You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Get Better at Phrasing

Starting point is 00:00:14 I'm Adam Madison, and you're listening to the You'll Hear a podcast. Today is my last solo episode. Wednesday, Peter and I will be back together. We've been revamping the pod suite. We've been wanting to get back into that original space that we designed for this You'll Hear at podcast. We were out in the pot hall for a little while. It was a little too reverberous for our taste, and it didn't have all the bells and whistles that we're accustomed to. So we thought, you know what, let's just invest in making our pod suite a little bit more socially distant, a little bit more responsible. I hear there's a rumor. There's going to be plenty of plexiglass.

Starting point is 00:00:47 So I'm excited. But today I wanted to talk about something that is really important. And that's how to get better at phrasing when we're improvising. It's something that isn't talked about as much as other nerdier topics like scales or voicings. But it's probably more important. And it's not talked about a lot because it's hard to put in the words. Before I get into that, though, I want to talk about our new sponsor. We have a brand new sponsor to the show.

Starting point is 00:01:10 Well, it's a new sponsor to the show, but it's probably not new to any of you. It's Mews Score. The Muse Score editor is by far the most popular free music notation software you can get. It's amazing. It's free. It has pretty much everything you would need. You know, I do a ton of arranging and composition and I get asked all the time. I don't have any music notation software. What should I get? And I always recommend Muse score first. And in my band, the 442s, we use MuseScore to present all of my compositions and arrangements on our iPads as we play. It's just beautiful. It looks great.

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Starting point is 00:02:13 So go to muscore.com slash upgrade and follow that link for the, you'll hear it here in the description, and you can save yourself 65%. Okay. Well, today I want to talk about phrasing. What is phrasing exactly? Well, it's phrases, and it's how we use them as we improvise. And it's one of the more challenging things, I think, to get our heads around. It's one of the more challenging things to teach, to do a real analysis.

Starting point is 00:02:42 on different players' phrases requires surgical precision of awareness of what's going on in the music and a big picture outlook and a small picture outlook. It's almost, honestly, too much to try to explain. And so that's why I want to start with this. We talk all the time here about what's number one, listen. It can't be emphasized enough here that to get better at phrasing, the first thing you have to acknowledge is that you have to listen to a lot of music. And you have to listen closely and try to pay attention to phrases. When does a phrase start? When does a phrase end?

Starting point is 00:03:17 What happens in the phrase? What's the shape of a phrase? Does it go up and pitch and then down and pitch? Does it start up and then go down and go back up? Does it go all over the place? What is happening within the phrase? How long is the phrase? How many seconds is it?

Starting point is 00:03:31 How many notes is it? How many short phrases are in a row? How many long phrases? Is it a short phrase, long phrase, short phrase pattern? What is happening to the length? and intensity of the phrases as the solo is going along. These are all questions that we need to ask ourselves as we're listening to music if we want to get better at phrasing.

Starting point is 00:03:51 And again, like just me explaining it that way, you can see this is a difficult subject to teach. And I know plenty of people have tackled it and have done great jobs. But I have some specific things that I like to think about when I think about phrasing. And I wanted to share them with you right now because there's just,

Starting point is 00:04:11 there's just a little bit of ambiguity with all of all of our possibilities here for phrasing. So the first thing I want to talk about is listening. And I always like to make the analogy to a foreign language. So if I wanted to learn Spanish, that's great. I can learn I can learn all of the syntax and I can learn all of the grammar from a book. That's no problem. Any of the verbs, any of the nouns, no problem. That's memorization. I can do that. But if I want to learn the cadence of a language, well, now this is getting a little bit more complicated, right? Because Spanish in Madrid is a completely different rhythm and pitch than Spanish in Mexico City. And that's completely different than Spanish in Santiago or Spanish in Lima or Spanish in Arizona. It's all

Starting point is 00:05:05 completely different, the way that the rhythm and the pitch flows. And this is phrasing. It's the same kind of thing. So that's what we need to wrap our heads around. We can learn this, like again, going back to the analogy of Spanish. I could learn the rhythm of, say, a Mexico city cadence of Spanish, right? There's symbols that we can use in language that can dictate that rhythm and that pitch and the phrasing. But is that the most effective way for me to get that into my own speech? Almost certainly not. rhythm and pitch and phrasing is something that is it's counterintuitive to intellectualize it. Like it's so much easier and more natural to just experience it. It's really why it's one of the more difficult things to teach.

