Jazz guitar lessons.net improve your jazz guitar playing with a Real Teacher podcast number 32 on free playing.
Welcome to jazz guitar lessons, where we help guitarists to learn jazz faster, express themselves more fluently, and have fun along the way. My name is Marc, and if you're looking to learn jazz, form better practice habits, and especially if you enjoy French accent, make sure to subscribe! Wow! How was that for an introduction to a podcast? Well, I think it fits the theme because this week I want to talk about free playing.
And not just free as in, hey, let's go listen to Ornette Coleman and be on drugs. I mean, really actually using free playing as a means to improve your playing and to, well, this is what the website is all about, this podcast videos and everything. And I'm really trying to, you know, reach out and help you guys do better.
What I personally kind of know how to do. I have tips for you. So free playing is cool because you can disregard your note choices, or you can disregard any parameter of music that you decide to put in the trash. Like, I don't want to worry about this anymore. If you go and play free, free, free, you disregard basically everything so you can say, I'm going to just make sounds.
You know, I have my guitar in my hand on my life right now and I can just go like I could go, you know, these things and just really tap on it, shake it, dude, you know, blow on it. Whatever. Whatever floats your boat. You can also do something that I really like to do, which is playing good time but disregarding the notes and the changes totally, completely.
So one of my attempts at learning how to play jazz and Trey's like a real jazz player. One of the great exercises that I found that worked over time was to use the metronome, sound to and for just to use it as a pulse in the background and then start to speak jazz in a way that I would not know what I'm doing technically, in terms of the note choices, arpeggios and chords and chord changes and songs and whatnot. I would know nothing about that, but I would still try to speak the accent of jazz.
Imagine. Like, I don't know how to speak Russian or Spanish for that matter. So I could just try to pick up, listen to a Spanish TV show, and then start to imitate the accent with my voice. Even though I don't make sense with my words, at least I can sound like it. So it's one of the great use of sounding sounding like this and something that you could do.
I'll do a little demo since we we have time. I mean, the podcast, it's pretty cool. So here's a metronome and here's me going at it that I'm not thinking of anything and not going to think of changes, of course, or anything. And you'll see it will still sound like I'm improvising jazz. You ready? I want to I want to get you.
Understand that. Da da da da da da da.
So do you see? If I do this for too long, I start singing and then the neighbors complain. but. Hey. So like this. So this is the subject of a video shot, probably in 2011, 2012, still on YouTube. It's called All the Right Notes. And it was inspired by Steve Bregoli, a good friend, a regular contributor to jazz da Lessons Off that.
And this guy says, hey, you know, if you can't play it, fake it. And if you want to put on a Charlie Parker recording of Miles Davis or West Montgomery, play with them, try to do what they do, but never mind the notes and the chords. Just phrase like a jazz player. Play like them. Have the American jazz accent, but not necessarily imitate.
There are no scores. I mean, you could transcript solo. You should do that also. But now we're talking about playing free. And I think this is the thing I mentioned to basically every student, everybody I work with, it's like, yo, you should just grab your guitar and play some crazy stuff until it starts sounding like what you hear in your head or what you've heard on recordings and or both.
Right? There's other reasons to play free, which is, often this is how I compose you know, you just stumble upon something really good that you find really good and you can kind of go with it, but you're not in the context of, say, playing blues. You're not in the context of playing a standard or any song. You just let yourself go.
So just creatively, I think it's a thing all musicians has to do. Just sit down with your instrument or stand up with your instrument. Take it, start playing. Never mind what any of the rules say, because that's music is in fact a creative endeavor. So we should just go for it and do whatever. Maybe not all the time, but as an exercise, as a means to an end.
Playing free is really, really interesting. So there's several ways to do it. there was this book by, book and Play along by Kenny Werner. It's called freeplay, in fact, and he has these parameters. When I mentioned parameters earlier, I think, say you have time, like a good pulse with a bass blaring drums, but you don't have changes.
So time and no changes. But maybe you have another way to do it, which is changes with no time playing rubato, and perhaps other ways to do it is just sounds, you know, how about tearing this piece of paper apart like I have a piece of paper? Here I go. Maybe that could be part of the jam I have with my friends later on, just because we're creating sounds.
So, I encourage you to check this out. The Kenny Werner, free play and also the Kenny Werner Effortless Mastery, which is also in that vein, is he's saying, well, can you hang on to the form? Can you keep driving the boat? Like, can you keep playing on that 12 bar blues? But by playing, by letting your fingers play anything they want, but still playing on that blues, which is, I think, one of the greatest exercises if you can be free while playing the blues, it means that you can really play anything means you can play the things you know.
So the blues licks and the things you've learned as solos and all the arpeggios and the scales of the jumps. And whenever you've practiced pentatonic, name it blues scales, but it means you can also play all the stuff that you don't know yet that you know, which is pretty interesting. And I'll conclude this podcast with an example of me doing just that.
I'll do B-flat blues, and I will be, going on a tangent, meaning that the blues form will still be there, but I will not, I will not play it explicitly, but it will still be in the background. So please count the amount of bars and hang on for dear life. Ready? 121234.
And do that by the.
End.
Hey, guys, real quick. If you are enjoying this episode so far and you're interested in taking your jazz, start playing to the next level. Please reach out to us. We've helped thousands of guitarists improvise on standards at a level they didn't even think was possible. So link in description or visit jazz guitar lessons dot net to start today.
Okay, back to the episode. All right. So you see, really let myself go. But the important thing is I kind of didn't lose my place. Well, maybe I did. I'll tell you when I listen to this recording after I'm finish this podcast. But the main idea as well is you can be free like this. You really means that you can play anything, anywhere.
And you have the freedom you, to play the good notes, but you also have the freedom to play the bad notes. And it means that you can hold the form whatever happens. Now imagine playing this in a trio and saying, hey, bass guitar and drums and say, we all know it's blues. We count it in one, two, one, two.
We all know it's blues, but we're going to play the craziest things ever. And we'll try not to get lost. We'll try not to be, torn apart or be, taken away. That's what everybody's playing. Will still be right on. But we'll avoid playing the the form will avoid giving you the details of where the chords are going, playing the usual licks and whatever.
Which is, by the way, if you've read Miles biography, what the the quintet this second or the last great Miles Davis Quintet, Wayne Shorter, Tony and Herbie Hancock, of course, and Ron Carter, they said all right, let's play anti music. And that's that's the gist of it. All right. So as far as I can understand it. So I'll let you go with these crazy thoughts.
My name is Marc from jazz Guitar Lessons that improve your jazz guitar playing with a real teacher. And this has been broadcast number 32 on Free playing. Take care.
