24. Assimilate - Practice, Practice, Practice

We are what we repeatedly do. 

Excellence, then, is not an act, 

but a habit. 

—Aristotle 

Last week I mentioned Clark Terry’s three important bits of learning to improvise: Imitate, Assimilate, Innovate.These are also important in growing as a musician in any genre, even if we never have to improvise.

I discussed listening as basic to imitating. In our listening we pick up on things that are going on in the music we are listening to. We pay attention to what is going on within the music and even within our own emotions and responses to the music. Imitation, in Clark Terry’s thought, is learning by ear and then absorbing the feel, articulation and time of whatever you are listening to.

Well, in that absorption something else begins to happen- the second of Clark Terry’s bits: Assimilate.

I looked up the general definition of assimilate before digging into what he meant by it. Here is a little from the Free Dictionary online:

Assimilate means:
1. to learn (information, a procedure, etc) and understand it thoroughly
2. to become absorbed, incorporated, or learned and understood
3. to bring or come into harmony; adjust or become adjusted to
4. to become or cause to become similar

To learn and understand thoroughly, in the case of musical listening is not just saying, “Oh, I get the theory behind what is being played!” It goes beyond understanding what is happening. It is hearing the theory applied. It moves from getting the theory to hearing, feeling, catching hold of what the theory sounds, feels, and perhaps even looks like.

Assimilation then moves to allowing what we learn and understand thoroughly to become absorbed and incorporated in what we are doing. Remember, we are imitating Clark Terry, Miles, Coltrane, or Herb Alpert. Imitation is beyond aping or mimicking- it is absorbing the style so it becomes yours. As a result we ourselves can move into harmony, become adjusted to whatever it is we are listening to and imitating. That is an important step that cannot be overlooked, or short changed.

On the Jazz Advice website where they talked about these three things of Clark Terry’s they described some of this step this way:

Assimilation means ingraining these stylistic nuances, harmonic devices, and lines that you’ve transcribed into your musical conception… truly connecting them to your ear and body. This is where the hours of dedication and work come in.

• Get into the practice room and repeat these lines over and over again, hundreds of times, until they are an unconscious part of your musical conception. 
• Take these phrases through all keys, all ranges, and all inversions. 
• Begin slowly and incrementally increase the speed until you can easily play them. 
• Don’t feel satisfied until you can play these lines in your sleep. 

 This is not an easy step to complete.

Yeah- I know.

So what now?

You are what you practice most. 

---Richard Carlson

Well, the basic answer is go and do it. That phrase above, connecting them to your ear and body, is really the goal.  But can I really do that? Do I have the motivation to do what needs to be done to become a better trumpet player? What about those days when that trumpet looks like it weighs a ton and the mouthpiece seems to have all kinds of nails sticking out before I even pick up the horn?

At this stage of the learning, we are working at being similar in our style to whatever we are listening to. So we just have to keep at it. Maybe we are working on a difficult passage in a classical wind band piece. The notes run by too fast. Keep playing it. Build it up in your head. Listen to a recording of it. (Much gratitude to You Tube on this one!) I have been doing that with that first characteristic study from Arban's book. I found a recording by Paul Mayes of it at full speed and listen time after time to it. What are the nuances? I watch his fingering and see if he uses any alternates. I even watch how he moves the trumpet on his lips. It is the whole process of imitating- hearing, feeling, seeing.

Don't overlook singing the music as well. Part of the assimilation is to get it into your head. Sing it. Then sing it again. Get the feel. I can usually sing something closer to the full tempo sooner than I can play it. But they work together.

These tricks work. They help me pay attention to the music and how I feel as I'm playing. But more than that, they also introduce me to a way of playing that I may not have known before. When I try to improvise, for example, I tend to be more melodic, Miles Davis in "Birth of the Cool" or even Al Hirt in "Java." I have not been able to think fast to do some of the bebop licks. But I have been listening to them and even singing some of them.

