Notes, Schmotes! Keep a Steady Tempo!

How many times has this happened in your band... Musicians stumble over a tricky passage, and the beat lurches, bucks, and heaves until it settles on a new tempo much slower than before. Hit another tricky passage and the process repeats itself. What started as an up-tempo dance tune becomes a funeral dirge by the end. 

I blame it all on sheet music.

Sheet music is a necessary evil. We need it because it's not practical to memorize dozens of charts, and it's evil because there's a powerful temptation to mistake the map for the territory, wrecking the music in the process. Allow me to explain...

Consider the feat that musicians are required to perform: Transform information encoded by matter in physical space (black blobs printed on a sheet of paper) to information encoded by energy in time (the sound waves the audience experiences). It's a lot like a Fourier transform, if you're mathematically inclined. Your job as a musician is to make that translation happen. 

The important thing to remember is that your audience doesn't experience the printed page. It experiences your transformation of that page. But as musicians, our primary focus is that instruction sheet in front of us, which tempts us to forget that the product we're making from it is what counts, not the instruction sheet itself. You eat the food, not the recipe. 

Here's another analogy:

Imagine experiencing a You Tube clip using an internet connection that's a little too slow. What would you rather watch? A clip that maintains a normal playback speed while reducing video and audio resolution as necessary, or a clip that maintains high video and audio resolution while slowing down (or even stopping) its playback speed as necessary? Nearly everyone prefers the former, and that's just what You Tube does to cope with slow connections. Detail is sacrificed in order to maintain a steady tempo. 

Playing a tune using sheet music is virtually the same thing. We must keep a steady tempo at all costs even if we have to sacrifice the details of notes, rhythms, dynamics, articulations, and phrasing. Nothing is more important than tempo! As I wrote before, physically disengage from your instrument if you need to, but remain mentally engaged and follow along in good time until you can jump back in. 

As Yogi Berra said about baseball, "90% of the game is half mental." Likewise, most of what we do as musicians is a mental process. Let's redefine 'playing music' as doing as much as you can of the list below*, but no more. It's additive, so each step incorporates everything from the previous steps. Do as much of it as you can, and don't do something on the list if you're not already doing everything above it. Note how much is mental and how much is physical:

• Keeping good time requires only mental engagement. No instrument required. 
• Keeping good rhythm might involve minimal physical involvement (chanting/clapping/tapping). Still no instrument.
• Throw in phrasing and dynamics. Still minimal physical involvement (varying how hard you're chanting/clapping/tapping). Still no instrument. 
• The mechanics of good articulation are specific to your instrument, so only now is an actual instrument required, but the right notes still aren't. You can use just one note or even random notes instead.
• LASTLY- Add the right notes. 

If you define 'playing music' as 'notes coming out the horn', you're taking the lowest priority item on the list and making it the highest. Like a house with a bad foundation, the whole structure soon collapses. Keeping good time has to come first, and getting the notes last. Especially in ensembles, chaos ensues when those priorities are switched around because no two people will slow down the tempo at the same time in the same way, so there's multiple competing tempos. That's the bucking and lurching bit I mentioned before. 

You Play How You Practice

Many people have the bad habit of slowing down or even stopping when they miss notes while practicing at home. Because it's a habit, you can't turn this behavior off like a switch when you come to rehearsal. Slowing down or stopping while playing alone is mostly harmless, but it's deadly to ensemble playing. Since you'll play in rehearsal just like you practice at home, break yourself of this habit as soon as you can. Maybe it should be your #1 priority! Use a metronome or a play-along track and practice not slowing down or stopping no matter what. Pick a short exercise, tune, or excerpt so you don't overwhelm yourself or get discouraged at first. Be patient with yourself and remember that changing habits takes time and patience. Becoming comfortable letting missed notes and rhythms sail by is a great skill to have. It helps develop your ear, and it'll help you fix the problems that led to you missing those notes and rhythms to begin with.  

To summarize, stop throwing the music under the bus of get all the notes all the time. Do exactly the opposite! You and your band will be a lot better off!

*I didn't include on this list the process of sight-singing the notes, which could be added in early on since that too is a purely mental process. Doing this requires some ear training, which is always good to practice. Check out Jamey Aebersold's Jazz Ear Training for that. 

Instant Feedback in Rehearsal

I have two deaf friends from my college days whom I'll call R and J. R went deaf as a child while J lost his hearing as an adult, and it's easy to tell who's who by listening to their voices. J's voice sounds perfectly normal to us hearing people, while 'R' sounds like he has a heavy cold, speaks in a nearly emotionless monotone, and mispronounces common words. Figuring out why is no great mystery. J learned to speak while he could still hear, having access to a built-in mechanism that provided instant feedback and correction. R lacked that instant feedback loop, so even though he's capable of producing speech normal to us 'hearies', he can't progress beyond a very basic level despite there being nothing at all wrong with everything else needed to produce speech (i.e. his larynx, mouth, tongue, etc.).

