Elephant in the Room
Yesterday, I conducted a workshop for the British Columbia Registered Music Teachers Association.
The topic: How to Teach Jazz Piano.
The class: Remember this post? Generally, the class consisted of piano teachers from the ‘read-execute’ tradition who are encountering more and more students interested in learning “jazz.”
The elephant: I’m not interested in RCM-approved transcriptions of Oscar Peterson solos. I’m not interested in jazzy versions of Pachabel’s Canon in D. I’m interested in a fundamental shift in methodology. They need to embrace a ‘listen-execute’ tradition. And I want them to embrace the jazz ‘listen-execute’ tradition!
Every music teacher I spoke to recognized the imbalance. They all want to change, but don’t know how. The elephant is getting bigger.
Our goal: Build another room!
UPDATE: I spotted another elephant.
Related posts:
I’d like to see more detail on the ‘listen-execute’ tradition and to actually get this into the colleges/universities.
I studied jazz in college (now mount royal university) and was extremely frustrated at the time because they follow the typical – cram tons of stuff down your throat and see what happens approach, lots of extraneous material (classical history, non-core electives) instead of the ‘Imitate, assimilate, innovate’ method, which implies the first phase is just learning solos (listen-execute that you mention). Can you imagine spending the first year of school or more just learning songs/solos instead of trying to take a scale/mode and make music out of it with no context?
I see it time and time again, students struggling to make music even though they know the scales to use. The theory and experience needed to execute the 3rd phase, innovation comes way too early in the education process in my opinion.
Also many people don’t realize that to play at high speeds requires that brain /muscles develop memory. If you tell someone here are all the modes to use over this progression, there is no way that is going to turn into music at first.
Unfortunately when I complained the implications were that the student is the one with the problem.
i can’t tell you how frustrating it was in jazz college and I quit after 1.5 years. I have a master’s in engineering so I’m not exactly afraid of hard work. everybody trying to play and sounding like crap, with intimidating and often arrogant teachers (great musicians though). Giving us tunes like confirmation the first year and being lost trying to improvise over it.
Then I found Jimmy Bruno’s guitar institute and it became a simpler system of learning tunes and applying 5 caged shapes to the fretboard. the only missing link ( a big one in my opinion) is playing solos note for note and learning the language. Students that submitted videos would tend to ramble over scales and not really be melodic or reflect the language. He did teach chord tones, arpeggios, etc.
Then I found Greg Fishman’s jazz guitar/sax etudes. This allowed me to play at blistering speeds in really musical ways. You feel like you’re playing jazz whose power at early stages can’t be understimated. Of course you can also transcribe.
But then the challenge became how to take those skills (from the etudes) and truly improvise. Based on how I learned rock/blues it most likely becomes inherent after enough imitation and assimilation.
I’d love to somehow get this type of approach into the schools although they usually have strict policies to follow (electives, etc).