What I continue to be amazed at is that this is all taking place for me now- 55 years after I first learned the trumpet. It is possible- and exciting- for an old dog to learn new tricks. Some of it is common sense. Some of it is just the old line- practice, practice, practice. What do I want to become as a musician? Well practice that.

And usually all it takes is to pick up the horn and start those long tones and my mind and body begin to come together. It's about the music.

23. Observe and Imitate

Try to find the best teachers,

listen to the finest playing, and

try to emulate that.

Be true to the music.

-- Wynton Marsalis

I have been reading Words Without Music, an interesting memoir/autobiography by modern American composer Philip Glass. It is a good insight into the creative process of one remarkable composer and how he developed into the person he has become. Reading it with an openness to seeing creativity develop is worth the time. At one point he is describing his working with sculptor Richard Serra. Glass spent several years working with Serra as a "day-job" to support his composing. He expressed to Serra one day that he would like to learn how to draw to which Serra replied that he could do that by teaching glass how to "see" and then he would be able to draw.

That was an eye-opening insight for Glass. He reports the following thought that flowed from it:

Drawing is about seeing, dancing is about moving, writing (narrative and especially poetry) is about speaking, and music is about hearing. I next realized that music training was absolutely about learning to hear - going completely past everyday listening. p. 223 [emphasis added]

This reminded me of an article about Clark Terry on the Jazz Advice website. Terry's three steps to improvising are:

Imitation, Assimilation, Innovation.

That simple. (Yeah. Right!) They define imitation this way:

Listening. Learning lines by ear. Transcribing solos. Absorbing a player’s feel, articulation, and time.

The same as Glass's insight- learning to hear. Paying attention.

We've all heard someone say (or have said it ourselves) that they just don't "get" or "understand" that music.The first time you hear music from a completely different culture based on scales and rhythm that is "foreign" to us, we scratch our heads in wonder. What that means on some level is that we are not listening or able to listen to the music as it is meant to be heard. Our own brains don't expect it to sound that way.

Learning to hear. Paying attention.

But we can keep working at it.  We can keep listening. We can train ourselves to listen differently. Too often we expect things to be just like they have been before. Or in a way that we are used to. Glass himself faced a great deal of criticism and even hatred for the type of "odd" music he was writing. When he started in the 50s and 60s "modern music" was considered the music of the 1900s- 1920s or so. People came on stage and attempted to stop his concerts! They weren't able to hear- and therefore made a judgement about its quality and even its definition as music.

I would go beyond listening to learn to improvise. I think it is essential to being a musician of any type of music. Hearing what it sounds like; hearing what it feels like. Then picking up our instrument and trying to imitate it. The more we listen, the more we are open to hearing, the greater our musical skill will become and the deeper our understanding of music will go.

What this boils down to is going beyond the music theory and an intellectual understanding. The website Brain Pickings has a post from the 1982 book by author and composer Elliot Schwartz Music: Ways of Listening. The book outlines seven essential skills of learning to listen in this age where, he believes, we have been “dulled by our built-in twentieth-century habit of tuning out.”

The first skill is:

• Develop your sensitivity to music. Try to respond esthetically to all sounds, from the hum of the refrigerator motor or the paddling of oars on a lake, to the tones of a cello or muted trumpet. When we really hear sounds, we may find them all quite expressive, magical and even ‘beautiful.’ On a more complex level, try to relate sounds to each other in patterns: the successive notes in a melody, or the interrelationships between an ice cream truck jingle and nearby children’s games.

It's all about hearing. The other six skills Schwartz explains help us guide our learning and our hearing, going deeper and broader.

• Time is a crucial component of the musical experience. Develop a sense of time as it passes: duration, motion, and the placement of events within a time frame.

• Develop a musical memory. While listening to a piece, try to recall familiar patterns, relating new events to past ones and placing them all within a durational frame.

• If we want to read, write or talk about music, we must acquire a working vocabulary.

• Try to develop musical concentration, especially when listening to lengthy pieces.

• Try to listen objectively and dispassionately. Concentrate upon ‘what’s there,’ and not what you hope or wish would be there.