Amateur big bands are in a similar situation with regards to section and ensemble playing because they're mostly deaf to how they sound. Although they're capable of sounding better, they don't have instant feedback loops in place that enable learning. However, unlike my deaf friend R, we have the capability to construct an effective feedback loop for ourselves. And while it's true that many bands record their rehearsals and later upload them to a service like Dropbox, this doesn't constitute an effective feedback loop because:

• The default option is not to receive the feedback. Musicians have to consciously choose to download and listen to the recording. Most of them won't do this.
• Even if musicians do listen to the recording, it's too late to actually correct any errors that are noticed, so they'll likely make the same errors next time. They can't even mark their parts because they can't bring their parts home with them.
• Discussion with other band members isn't possible, which short-circuits most learning opportunities.
• Even those band members who do make the effort to listen to the recordings will discover the futility of the process and stop listening after a while. I sure did.

To have a truly effective feedback loop, we need the capability for instant feedback, right there in rehearsal where musicians can listen to what they played just moments before, followed by a chance to immediately try again. Limited discussion and analysis might also be helpful. Luckily for us in this digital age, we can easily set up instant recording and playback using a laptop (or tablet), the band's PA system, and an inexpensive stereo microphone.

Read this book! (See link at bottom)

The above solves the problem of how to practice, but not what to practice. For that, we need to separate "drills" from "scrimmages".* Drills are short exercises meant to focus on learning a specific skill or two, while scrimmages (playing whole charts) are full-scale rundowns of the real thing that implement those skills. There's little point in running a scrimmage if you haven't practiced the requisite skills. For example, why would a band attempt to play through an up tempo latin chart if they routinely stumble on fast syncopated rhythms? Unfortunately most bands only run scrimmages while somehow expecting the benefits of drills. Some improvement can be made the through brute force repetition of scrimmages, but it isn't pretty and takes way longer than it otherwise could. Speed up skill development by using the Raph etude book along with short sections from troublesome charts to drill particular skills, then go ahead and try those news skills out in full-length charts. 

Putting everything together, here's a model for a typical rehearsal, to be done in the following order:

• Warm-up of some sort. I personally favor an open blues structure of some sort.
• Drills for specific skills that the band needs to improve on, using the recording/instant playback setup described above combined with material from Raph & relevant excerpts from charts.
• Break
• Play whole charts (scrimmages); record & upload to Dropbox as usual.

The specific proportion of time spent on each section would depend on what the band needs, but I think no more than half the rehearsal should be spent on drills and skill development. After all, most people want to play the tunes and have a good time, including me. I also think that the band will recognize the benefits of the drills/instant feedback procedure in short order, so it probably won't be such a tough sell after the ball gets rolling. What's more, as the band learns new skills and ensemble skills improve, less time will need to be spent on drills anyway.

So there you have it. That's my grand idea for how amateur bands can get the most out of themselves and not tear their hair out doing so. More to come!

*This idea comes from the highly recommend Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better, by Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, and Katie Yezzi.

P.S. My good friend J also happens to be a professional musician. Without his generosity and support I would've quit playing a long time ago!

Keystones, Bricks, and Anthills: How Articulation Makes or Breaks the Band

Holmquist's General Method is so chock full of good ideas that it's hard to know where to start if you're trying to introduce his methods to a band. But after some reading (and re-reading), one particular item came to mind. It's easy to do and requires virtually no training.  The best part is that despite being a small change, it has a big impact on the band's sound that only increases over time.

I'm talking about using your tongue to stop notes rather than allowing the note to gradually taper by stopping the breath. Holmquist calls the former the 'Brick' and the latter the 'Anthill' because of the shape of its sound envelope.

Example of a sound envelope with something
of an 'Anthill decay'. We want our 'Brick'
 decay to be as vertical as possible.

The difference between the two is not in the attack of the note, but the release. The sound envelope of the tongue stop / 'Brick' ends with a vertical line from 100% to 0%, while the breath stop / 'Anthill' has a curve that gradually tapers to zero. So now you're starting and stopping notes with the tongue. This should be the default technique for releasing notes when playing big band music. Read the General Method for further discussion of why this is so. 

