Birth of the Cool and "Boplicity": How Miles Davis Cooled 52nd Street

It's arguable that no single figure has been as impactful on the evolution of American jazz than trumpeter Miles Davis. A member of the music scene of his native St. Louis from the young age of 16, Davis was quick to find his way to New York City and begin making his mark on the bebop movement, alongside such legends as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Despite being more than able to hold his own amongst such luminaries, Davis quickly grew tired of the virtuosic nature of bebop, and, along with a budding group of other like-minded musicians, sought to find ways to revolutionize the music. It is this fact of Davis's character--his unyielding willingness to find and push the boundaries of existing musical trends--that put him at the forefront of several of the most dramatic shifts in the genre throughout his life. In this analysis, I will cover one of the most significant recordings of Davis and his groups: "Boplicity," from the 1949-recorded and 1957-released album Birth of the Cool, which signals Davis's segue from bebop into a new genre called cool jazz. In examining the circumstances behind Davis's career and his personal relationships, it will become clear that the evolution of bebop into cool jazz was a natural and inevitable progression from his roots as a bop trumpeter.

Early in his career, the driving force behind Davis's urgency of creativity was mostly a musical one, although personal influences played a significant role as well. Arriving in New York in the mid-'40s to attend music school, Miles was quick to acquaint himself with the heaviest players on the scene, including his idol, alto saxophonist and bebop pioneer Charlie Parker. Although he would drop out of Juilliard, he acknowledges that the school played a role in both increasing his facility on his instrument and in providing him the resources to become a more learned musician[1]. After trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie left the heavily-booked Parker quintet in 1945, Davis was picked up as a replacement, and joined the group on dates in New York and throughout the country. Despite a good deal of work from Parker, Davis was growing increasingly irritated by the bandleader's inconsistency; even after their return to New York, Davis and several other members of Parker's quintet remained unsatisfied with his choice of band members, and his worsening heroin abuse, and tensions between Parker and Davis in late 1948 finally forced Miles to leave the group[2]. At the same time as the tumult grew amongst Parker's quintet, Davis was becoming closer with pianist/composer Gil Evans, who would remain one of his closest friends, and whose approach to composing and arranging heavily influenced Miles in the creation of a new style of jazz. Davis, Evans, and several other New York musicians, including drummer Max Roach, pianist John Lewis, and baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, discontent with the extreme virtuosity required of bebop, were meeting regularly at Evans's 55th street home to work on what would become the style known as "cool jazz."[3] Evans's earlier work with the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, an 18-piece group, was a significant influence on the 1949 recording sessions that resulted in Birth of the Cool, which utilized a large group (nine pieces, what would become known as the Miles Davis Nonet), unconventional instrumentation[4], and a distinct compositional and technical style[5]. Davis and Evans were chasing an approach to arranging and composing similar to what had been used by Duke Ellington in his orchestra[6].  An analysis of the instrumentation, orchestration, and structure of the album's most famous track, "Boplicity,"[7] reveals a number of the hallmarks of the Davis/Evans collaborative writing style, and their roots as bebop musicians extending into previously unexplored territory[8][9]. As would become increasingly evident in Miles's later career, the decisions behind the choices he and Evans made in Birth of the Cool were not purely musical, as he explains that many other factors, including the biases of musicians on the scene[10] and the "white" conception of jazz[11], had an impact on how the artists of the time were structuring their music.

To clearly trace Davis's development as a composer and arranger, we must look at his beginnings as a musician in New York City, both musically and personally. Davis had initially moved to New York to attend the Juilliard School of Music, at the urging of his father, and the school did initially contribute to his musical development, in particular through the players he would meet, including pianist John Lewis, a founding member of the upcoming Miles Nonet. He admits, in his biography, that while it wasn't a place of great change for him as a musician, he was able to use the school's resources to further his own musical goals, being a regular visitor to the Juilliard music library, and studying scores from many different composers. His words on the matter, apart from making clear his interest in a wide variety of music, also hint at deeper racial issues that would rise to the surface of his compositions later in his career:

"...a lot of black musicians didn't know anything about music theory. Bud Powell was one of the few musicians I knew who could play, write, and read all kinds of music. A lot of the old guys thought that if you went to school it would make you play like you were white. Or, if you learned something from theory, then you would lose feeling in your playing. I couldn't believe that all them guys like Bird [Parker], Prez [Gillespie], Bean [Coleman Hawkins], all them cats wouldn't go to museums or libraries and borrow scores by all those great composers, like Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Prokofiev. I wanted to see what was going on in all of music. 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 it."[12]

