Quick burst

After playing my weekend gig at Brown Sugar By The Sea in Newburyport this weekend, I made a huge connection to something that I had read in Miles' Book. Last week I spent a lot of time studying Miles' playing and noticed just how much space he incorporated into his improvisation. This is something very prominent in the playing of a lot of the musicians from Miles' era. After reading a lot on what society for musicians was like at this time, I can see why. All these guys did was play music together. They played enough that it became their second form of communication. When human beings talk, unless you are a chatterbox, we tend to put space into our phrases. Miles seems to incorporate this heavily into his improvisation. I tried doing this at my gig this weekend and found it to be an extremely useful tool. Instead of thinking about playing jazz lines, I tried to voice my improvisation to be as if I was talking. This approach forced my playing to be really melodic and have a lot more creativity.
A great example of miles using space would be this recording -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0xkMxT6KGo

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Final Project

Image
For my final project, I really wanted to see if I could improve my ability to improvise with more genuine jazz feel through learning about and trying out the approaches that Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and Herbie Hancock used on a day to day basis. After reading about the three of these unbelievable musicians, I learnt a lot about practice technique as well as a lot about the type of mentality that It takes to be a true jazz musician. Since I play at least one jazz gig a week, I thought it would be cool to map my progress through these gigs. The first thing that I started working on was fixing my practice regime to match more of what these guys were doing in their day to day lives. One of the things that really inspired me was something that Mingus had said about the way that he practiced music. He stated that he would practice without his instrument every second of the day. He would actively listen to music and pick up on important things that one would not find unless actively loo...
Read more

Davis' idea of freedom in the music world (quotation)

Image
Miles - The Autobiography Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe 1-80 pgs Moving to New York and attending Juliard School Of Music allowed for Miles to meet a lot of very influential musicians as well as gain a lot of knowledge. The knowledge that Miles gained was from both the musicians that he was around as well as his access too the music libraries in NY. Shortly after moving to New York, Miles expresses shock as he finds out that a lot of the top jazz musicians believed that if you went to school for music as well as learnt music theory that you would end up playing as if you were white, as he describes it. In other words, playing without feeling. When expressing this shock, Miles states something that is extremely universal and powerful. "Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery, and I just couldn't believe someone could be that close to freedom and not take advantage of all the shit that they can" (Miles 61) Miles' background was heavily routed in civil righ...
Read more

Quote blog

Herbie Hancock finished Leading up to this point in the book, I have learnt about Herbie's early life including his playing experiences with Donald Byrd to his joining Miles' famous great quintet from 1963 to 1968. Coming from a background of classical and soul music from growing up in Chicago, Herbie appears to have a very free flowing personality. I definitely got this vibe from a story that Herbie told about the first time he got the chance to join Miles' band. The story went that Herbie was in the middle of recording with a few musicians in his area. He was recording for a studio and was considering putting out an album. The manager of the studio got word that Miles was looking for Herbie and that he was about call him. Herbie did not believe it, but was told that if Miles asked if he was with anyone, he was to say no and agree to what ever Miles said. To no surprise, Miles called and invited Herbie to become part of Miles' first great quintet. Upon first meeting,...
Read more