What makes the tongue stop / Brick release so powerful is that it's what Charles Duhigg refers to as a 'keystone habit' in his latest book. (Buy the book here; read an excerpt here.) He says keystone habits are "those patterns that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other habits." Here are some of the interconnected benefits that arise when the tongue stop as the default release technique:

• The band immediately sounds cleaner because musicians have almost no discretion about how and when a note is released. The band moves much closer to having only one version of a note instead of over a dozen (see this post for a brief discussion of this effect). Missing a release is just as important as missing an attack!
• In order to successfully release together, keeping good time becomes more important than ever. The habit of mentally subdividing the beat is therefore encouraged and rewarded.
  • Another benefit of mental beat subdivision is the release on longer notes, especially at slower tempos. This addresses the problem I described in 'It's as Easy as 1, 2, -3'.
• There's now double the number of feedback opportunities for musicians to check their sense of time (attacks and releases)
• The tongue stop release of one note sets up the attack of the next note. Not only is articulation clearer, it's more efficient to play as well!
• It's easier to play quarter notes that are unambiguously short.
• Complex rhythms are easier to hear, understand, and learn.
• Clear articulation encourages decisive playing.

Most of these benefits become apparent soon after the switchover is made to use the tongue release, so it shouldn't be difficult to get the band sold on it, even if it takes some occasional reminding to help firmly establish the habit. As the habit gets firmly established, the tongue release creates a virtuous circle of other good habits that allow the band to sound even better over time.

Lost in (Rehearsal) Space

Mats Holmquist has published The General Method, A New Method For a Tighter Big Band,  a book that's a must-read for anyone who plays in a big band. Far more than anything I could ever accomplish as an amateur, Holmquist uses his years of directorial experience to dissect all the errors that plague big bands, keeping them from sounding their best. In subsequent posts, I'm going to delve into some specific areas of The General Method and offer my own responses. 

Danger, Will Robinson! Bad rehearsal space!

The subject of the present post, however, revolves around something that isn't included in the book, but which is nonetheless critical for the band's well being. 

Everything in The General Method is for naught unless the band has a proper rehearsal space. To illustrate this point, here's a story about three bands that I play in semi-regularly. It's something of a natural experiment showing the impact of rehearsal space on a band's performance. 

Here's a description of each band's playing space:

• Band 'A' plays in a noisy, crowded restaurant.
• Band 'B' alternates between the banquet room of a not so noisy/crowded restaurant and a small auditorium inside a senior living facility. 
• Band 'C' plays in the downstairs meeting area of a church.

And here's my evaluation on how well they play as an ensemble:

• Band 'A' is stuck on the 'OK Plateau'. Their book is interesting but not challenging (nothing wrong with that). There's very little attention paid to phrasing, articulation, dynamics, and general music-making. They're playing the notes and not much else. 
• Band 'B' has a more varied and challenging book. Although they're usually aware of phrasing, articulation, dynamics, etc. but they aren't consistent about it. They also miss opportunities to apply knowledge gained in one chart to others. Their playing gets worse at the restaurant and better at the senior living facility.
• Band 'C' attempts some pretty difficult charts and usually does a decent job of making actual music from the notes. They also do this despite not playing as often as Bands 'A' and 'B'. 

The band's choice of playing space has two major effects:

1. You can't rehearse when you're in front of people who have to pay to be there (ex. restaurants). Like it or not, those people are an audience, and the band is performing, not rehearsing. Without rehearsal, mistakes become entrained and bad habits are reinforced. Quality inevitably declines. 
2. The insidious Matthew Effect works over a longer time period. Because of the first effect (above), bands with better rehearsal space tend to play better. This in turn attracts better musicians, which further improves that band. Vice versa for the bands with bad rehearsal spaces. 

In short, if the band doesn't have a good rehearsal space, they eventually reach the 'OK Plateau', where mediocrity rules the roost and music goes to die. If they have a good rehearsal space, there's the opportunity to work and improve. Taking full advantage of that opportunity is something else altogether, and I'll address how that can be done in future posts. 

The Fully Pneumatic Band

pneu·ma  [noo-muh, nyoo-] 

noun

1. the vital spirit; the soul.

2.Theology . the Spirit of God; the Holy Ghost.

Origin: 1875–80;  < Greek pneûma  literally, breath, wind, akin to pneîn  to blow, breathe

In my previous posts on complexity, I emphasized the need to allow for some mental bandwidth to be devoted to section and ensemble playing. But what if someone's chops are up to snuff but they still struggle with ensemble playing? How might you encourage the basics of this vital skill? Where would you even begin? 