Similarly, though Davis was very active on the jazz circuit in the mid- and late-'40s, and therefore present for the bebop revolution personified by Parker, Gillespie, Hawkins, his good friend Freddie Webster, and many others, he always found himself working hard to match the technical firepower exhibited by players like Gillespie. More importantly, Davis and several other members of Parker's working group were finding it more and more difficult to put up with his decisions, on and off the stage. Miles wanted to oust pianist Duke Jordan, in favor of a Juilliard cohort, John Lewis. Jack Chambers points out the effect of Parker's well-known heroin addiction on the group:

"As the tensions within the quintet grew, they were exacerbated by Parker's erratic behavior, which caused all the members grief. Even when the quintet were booked for a long engagement, the sidemen had to worry about getting paid. ...[Guitarist Jimmy Raney, quoted by Chambers, said:] 'Parker's horns presented a problem--they were in hock so often. At the Three Deuces, the porter had a job assigned to him, to go to the pawnshop every day and get Bird's horn for the job, and then return it to the shop after the job.'"[13]

Davis quit the group in late 1948, and began attending "salons" hosted at Gil Evans's 55th street apartment, where he began to grow much closer to the Canadian arranger, and where several of the players in his soon-to-be-founded group could often be found[14]. It was in this context that Davis found his nine-piece group, thanks in large part to his collaboration with Evans, who was already well-known as an arranger for Claude Thornhill's orchestra, a group that utilized 18 pieces, and featured instruments that were somewhat unusual for a jazz band, including tuba and french horn. Davis and Evans were the principle architects behind the Miles Davis Nonet's characteristic sound, and Davis's selection of players for the recordings that resulted in the album Birth of the Cool was not arbitrary--resulting from his meetings at Evans's basement apartment, his professional encounters with other musicians during his tenure with Parker, and his brief time at Juilliard, the personnel on the April 22, 1949 recording session that produced "Venus de Milo," "Rouge," "Boplicity," and "Israel," was as follows:

Miles Davis, trumpet

J.J. Johnson, trombone

Sandy Siegelstein, french horn

Bill Barber, tuba

Lee Konitz, alto saxophone

Gerry Mulligan, baritone saxophone

John Lewis, piano

Nelson Boyd, bass

Kenny Clarke, drums[15]

Davis's ability to assemble a cast of players so meticulously, at such an early stage in his career, would become a hallmark of his style throughout his life, with this group, and his first and second quintets, exhibiting the same decisively-chosen membership. Jim Merod states that "[a] good deal of Davis’s strength as a musician resides outside the immediate textures of his own playing. His legacy derives, in part, from his leadership ability, his knack of assembling gifted players and provoking their best results to augment his own."[16]

Davis himself implies that Ellington's well-known practice of writing specifically for the individuals in his groups played a part in the instrumentation, section writing, and orchestration of Birth of the Cool:

"...he would always get guys with a sound that you could recognize. If they played alone in Duke's band, you could always tell who they were by their sound. If they played in a section thing, then you could still tell who they were in the section by the voicing, They put their own personality on certain chords."[17]

Richard Cook points out the dramatic differences between this new style, recorded on the Capitol record label, and the New York phenomenon of bebop, as being "...a direct counter to the jaggedness of bop's momentum. Suffused with low brass, buoyed up on almost feathery rhythms, in might have sounded effete, if the playing hadn't projected a different sort of intensity."[18] Perhaps most idiomatic of the style, the tune "Boplicity" contains many of the hallmarks of this new compositional style.

There are a number of clues that bebop is a close progenitor of this style. Formal boundaries can be found distinctly every eight bars, and the full structure of the tune is a 32-bar AABA form, standard in jazz at the time (the majority of Parker's compositions were either 32-bar forms or 12-bar blues forms). The next close tie to bop lies in the changes to the tune, which are very tonally-based: the entire song stays close to its home key of F major, with the A section of the tune briefly tonicizing B♭ major. The bridge of the tune again tonicizes B♭ major in the first four bars, then A♭ major in the next three, before turning around once more to the final A section, again in F.

