From our free, Jazz Guitar Lessons Daily Series: Lesson 53
Wednesdays - ii V Is and Tunes
3/24/21
The standard approach to teaching and learning jazz can best be describe as a journey of (1) learning your basic music theory, (2) shedding your scales and arpeggios like a madman for years, (3) transcribing and memorizing tons of riffs from players you dig, and (4) gigging (badly) a lot for many years.
Then if you’re lucky, the gods of music may descend and bestow upon you the medal of jazz honor.
There’s nothing innately wrong with this way of learning. It’s helped produce some staggeringly incredible musicians. But it’s also not necessarily a guarantee of anything. There are plenty of players who go through these steps for years, even decades, and never quite reach the point with their playing that they had always dreamed of.
Countless blog posts and books could be written as to why, and countless deep conversations about philosophy, practice, human nature, and talent vs work could be had over coffee or beers… but ultimately the answer isn’t necessarily the same for each person and can’t really be pinned down to one generalized problem. As a musician who’s had to learn to play the guitar twice and as an educator who’s taught everywhere from young kids to college students studying jazz to older players who’ve been working at the guitar longer than I’ve been alive, I have my theories.
I think all of the things on the list above are important and play their part. But a few things are missing. A big one is a lack of our music institutions and teachers forcing us to take things personally. I often tell my students that rather than spending an hour reading a chapter in their theory book, instead just pick one sentence and spend an hour exploring what that sentence is attempting to convey, how to hear it in a visceral way (not by comparing it to nursery rhymes), and how to see and execute it on the fretboard. Then to take another hour learning to dismantle it and play with the individual components of it like an aspiring car mechanic getting their first car and pulling the engine out.
It’s ultimately about getting underneath where the intellectual understanding of an idea can take you. One of the most challenging thing for me as a teacher is to engage with a student when I try and show them something and they respond, “Yeah, I already know that… what’s next.”
Any topic within music could quite literally become a multi-lifetime exploration to discover and master all its facets… and the many more facets that it leads to. The mentality of “I already know that, let’s do something more advanced,” in many ways is the greatest enemy...
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