The other day I mentioned that I went to see Eric Harland give a masterclass, which of course made me pull out some records with Harland on them and do a bit of playing. As I've been doing a lot of 6/8 stuff lately I transcribed this groove from a small section of the Aaron Parks tune, Karma, from the Invisible Cinema record and spent some time with it this afternoon. And speaking of this record, if you're a fan of it, it just so happens that Aaron gives away the charts to every tune on the album completely free over at the NextBop blog. Do check it out.
I had the great pleasure of seeing Eric Harland give a masterclass last week at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama where I teach part-time. It ended up being a lot of Q&A not just about the technical side, but also the conceptual and mental side of playing. And one of the things that really jumped out at me was a quote that Eric mentioned by Teddy Roosevelt which is:
"Comparison is the thief of joy"
Right away the quote seems obvious. Don't compare yourself to others because we're all different and you'll just make yourself miserable. But while this is true, Harland went on to talk about a different type of comparison that I hadn't thought of. He said that not only should we not compare ourselves to others, but we shouldn't compare ourselves to ourselves. On one hand I don't necessarily agree, as I think it's important to look back to see how far you've come, and to look ahead to see where you want to go, but what Eric was getting at was that we shouldn't waste our time thinking, "I'd play this much better 6 months from now", or "I wish I could go back and play that gig from last year now". The gist of it was, when you're playing, gigging, practicing whatever, don't waste your mental energy thinking about what you could have done better before, wish you could do better now, or what someone else can do better than you. Rather, put that focus into the music you're playing right now, and make the best music you can make with the skills you have today.
This video of Eric Harland from the Jazz Heaven DVD, The Yin and Yang of Jazz Drumming has been floating around YouTube for a couple years now just waiting to be transcribed. As of late I've noticed it pop up on discussions boards a few times and figured now was as good a time as any to get a pen to paper, or fingers to keys, as it were.
Marcato markings signify rim shots. It's a habit from my drum corps days. E-mail me if you'd like a PDF.
Upon first listening to this I just thought, "Ummmm….OK". How does he improvise something like this? How does a groove like that just flow out of him? But once I began transcribing, I felt a little better. Taken in small chunks it was actually fairly easy to write out. And by the time I got about 12 bars in I saw it. There is actually some method to the madness here. I remember a good friend of mine pondering jazz soloists, and wondering how they just "made stuff up as they went". As most of you know, it's not really like that. It sounds cliché, but a solo really is a conversation. Musicians have a vocabulary; a big bag of ideas and phrases from which to pull their material. They take multiple ideas and string them together in a cohesive fashion, just like a sentence. Harland does the same thing here. Admittedly, I didn't notice it right away. It was going by so fast, and voiced in so many places around the kit that it didn't even sink in. But if you look at bars 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 20, 30, and 31, you'll notice a lot of similarities. There's a pattern there. And to a lesser extent, some of the same ideas and stickings can even be seen in some of the fills. Now, please don't get me wrong. I am in no way, shape, or form trying to take ANYTHING away from Harland. I'm not saying for a second that what he is playing is easy. He's got chops for days which he executes with the utmost finesse. The ideas he's playing, pattern or no pattern, are incredibly well developed and musical, and his ears are absolutely massive. What I am saying is that dreaming of playing something like this is by no means a lost cause. There is some great material in here from which to draw plenty of inspiration. I'm not 100% sure of the form of this piece. It may be through-composed. So I went up to where the head seemed to end and the tune moved to where we might have heard a soloist were this played with a whole band. Besides, lately I've been more interested in smaller chunks of material. Rather than taking a book and trying to systematically working my way exercise by exercise through 50 pages of similar material, I'd rather have more digestible bites. Give me one page that I can work on right now, today. Something that I can get handle on in a few hours, and get really solid in another day or two. Then on to the next thing. Much like the idea of a random practice schedule. I once gave a master class with my trio and someone in the audience asked our piano player about his practice routine. He said that he basically didn't practice exercises anymore. Instead, when he heard something that he liked, but couldn't play, he learned it. Simple as that. Imagine how quickly you'll build your vocabulary that way rather than spending days and weeks running the same exercises. So get started with this first page and get everything you can out of it. Maybe one of these days I'll revisit this piece and transcribe more of it. Then again, maybe I won't.