This is where the similarities to bebop end. The tune itself features no introduction, with the full ensemble in at the top of the piece, playing the lyrically-singable melody in gentle homophonic unison, with a subdued rhythm section (Kenny Clarke plays on brushes throughout the piece, and Nelson Boyd walks steady quarter notes) supporting the band, with the entire tune rolling along at about 136 beats per minute. Already, these are distinct contrasts to bebop, which is best known for its frenetic and angular melodies, and in particular for its tempos, which lay anywhere in the medium-up to tearing-fast range of 200 beats per minute and faster, up to as fast as 400 bpm. The unusual inclusion of french horn and tuba, and the lack of tenor saxophone, suggest that Davis and Evans were attempting to recreate the sound of Thornhill's much larger band, but with a group that could fit into a jazz club, and get paid by a club owner, something that would have been difficult for a group as large as Thornhill's given the deteriorating conditions of 52nd street clubs at the time. Cook calls the Birth of the Cool sound "akin to a reduction of Thornhill's idiom."[19]

"By having the size of what would have been Thornhill's instrumentation, and emphasizing brass over reeds--note that the tenor saxophone, one of the dominant sounds in jazz of the time, doesn't figure at all--Davis's group had secured a more limber and fluid music than anything Thornhill had created."[20]

Importantly to the cool jazz idiom, it's clear in the group's melodic conception that they were straying from the front-edgedness of bebop, with the entire band laying back significantly on the melody throughout the head, playing on the "back edge" of the time, and allowing a special kind of tension to be created between the horns and the rhythm section that could be traced to African American blues roots. Davis mentions the importance of that culture in these recordings, saying (without reserve) that "Birth of the Cool came from black musical roots. It came from Duke Ellington. We were trying to sound like Claude Thornhill, but he had gotten his shit from Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson."[21]

In continuation of the laid-back approach to this tune, the first soloist is bari saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, entering into his solo as the melody fades at 0:58. Bebop often characteristically featured a specific soloist bursting forth from the melody line, in particular at faster tempos, and often featured one of the higher-voiced instruments first, such as alto or tenor sax or trumpet. Mulligan plays fluidly in his midrange here, with light comping from Lewis in the background. Mulligan only takes two A sections for his solo, before Evans and Davis introduce an unusual twist on the form of the tune as a low, brooding horn line enters at 1:25[22]:

The form is still intact in the beginning of the B section, but the arrangers add two bars to the form as Miles enters for a brief solo before an ensemble soli at 1:43.[23] The continuation of Davis's solo at 1:58, which includes horn backgrounds, is an obvious, if not intentional, homage to the heavy influence of Parker on Davis and of Thornhill on Evans[24]:

Analyzing Davis's trumpet solo line (beginning here at m. 20), we can see the precipitative effect of Parker on Miles. The lines are still heavily infused with chromatic approach notes and "bebop-isms," such as the ascending triplet figure in measure 22, and in the obvious 16th note run at measure 25, rife with surround tones and chromatic and double-chromatic approach notes. Nevertheless, leading into measure 27, we also see Miles's rebellion against bop, and the signature for which he would become so well known: the 16th note run stretches into an eighth note run, which stretches further still into a long-sounding dotted quarter, finally finding rest on the whole note at bar 28. His longer, often languid phrasing, mixed with chromatically-colored runs, would become a clear staple of his style.

Released on a two-sided 78 rpm record, the solos and the arrangements on Birth of the Cool are brief, concise, and quick to make their points, a far cry from the sometimes meandering, thought-insistent quality of bebop. The final solo before the head out of the tune is Lewis on piano, playing a simple, eight bar piano line, mostly in the right-hand. The tune closes with the horns in homophony once again, now playing the only final A section, before a short repetition of a two-note melodic figure, and with the tune ending on three decelerated chords, landing at last on an F7#9#11, with Miles floating above the band on a mellow D.

This music, borne from the chaos of bebop, must have seemed to Miles to be a natural extension of the frantic, bustling energy with which he had grown so accustomed in the 52nd street clubs where he played with Parker and Gillespie. Gillespie himself said the music lacked the "emotional heat" of jazz to that point[25]:

"It was a natural progression, because Miles had definitely come out of us, and he was the leader of this new movement. So it was the same music, only cooler. They expressed less fire than we did, played less notes, less quickly, and used more space, and they emphasized tonal quality. This music, jazz, is guts. You're supposed to sweat... in this music. They sorta softened it up a bit."[26]

Importantly, most of the progenitors of bebop were black, and Miles was often chastised by colleagues for his inclusion of white musicians on his albums and in his bands, criticisms that would recur throughout his career for the inclusion of musicians like Evans and Mulligan. Davis himself would later express some disdain at Mulligan for his massive success in the cool genre, insinuating that is was his race that aided his success. Nevertheless, Davis admitted to the importance of race for this new genre at the time of Birth of the Cool's release:

"White people back then liked music they could understand, that they could hear without straining. Bebop didn't come out of them and so it was hard for many of them to hear what was going on in the music. It was an all-black thing. But Birth was not only hummable but it had white people playing the music and serving in prominent roles. The white critics liked that. They liked the fact that they seemed to have something to do with what was going on. It was like somebody shaking your hand just a little extra. We shook people's ears a little softer than Bird or Diz did, took the music more mainstream. That's all it was."[27]

It's clear in analyzing Miles Davis's life and early career in New York that his interactions with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and all the other musicians behind the bebop movement contributed heavily to his foundational role in the development of the cool jazz style. His and Gil Evans's ideas for composing, arranging, and orchestrating were direct reactions to the bebop genre, and yet were still obviously tinged with the musical ideologies that were hallmarks of the bebop style. Standard forms and tonally-based chord changes dominated early experiments in cool jazz, but the creators of the style were able to distance themselves from the genre by choosing new instrumentations and orchestrations that achieved mellower sounds, by changing formal structures at will, and by conceptualizing the music from a melody-centric and listener-centric standpoint. Deeper exploration into this area of jazz will undoubtedly focus on the individual circumstances of the musicians that were formative members of the cool movement--Gerry Mulligan, Gil Evans, J.J. Johnson, John Lewis, etc.--and how their lives and musical careers impacted the way they approached improvising and composing.

Works Cited

• Yudkin, Jeremy. Miles Davis, Miles Smiles, and the Invention of Post Bop. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008.

• Davis, Miles (author); Troupe, Quincy (collab.). Miles: The Autobiography. New York, NY, U.S.A.: Simon & Schuster, 1989.

• Chambers, Jack. Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis. Toronto, ON, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1983.

• Cook, Richard. It's About That Time: Miles Davis On and Off the Record. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007.

• Carner, Gary. The Miles Davis Companion: Four Decades of Commentary. New York, NY: Omnibus Press, 1996

• Merod, Jim. 2001. "The Question of Miles Davis." Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature 28 (2): 57-103. http://muse.jhu.edu.libproxy.txstate.edu/journals/boundary/v028/28.2merod.html

• Henry, Cleo (attr.); Davis, Miles (composer); Evans, Gil (arranger). Boplicity. Miles Davis and his Orchestra. Capitol Records. 7243-5-30117-2-7. CD. 1957.

---

[1]   Davis, Miles (author); Troupe, Quincy (collab.), Miles: the Autobiography. (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 60.

[2]   Chambers, Jack. Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis, Vol. 1. (Toronto, ON, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 83

[3]   Ibid., 92

[4]   Jim Merod, "The Question of Miles Davis." Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature 28, no. 2 (2001): 57-103. http://muse.jhu.edu.libproxy.txstate.edu/journals/boundary/v028/28.2merod.html

[5]   Richard Cook, It's About That Time: Miles Davis On and Off the Record. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007), 16

[6]   Davis, Miles: The Autobiography, 119

[7]   Henry, Cleo (attr.); Davis, Miles (composer); Evans, Gil (arranger). Boplicity. Miles Davis and his Orchestra. Capitol Records. 7243 5 30117 2 7. CD. 1957.

[8]   Cook, It's About That Time, 14

[9]   Jeremy Yudkin, Miles Davis, Miles Smiles, and the Invention of Post Bop. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 15

[10]  Gary Carner, The Miles Davis Companion: Four Decades of Commentary. (New York, NY: Omnibus Press, 1996), 57

[11] Davis, Miles: The Autobiography, 119

[12] Davis, Miles: The Autobiography, 60

[13] Chambers, Milestones, 83

[14] Ibid., 92

[15] Cook, It's About That Time, 14

[16] Jim Merod, "The Question of Miles Davis." Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature 28, no. 2 (2001): 57-103. http://muse.jhu.edu.libproxy.txstate.edu/journals/boundary/v028/28.2merod.html

[17] Davis, Miles: The Autobiography, 119

[18] Cook, It's About That Time, 14

[19] Ibid., 16

[20] Ibid., 16

[21] Davis, Miles: The Autobiography, 119

[22] Yudkin, Miles Smiles, 15

[23] Ibid., 15

[24] Ibid., 15

[25] Carner, The Miles Davis Companion, 57

[26] Carner, The Miles Davis Companion, 57

[27] Davis, Miles: The Autobiography, 119

A Quick Look: Gabriel Santiago

It's been another busy week, but I'd like to get a start on a new string of posts. I've recently had the opportunity to take lessons from several Austin musicians, and I'd like to share a bit about them and our meetings over the next few posts. Until I have a chance to flesh out the whole series of posts, I'll just put up a few videos.