Starting point is 00:05:51 It's why you don't see a ton of click beta YouTube videos about phrasing and about getting better rhythmic language. It's just harder to do. You have to actually put in the time of listening and paying attention. So that's where I want to start with this. You will never get better at phrasing unless you're listening for things like rhythmic variation, pitch variation, length and duration of phrases, how the phrase is structured over a solo. You have to spend time doing that. You have to spend significant time doing that.

Starting point is 00:06:18 But this is great, right? If you didn't know that before, now you have another thing that you can spend listening for, and it makes listening to music super fun. Like you're going to come out with insights about people that you've probably heard a million times, like Miles Davis or Bud Powell or Keith Jarrett, that you never thought about. before. So that leads me to my first, my own personal revelation with phrasing happened about 10 years ago. And I was transcribing some Herbie Hancock and I noticed, I think it was from One Finger Snap. It might have been longer than 10 years ago. I'm old. Anyway, transcribing One Finger Snap and I noticed

Starting point is 00:06:56 just how short Herbie's phrases were. Compared to what I was playing when I tried to blow over one one finger snap, I was speaking in run on sentences. I just couldn't shut up. Herbie is playing these succinct short phrases. And then I started to notice that in all the other players I love. I started notice it in the Oscar Peterson solos that I was transcribing. I started noticing it in Keith Jarrett solos. You think of Keith Jarrett as a very verbose player, right? But when you break down the length of each individual phrase, they're super short. They're super short. They're way shorter than what you're playing. And then when I started working here at Open Studio, I started transcribing a lot of Peter Martin, a lot of Jeffrey Keiser, and I noticed the same pattern.

Starting point is 00:07:37 These guys are playing shorter phrases than I am across the board. This can't be a coincidence that all these great players are playing such shorter phrases. So that's where I want you to start with this. Chances are you're probably playing too long of phrases at the beginning of your solos too often. And if you really pay attention to the Masters, it's a lot. shorter than you might think. And they get more out of it. They have more phrases per solo than you and I might because they're shorter. And another character of phrasing from the greats that I've noticed is not only are the phrases short, but there's a ton of variety between the phrases.

Starting point is 00:08:21 So one of the things that makes art great, one of the things that we're attracted to is the artist's ability to mix the familiar with the novel. That's what they're doing. They're, they're kind of commuting with us with things that they know we are going to accept and agree with in their art. And a good artist then is surprising us with something we are not expecting, something we would never consider to be a possibility in the moment of where they put it. And that's how great music is made, too, is I am setting you up. I am inviting you in. I'm giving you something familiar and then I'm giving you something completely novel that you would never dream of happening. So that those two things, right? Short phrases and this mix between the

Starting point is 00:09:08 familiar and the novel is where I want to start our discussion of how to get better. And that leads me to this. How do we get better at this? Is there a way to practice phrasing? Well, we can listen, as I said, and listening goes a long, long way. Getting the sound and language of great players, phraseers in your head is probably 80% of the work here. You have to get the language in your head. You have to be able to sing beautiful, varied short phrases all the time or else you're going to get nowhere. But there is a technical thing that we can do, a little thing I've developed over the years that really helps me. I spend time on this every couple of months where I'll spend about a week working on this one thing, and I notice that it really keeps me in good shape. It really keeps my phrases fresh. It keeps me from

Starting point is 00:09:57 from those run-on sentences, which as pianist is always an ugly possibility. But hey, even trumpet players and saxophone players get into this too, where it's just these huge long lines all the time. And so there's an exercise we can do to kind of get it out of that. And it involves keeping our phrases very short, as you might suspect. We want to think about that first and foremost, short phrases. But the game I like to play is some restrictive practice where I change the rhythmic duration that the phrase is based around with each phrase. So this is restrictive practice, meaning that I'm giving myself a very hard rule that I need to follow as I practice. Let's work this over the tune Solar by Miles Davis. Okay, that's the head.

