Practice Heuristics

Separation of Craft and Art

Classical musicians break up the acts of acquiring instrumental technique and preparing music for performance. The separation between means and ends is clear. Patterns are dealt with, but not with the idea that they are to be applied verbatim in concert. Hanon, Czerny, Klosé, are but a few of the celebrated methods devoted to the development of technique. The goal is to make technique transparent in the same way that, ideally, the instrument itself is transparent when not malfunctioning.

Jazz musicians, burdened by the necessity of dealing not only with technique and repertoire but also with harmony, improvisation, and composition often lose sight of this separation, combining the acts of practicing the instrument and practicing the music. This conflation of craft and art does neither justice, yielding half-formed technique and technical-sounding music. Generally, it is not possible to do everything at once. A pop singer selected for a combination of sex appeal, vocal talent, and dance skill will seldom be sexy enough to model, talented enough to impress a professional singer, or skilled enough to cut it as a dancer alone. I advocated choosing practice methods with specific priorities in mind.

Consistency, Evenness throughout Range

One problem that plagues jazz musicians is an inconsistency in range. Specifically, saxophone players have a tendency to develop one vocabulary that is employed through most of the range; another, less extensive vocabulary for the altissimo range; and a third, equally limited vocabulary, which is applied in the lower register.

It's easy to understand why this might happen. The middle register is worked substantially more than any other range of the instrument. If scales are practiced starting and ending on the tonic, all the middle notes are played substantially more than the lowest or highest notes. Imagine a saxophonist, whose range is from low B-flat to high F, practicing major scales. The high F is only played on one scale. The High E and E-flat are each played in only two scales, etc. The same logic applies to 'licks'. The highest and lowest notes are seldom reached.

Separating technique from the act of playing, this problem is easy to isolate. Modify all exercises to traverse the entire range of the instrument equally. This way the altissimo, middle range, and lower register are not practiced separately. Further, playing through all three ranges with the same air, a unification of the ranges is possible.

An Outline of the Method

• For all exercises, choose a highest note and lowest note in the range. This range can grow or shrink from day to day, the important thing is to choose a range, whether it be one octave or four. At first, if in doubt, start conservatively.
• For each pattern-oriented exercise, whether it be scalar, concerning arpeggios, etc., choose a starting note as you usually would.
• Next, play the exercise ascending until it reaches the highest note in the range (or the highest note in the range that is permissible in the exercise).
• Then play the exercise descending until it reaches the lowest note in the range (or the lowest note in the range that is permissible in the exercise).
• Lastly, ascend again, until the starting note is reached.

In this way, the entire range of the instrument is traversed twice. For example, given a G Major scale and a range from low B-Flat to high F, one would start the scale on either G, as usual. Then one would ascend to high E (F is not contained in the G Major scale), descend to low B (B-Flat is not contained in the G Major scale), and return to G. In a subsequent lesson I will post a more comprehensive exploration of this concept with many applications and accompanying sheet music.

Thanks to Jan Vinci, whose flute lessons inspired my development of this heuristic.

Everything is a Sound Exercise

The final, but perhaps most important heuristic that I will include in this article is the treatment of all practice as a sound exercise. This stems from two observations.

• Sound is the most important attribute of any musician's technique. Great players' sounds are instantly identifiable. There have been many noteworthy artists who lacked virtuosity in most other ways, but it's nearly impossible to find any who lacked sound.
• When sound is compromised in an exercise, it generally indicates not just the neglect but also the degradation of sound. If pinching the reed to play high notes, one is not merely failing to gain anything from the exercise. Bad habits are being developed.
• To rectify technique acquired at the expense of sound, one needs to unlearn the technique, relearn sound, and then relearn the technique, this time with proper sound

I personally played with awful technique for many years, dropping my jaw on low notes and pinching high notes. Subsequently, most of the technique that I acquired at the time is now useless as I seek to redevelop my entire sound concept. If ever anything doesn't sound controlled enough to be a sound exercise, I should probably be doing sound exercises instead.