First on the list: Gabriel Santiago. A Brazilian-born guitarist, Gabriel is phenomenal on both electric and acoustic, but his nylon guitar stylings and compositions have really been on my mind lately. He cites many composers and guitarists as influences, among them Pat Metheny, Milton Nascimento, and Toninho Horta (Toninho's 1988 Polygram/Verve recording Diamond Land has been in my car the last couple of weeks--it's well worth a listen!), and his small-group arrangements and compositions are sort of goals for me. This is just a couple of posts from his substantial body of work: more videos can be found at his YouTube channel, and at his website, www.gabrielsantiagoproject.com. Enjoy!

John Scofield live at Blue Note

Whew, this week has already been a long one! And there's no end in sight... Thankfully :) Instead of a musical diatribe today, I thought I'd put up a video that has been an inspiration to me. Actually, several videos... of the John Scofield Trio live at the Blue Note in New York. The creativity, the connection... it's ear candy for days. These are actually part of an 8-video set. Visit daandrums's channel on YouTube for the rest. Happy viewing!









Check out my website, www.ajcjazz.com, for more on myself and jazz around central Texas
Check out my other blog, "JazzScripts" for jazz guitar and bass transcriptions

Kenny Werner Lecture @ NYU, 2005

One of the most in-tune pianists around today, Kenny Werner might be best known for his treatise on improvisation, "Effortless Mastery - Liberating the Master Musician Within"--and you might consider this 2005 recording from the NYU campus to be a teaser into the insights within the book. It's a bit of a long video, but it's worth every second:



Thanks go out to Mr. Werner, for his ever-illuminating insights, and to ArtistHouseMusic for bringing this video recording to YouTube!


Check out my website, www.ajcjazz.com, for more on myself and jazz around central Texas
Check out my other blog, "JazzScripts" for jazz guitar and bass transcriptions

The Road to Confident Music: Learning to Focus

As we've all experienced, one of the cornerstones of good playing is clear, consistent focus. It's much easier said than done! Although it's an ever-present and always improving effort, I thought I'd share a few tips that have helped me in this important process. With practice and an awareness of some of these ideas, you will start to see a marked improvement in the quality of your playing, and you'll feel a great deal of confidence in your music! As you read, think about how you've already worked with these ideas, and how they already affect your playing.

Have a Clear Idea!

In other words, say only what you mean to say! For most of us, that will start with simplification. We are often convinced that we need to search for complex, interesting ideas, but this usually leads to over-complexity, which clouds our original intention. Instead, play something simpler, something clear and concise. Even if it's short, and even if it seems "too simple," you'll be absolutely certain that you're playing exactly what you intended, and it will come across as much more musical. The defining characteristic of every great player is that they are never overreaching their technical ability, and never playing anything accidentally or incidentally. Every choice they make is a conscious musical decision. Of course, in our musical youth, our technical proficiency is limited, but that's what time and practice are for! Use the tools you have to be musical--don't use them to be "impressive." Make conscious, musically responsible decisions, and your playing will achieve an impressive degree of maturity.

Simple ideas often seem to lack validity: they can sound rudimentary if they're used in the wrong way. It can seem tough to validate a simple musical idea in the moment! The clearest illustration of a "musically valid" idea is a lick: that's a pre-cooked musical idea, one that many people are familiar with. Licks are "pre-cooked" because they start out with some musical validity--they came from some other tune, or some other solo, one that has already been judged to be of high quality. But pre-packaged ideas lack the substance of an idea created in the moment, for the moment. So how can we create original material and have it considered valid? The answer is as simple as repetition, or (in more musical terms) motivic development. That's the process of taking a simple idea and using it as the melodic framework for a solo. Once you have a very simple, even a seemingly skeletal idea for a lick, start adding to it, little by little. Turns, approach notes, transpositions and planing... With these tools, a simple, skeletal idea can be fleshed out into a beautifully developed solo, or even an entire composition! Moreover, it will be a solo over which you always have control, and one that you genuinely believe in--because it's uniquely yours!

Maintain Your Focus!