The essence of good ensemble playing is largely ineffable, at least for me. I can tell you some its attributes, signs, and symptoms, but not necessarily a detailed step-by-step process of how one might go about developing it. I suspect the approach one takes varies widely from person to person, in keeping with the Berliner Principle. So, true to Monk's advice not to talk music to death, I want to focus on very basic stuff you can do that might foster better ensemble playing while keeping the jabbering philosophy part to a minimum. 

So what can we do? We'll get to that soon. First, I'm going to sell you on the importance of breathing. 

He might have played even better
 had he actually inhaled.

You've probably heard that "the band that breathes together, stays together". That's true whether or not you happen to play a wind instrument. The act of breathing is so natural and vital that the simple act of coordinated breathing can work wonders, especially at the section level. Anyone who has played in a concert band or orchestra with a conductor standing up front has seen him/her use their breathing (or the lack of it) in the performance of their job. 

Take this example from a NY Times article on conductors (emphasis is mine):

Conductors often speak of the importance of breathing: of inhaling in time to an upbeat to prepare for an entrance, much the way a singer draws a breath before starting. “The strings have to be encouraged to breathe” as well as the winds, Mr. Nézet-Séguin said. “It makes the whole thing more natural.”For Mr. Bicket breathing as conducting is a necessity. If his hands are otherwise occupied playing a harpsichord or an organ, his cue for entrances often comes with an audible breath. The nature of that breath can affect the playing. A sharp intake creates a harder-edged sound.

Leonard Bernstein mentions breathing in The Joy of Music (emphasis is mine):

...he [the conductor] must show, in his silent upbeat, the character of the music which is about to sound. Whether he thinks of it as tense and agitated, or weighty and doom-ridden, his upbeat should show this, in order to enable the orchestra players to respond in kind. It is exactly like breathing: the preparation is like an inhalation, and the music sounds as an exhalation. We all have to inhale in order to speak, for example; all verbal expression is exhaled. So it is with music: we inhale on the upbeat and sing out a phrase of music, then inhale again and breathe out the next phrase. A conductor who breathes with the music has gone far in acquiring a technique.

I'll add that breathing with the music is the responsibility of everyone, not just the conductor. Breathing with the music makes you a much more effective player and solves a lot of problems with badly timed entrances, attacks, accents, etc. 

So, what to do? For now, put your instrument down. Ironically, it's the biggest barrier between you and the music. Also, you'll need other musicians around because ensemble playing can't be learned alone. You need at least one other, but preferably the whole band will participate. Sit just as you do in rehearsal or performance, but have one person (the lead trumpet probably) try to get everyone else to simply inhale, then clap together. The inhalation is the cue/upbeat/ictus for the subsequent clap. Not as easy as it seems, especially when the guy doing the inhalation cue/upbeat/ictus is the lead trumpet, who stands at the back of the band. 

As a special encouragement, you might pack band members in as tightly as possible. Good listening skills aren't the exclusive domain of the ear, but rather involve a more intuitive, visceral, gut-level approach. So writes Tom Palmatier in "A Guide for the Blue Collar Band Director" (emphasis is mine):

Insist that the band sit almost uncomfortably close together. The really great British brass bands sit with their elbows touching so they can feel each other breathe. I like to set up the band myself or to put out some "limits" at the perimeter to keep them packed in. They can't listen to each other if they're spread out too much.

If you can manage to get the band to clap together, then have everyone pick up their instruments and just play one note instead of clapping. And if you can do that, you're well on your way to having tight entrances and releases as well as unified phrasing and articulation. In short, the coordination of phrasing and articulation starts with the coordination of breathing. 

So why not take a few minutes to have the band just practice breathing together? Maybe that's just what everyone needs in order to get tuned in to one another. 

P.S.  Also, don't neglect (certain) recordings. A good pair of earphones (like these or these) opens up a whole new world when you can hear musicians breathe on studio-recorded albums. There's a wealth of information conveyed by how slow or fast, how deep or shallow a musician inhales just prior to an entrance. 

P.P.S.  If you're really into this breathing thing, maybe you can try Inuit throat singing (see an example here), or maybe take the whole band out for a group yoga class! 

Fascinating (Frustrating) Rhythm

Raph's one measure rhythm #13 is a pernicious little beast:

A close variant omits the quarter note on beat 4

What is it about this rhythm that trips up nearly everyone, including me? There's an instrumental version of "Night and Day" that has this figure multiple times, and it's never played the same way twice. Seldom is it played correctly. Usually the quarter note on beat 3 is rushed, causing everything for a few beats afterward to stumble. Kind of like moving a blind man's couch just a few inches to the left. Not enough to cause a disaster, but enough to make the band sound lousy. It reminds me of this problem that I wrote about previously. 

