of the You'll Hear It Podcast. For more information or to hear more of these podcasts, go to openstudio network.com slash podcast.

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