This is possibly the most difficult of all topics to address, and one of the most difficult to practice. An inability to focus can completely sink a solo line, a comping line, or even a familiar melody. I've heard of a variety of ways to work on this, from meditation to deliberate distraction, but neither of these really worked for me, at least not yet. For my money, the most effective method of focus is not mental isolation, but rather an acute awareness of everything. Being aware of all my surroundings--both musical and extra-musical--allows me to be in control of any potential distractions, and also allows me to react to any changes in the musical environment. Whatever your method, the idea is to be aware of as much as possible. Although I might go into greater detail in the future, I'll acknowledge three levels of musical focus: formulaic, intra-musical, and extra-musical.

First and foremost, focus on the music! This is the formulaic part: knowing exactly where you're headed, at all times. Using simple ideas will help you maintain an awareness of the form of your tune. Memorizing the chords, form, and melody (and lyrics!) of your tune will help you understand the logical placement of these ideas. Having one or two different reference recordings will give you a springboard for ideas, and guide you toward a specific sound.

After you have the formula for a tune, you'll need to work on being aware of all the music that's happening in the moment. The most unique aspect of jazz is its ability to change instantaneously. Although our generation has access to some fantastic tools--iRealb, Aebersolds, Band-in-a-Box, GarageBand--even the most advanced of these cannot react to your playing the way a real player can, nor can they make the same unusual musical decisions a real player might. Reacting appropriately to musicians in a true performance setting is an invaluable skill, but one that can only be honed in the heat of a live performance. Play with as many musicians as you can, regardless of what the ensemble ends up becoming! Duo, trio, rhythm section or no, the experience you'll gain in holding together a tune with other musicians will be of great benefit. 
  

A side-note: this is where it can be tempting to over-think things: not all musical situations require adaptive feedback from every musician. The majority of music we listen to, and most of the popular music around today, follows a through-composed formula. In these cases, the musical necessity might actually be great simplicity, and maybe a bit of redundancy. That's okay, if it's the musically appropriate thing to do! You need to be able to adapt either way. But whether you're working with a heavily interactive jazz trio or a rock-solid funk band, you need to maintain your focus enough that you are always playing your part with intention and contributing to the groove of the music, rather than forcing the music and your fellow bandmembers to carry your weight. Everything you play as an active, confident contributor adds huge levels of depth to the music, and makes it immensely more enjoyable for your bandmates and for the audience!

Lastly, once you have the ability to focus on these "intra-musical" ideas, you'll need to begin developing an awareness of the outside world, on all levels. Remember, it's when things are most distracting--when you have a lot on your mind, when you're feeling under the weather, when an inebriated audience member decides to heckle--that you'll need to focus most intently. This doesn't mean shutting out the outside world by ignoring it: trying to blot out distractions outright actually gives those potential distractions more power, and if they break through, it will cause a larger hiccup in the music. By the same token, you don't want to have to fall back on licks you know: in most instances, this actually means you're spacing out on the music, instead of focusing in, and will often result in a meaningless gesture, one that simply eats up time instead of adding to the composition. In order to maintain control over my music, I have found that there is a fine line between ignoring distractions and actually being swayed by them--that's where we need to be! Aware of all our distractions, but mature enough to set them aside. You'll have time to deal with those things after the music has been made, but when you're in the moment, the music is all-important--everything else can wait.

How can we practice this? In the short term, it's simple: lock yourself in the practice room and stay focused on your work as you play! The next step can be as simple as moving to a new area to play through a piece, one where you're not isolated from all other distractions. Always keep your mind focused on the task at hand: the chord progression, the form, simple melodic ideas. It's a great effort, certainly, but your music will sound worlds better as you practice it. Live performance, at a jam session or sitting in on a gig, is the last phase, where you subject yourself to your nerves, the band, and the people listening. Remember, developing impenetrable focus is a years-long effort, but it gets easier and easier with time!

The Result!

Getting these two ideas together is part of a larger goal: building confidence in your playing! You need to be aware of the things that are happening around you in order to react to them appropriately, and you should always stay well within your "wheelhouse" when you're in the moment, always playing simple licks and ideas that you are certain you have a grasp of. As you practice more, you'll expand your technical ability to include more complex ideas, and you'll learn to maintain your focus longer to accommodate larger ideas, but it's perfectly okay to start simple, as long as you have constant control over yourself and your music. Build that confidence early, and it will grow with you as your technique improves!

Just getting a grasp on these two concepts is a tough task, but I'll be covering more on the process of improvisation in coming weeks. Thanks for reading, keep up the practice, and I look forward to hearing from you!

Visit www.ajcjazz.com for downloadable materials, transcriptions, and info on lessons, as well as where to see me playing around town!