I've struggled to find a universal explanation for why most people want to rush beat 3, but I gave up. Personally, my mind tells me to continue the syncopation that's set up by the eighth rest + dotted quarter note, but the quarter note on beat 3 violates that expectation. Maybe your reason for stumbling over this figure is different than mine. It doesn't really matter. What does matter is you have to discover a tactic to reliably solves this problem- for you. That quarter note has to fall exactly on beat 3, like a pile driver cracking a watch crystal. Your timing needs to be exquisite to pull it off. 

One solution I came up with is to bend, but not break, one of Raph's 'Basic Rules'. That's Rule #2: "Any note longer than a quarter-note is given its full time value." I use breathing to solve the problem by taking a sharp, quick breath on the 'and' of beat 2. What I actually play is close to this:

In reality, I almost stop my air stream. It's more of very fast taper to near zero. Maybe I take a quick breath, maybe I don't. What's important here is the mental conceptualization of a very brief pause allowing the next quarter note to fall right on beat 3. 

Most importantly, I think of that rest on the 'and' of beat 2 not as a rest per se, but as note that I happen to play by inhaling. In so doing, I physically prevent myself from coming in early on beat 3. When it comes to music, I'm a kinesthetic learner, which fits with

The broader point here is for you the individual to experiment with different approaches and find what works best for you. The tactic I use fits very well with  my Myers-Briggs intuitive/thinking (NT) temperament.  Your mileage may vary.


I've written before about Paul Berliner's Thinking in Jazz, and I'll emphasize again that Berliner describes a shocking variety of personal variation when it comes to how different people approach and solve the same problems in jazz and swing music. Maybe I'll start calling it the Berliner Principle. 

Don't be satisfied with mediocrity! If you keep wrecking a particular rhythm or phrase, let your curiosity drive you to find a solution that best fits how you approach the music. That's just one more reason why talking about the problem isn't nearly as effective as simply trying out different ideas until something sticks, then building on it. Now that I've figured out what works for me, I simply write a circled "13" above that troublesome figure in my part. That's enough to remind me to use my home-grown tactic to make sure I nail that rhythm every time.

Chicken Sexing, Plane Spotting, and Swing

"Talking about music is like dancing about architecture."

-Thelonious Monk

Ask a Japanese chicken sexer how they do their job, and the most likely response will be something like, "I don't know. The chicks just look male or female to me." If you could ask a WWII era British home defense aircraft spotter how they distinguished Allied from Axis planes, you could expect a similar response. 

Good time & good rhythm. Chicks dig it. Do you?

Teaching someone to sex day old chicks or distinguish high-flying (and often invisible) aircraft sounds like a straightforward job. Design a seminar complete with nifty Power Point slides featuring snazzy diagrams, give students lots of handouts and quick-reference cards, and you're off. Only you aren't. Turns out giving explicit, articulable instruction is the worst way to go! Instead, a deceptively simple master/apprentice model where the teacher gives immediate yes/no feedback to the student gets the job done much better. 

There's a similar situation in the big band where we try to give clear, unambiguous instructions to less experienced members on how to swing, how to play tricky rhythmic passages, syncopations, etc. Attempts at explanation fall flat, no matter how detailed, verbose, and well-intentioned they are. In fact, it probably gets worse the more you try to explain it. The only way to learn how to swing is to listen and play, play and listen, over and over, to people who've 'got it'. You can get off to a good start by using materials like the Raph etude book, but that will only give you a rough idea of how to play. The real learning has to be done alongside a group of people who 'get it' already.

"Man, if you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know." 

-Louis Armstrong 

But what if your band doesn't have very many people who 'get it'? The band needs a critical mass of these people in order to provide an adequate pool of 'teachers' for the less experienced players to emulate. I'd say at least 50% need to be experienced, maybe more. The 'yes/no' feedback we're looking for is simply if the novice can match the playing of the more experienced people. Immediate, real-time, unambiguous feedback. Many amateur bands are permanently stuck in mediocristan because they lack that critical mass of experienced musicians by which the less experienced can bootstrap themselves. 

Worse yet is the lack of understanding about how swing and jazz is actually learned, especially at the ensemble level. Aside from the basics, it's not by verbal instructions or critique, classroom learning or round table discussions. Nope. Just find people better than you and emulate their sound. You have to trust that your subconscious mind will figure out how to make it happen. The cycle of frustration I wrote about last time is fueled by this misunderstanding. Well-intended experienced musicians confabulate a rational but specious explanation of how to play this or that. Novices try to put those instructions into practice and fail miserably. Everyone winds up frustrated.

Talking about it doesn't work, and there's not enough experienced musicians on hand to effectively transmit the knowledge. What to do? We'll explore some next-best options in the following post.