Archives for October 21, 2008

The Coltrane quartet was known for its intensity, and this film clip of “My Favorite Things” is a prime example. The YouTube writeup indicates that it was filmed in 1965 in Belgium, and attributes it to a DVD titled The World According to Coltrane.\r\n\r\nWith as much going on as there is in this video, I”m not going to try to analyze it. The piece is a tour de force of modal playing, and it”s enough to simply listen. However, I can”t help but notice Coltrane”s command of trills. It”s hard to connect trilled notes to trilled notes, but Trane does it effortlessly.

You can fumble the chord changes in a solo, hit a host of clinkers, and still come up sounding brilliant if you swing. It”s true. That elusive, hard-to-define concept called “swing” is the heart and soul of jazz. Master it and you”ll play with conviction; miss it and you can hit all the right notes and still sound wrong.\r\n\r\nSo what”s the key to developing a solid, personal sense of swing? Practice. Your playing, particularly your improvised solos, will never swing harder on the bandstand than it does in the woodshed. So it behooves you to incorporate a swing style into your practice sessions.\r\n\r\nDoing so is not hard. Granted, swing is about more than just a way of engineering rhythms; nevertheless, you can approach your scales and arpeggios in a way that accents the offbeats and instills a sense of syncopation in your thinking, and therefore your playing.\r\n\r\nHere”s is one way to accomplish that: assuming you”re practicing your scales and arpeggios in eight notes, slur the upbeats into the downbeats. For instance, let”s say you”re playing a C major bebop scale (C, D, E, F, G, G#, A, B, C) in eight notes. A classical approach would be to slur C into D, E into F, G into G#, and so forth. But in order to make the scale swing, you”ve got to switch the accents around. You want to begin by articulating C. But then you also tongue D and slur it into E, F into G, G# into A, and so on. In other words, you”re tonguing the upbeats, not the downbeats.\r\n\r\nThis approach won”t seem natural at first. You”ll have to work at it a bit. But after a while, it will become ingrained, and you”ll love what it does for your jazz concept. So stick with it. Apply it to all your scales, arpeggios, intervals, and licks.\r\n\r\nAnd don”t forget to listen to the masters. Phil Woods is a perfect example. They don”t swing any heavier than Phil. Give guys and gals like him a listen, and let their approach guide you into your personal swing style.