• Bring experience and knowledge to the listening situation. That includes not only your concentration and growing vocabulary, but information about the music itself: its composer, history and social context. Such knowledge makes the experience of listening that much more enjoyable.

This isn't just about music, of course. The relation to writing, or cooking, or being good at your job can be easily made. From the Brain Pickings post:

Perhaps most interestingly, you can substitute “reading” for “listening” and “writing” for “music,” and the list would be just as valuable and insightful, and just as needed an antidote to the dulling of our modern modes of information consumption.

Go for it. Listen!
Then, really hear.
Then imitate.

21. Be Crazy- Crazy Good!

Those who dance were thought to be insane 

by those who could not hear the music.

I know- I ended last week's post with that same quote. Well, consider it the theme, the phrase that ties last week to this week. It is a segue into what is like a coda to last week. For when I was finished typing it for last week, I could hear the unmistakable voice of camp director, Mr. Baca:

Are you crazy?

and the response, as always

Yeah- crazy good!

Not sure what to say about that I Googled the phrase "crazy good" and ended up at the online Urban Dictionary where I found:

a. Awesome, amazing, cool, stunning, super cool

Knowing the humility for which we trumpet players are so well known (?), that made sense. Hey- this is about being "crazy good." Awesome, amazing, etc. It is beyond just plain good. Man, it's crazy good!

But that's not what the quote is about. It's more than being especially good, talented or stunning. And sure enough, right after that first definition was another:

b. The feelings following an enlightenment; typically in creative work (elevation of work of art, idea, ability, level of happiness), where one is playing with and extending further. As the paradigm has shifted, others may express the genuine feeling you have actually gone crazy, however the opposite could be true and the path to awesomeness is being cemented.

Wow. Now that I have had happen. A moment of enlightenment, that old "Aha!" moment, leads down a path that you had never thought you would be following. The idea or ability or level of happiness is beyond what we have thought to be "normal." And that can feel like crazy!

Isn't that what musicians are looking to do- go beyond the "normal," find the new idea, the new experience, even in the song you have played hundreds or more times?  You finish playing that exercise in Clarke or the Etude in Concone and you find yourself sitting in silence. Something has just happened. You can't explain it, but you know it is real. People may look at those hours of practicing studies from the 19th Century and look at you and say,

What? Are you crazy?

and you smile and say,

Yeah- Crazy  good!

Or you are sick and tired of that piece your band plays every gig. There isn't even a place of solos or improvising. Sure, the group plays it well. You should after how many times you have played it. But then there's that moment when the audience stands and applauds and you realize you have just played it in a way that you never remember before. Sure, same notes, same rhythms. But the groove? The expression? The tightness of the group? You smile to yourself and say,

Yeah- Crazy good.

Or there's that memory of that place on the west facing lookout at the park. There's room for maybe 20 or 30 people- and the place is full. It is almost sunset on a perfect day. People are chatting and discussing everything from the weather to politics to how to keep the kids quiet long enough for you to see the sun set.

You didn't need to worry. As the sun sinks into t he western horizon and the colors begin to grow and deepen, the crowd speaks more softly. Even the children are entranced by this every day event as daylight lessens and shadows lengthen. You realize that the whole group is now silent. Adults and children in awe of one of the most common events on the planet. In awe as if there has never been one like it- and never will be again.

Try to explain that to someone who may not be able to get it, who doesn't hear the music of the sun or the birds in the forest behind you. Try to describe what it means to one of those overly logical-types who want answers.

What? Are you crazy or something?

Yeah- crazy good!

The past few weeks I have written about the language of music and the ability to speak it, live it, understand it, play it. It is a wordless language that makes no sense to someone who has never experienced it. It is tough enough for most of us on those days when the lip won't stay on the right note, the brain forgets how to play a "G major" scale, and you run out of breath half-way through every phrase.

But we keep coming back because we know the language and we know it works. Not every time, not every day, but when it happens, we are transformed.

So, I will end by again quoting Mr. Baca:

Let's get crazy!
Crazy good!