Starting point is 00:11:01 And now we're getting into the solo. What can we do over these very common changes to practice phrasing? Well, we do these short phrases. And with each phrase, we have to do a different subdivision of the beat as the basis. What does that mean? So let's start out with quarter notes and then whatever I do next has to be different. So if my first phrase is quarter notes, right? One, two, three, four. That doesn't mean, by the way, playing straight quarter notes like this. Just it's quarter note based, right? There's some eighth notes in there. There's some half notes in there. But really, it's based around a quarter, like I'm thinking, a do do that really quarter note based the next phrase after I do that short quarter note based phrase

Starting point is 00:11:57 has to be something different so maybe I'll do eighth notes right short phrase as short as I can make it and maybe after eighth notes I want to do something different so I'll do triplets maybe that's it as short as I like and then maybe I'll do half notes after that right trying to keep it short already I'm kind of running on more than I'd like to and then maybe I go back to quarter notes. That's a short phrase. That's great. Maybe I then go to triplets. Quarter note triplets, right? Okay, I've done that. I have to do something different. Every time I stop and have a pause, I have to recalibrate and do something different. So that, if we just do that, right, with no other rules, that we just have to do something different and has to be short, it's going to sound something

Starting point is 00:12:53 like this. Let's give it to go. One, two, one, two, three, and nice. So literally, just changing the phrase, changing the duration of the note that was kind of the base of the phrase with each phrase. And you might have noticed even then, I kind of let my phrases go on longer than I think I could have. Something that's a real challenge, especially as you're thinking about the duration. So yeah, this is a great way to start. Just being conscious of I can't play the same duration-based phrase the same way twice. It's a great way to get out of your head. There's another way, like we can do a couple other ways to kind of get even more refined with this. So maybe the next day way we'll do is I'll start with longer durations, like half notes, and then whittle it down,

Starting point is 00:14:15 like keep getting shorter and shorter duration. So I'll do half notes, and then maybe I'll do quarter note triplets or dotted quarters maybe, I don't know, and then maybe quarter note triplets and eighth notes and eighth note triplets and just keep whittling my way down to smaller and smaller durations until I feel like it's going too fast and then I'll get back to half notes or even dotted half notes. I don't know. Let's see what happens. one, two, one, two, three, and... So there we go, little short phrases where after each phrase, I kind of shorten up the duration, right?

Starting point is 00:15:32 I went from half notes to quarter notes, quarter note triplets, to eighth note triplets, to eighth note triplets to 16th notes eventually. I might not have done that perfectly, but that was kind of the general idea, right? It was getting short and shorter. So that's one really effective way we can practice this technique. The other way is the same kind of thing.

Starting point is 00:15:49 We do short phrases as short as we can. and instead we try to make contrast. So I might do really all I'm thinking is like long duration, short duration, long duration, short duration. So if I do half notes, the next phrase will be eighth note triplets. And then after that, the next phrase might be quarter note triplets, something longer, right? So whatever I do, I'm just going between going, I got to go shorter, now I got to go longer. Now I got to go shorter.

Starting point is 00:16:16 Now I got to go longer. This gets this a really great effect. and I actually even sometimes on gigs if I'm if I'm feeling like I'm struggling with my phrasing I'll just kind of like deploy this strategy it works really really well I'm always still thinking about I'm not like trying to be strict with it but I'm still thinking about melody and all that stuff but this can really get me out of a funk of just again we want to try to avoid just running our hands doing the same old stuff we always do let's hear how that would sound if I just alternate between okay I'm going to go long I'm going to go short I'm going to go long I'm going to

Starting point is 00:16:47 go short. Let's give it a shot. One, two, one, two, three. It is a little sloppy, but that's kind of the point. It's harder to just do that than merely play a solo. It's why we do restrictive practice for just that reason, because it makes us think about how we're doing things a little bit differently. But you can kind of see, actually, there's some really nice moments in there because it wasn't getting repetitive. It wasn't just a line of eighth notes or just sticking with one rhythmic theme throughout. It was kind of switching themes rhythmically as I went.

Starting point is 00:18:07 It's a really great way to kind of get out of your head about eighth notes or phrasing or technique. Anyway, I hope you find this useful. I certainly do. I love thinking about phrasing in this way of just mixing it up rhythmically, changing that duration, not doing the same thing twice,

Starting point is 00:18:23 and keeping your phrases short. That's so, so important, especially like, I mean, the first three quarters of your solo, you're probably not playing as short of phrases as you could be to be as effective as possible. So just have a go with that. Try that restrictive practice if you want some new ideas about phrases. And yeah, this is my last solo. You'll hear it for a while. We got the Potsweet up and running.

Starting point is 00:18:49 I was there earlier. It looks great. And we'll be recording some more next time. And again, check out our new sponsor MuseCore. Check out the link here in the description to give them a holler and check out that discount for MusCore Pro. It's awesome, awesome stuff. All right, y'all, until next time.

You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Get Better at Phrasing

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