Glad I'm not the only one with that problem!

Singing the lines while playing can often help me stop overthinking a solo (and often makes for more «human» and less bullshitty stuff too) :) sorry if i’m stating the obvious

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on that comparison!

@@PatrickBartleyMusic For example the idea of knowing theory and such by heart, automatically, you have to be able to internalize grammar structures as well as vocab, which is done typically through hours of let's call it "lang-shedding", so that when you go practice with cats, you can focus more on what they're doing (the conversation) and respond to it. Now, in both situations you can jam with pros, but typically in a speaking situation, there's not (usually, depends on who your partner is) gonna be all the gatekeeping we tend to associate with bad soloing in a jam session. Also, people are just as turned off by grammar as they are music theory, saying how much they don't need it

I spent tons of time working on my Spanish a few years back. Found a couple of books I really liked, then read them over and over again. You can sort of read them at this surface level: where you may not understand how every verb is conjugated, but you know which verb is being used, so you still understand the plot of the story. But you can also go back and dig into specific sentences and figure out: "Ok, why did they use that tense there?" A couple of times through that, and you've got that tense/phrase/word in your brain. Same goes for watching tv shows or movies in another language: you have this dialogue going on in front of you that you might not fully get, but you might understand after the fourth viewing (you'd better freakin' love the show). If you're lucky, you've got subtitles you can turn on when you get tired or something is really difficult. Then you try to take this stuff into the real world: have conversations with strangers, take lessons, join book clubs, etc. I've even thought about moving to a more Spanish-speaking neighborhood. So... jazz. I own Kind of Blue. I own Giant Steps. At Basin Street. Them Dirty Blues. But I haven't really sat down with my horn and the album and done: "Ok-what key's this in? Where does the bridge go to?" What's Paul Desmond playing in his solo there? Okay, better practice those (scales/arpeggios/patterns/enclosures). What chords was Joe Zawinul playing? What was Louis Hayes really doing on the ride cymbal? Was Sam Jones playing the root of the chord? As a horn player, you don't have to know all of that stuff cold, but you want to have as much of it at your command as you can on your horn. Otherwise you're just saying "Ok, this song is in D minor, so I'll play one scale over the whole thing." You want as much jazz language in your head beforehand as you can get. Then you have to trust that it'll come out of your horn. It's not about being perfect, either: you're _going_ to make mistakes. You're going to get lost. To quote Jamey Aebersold, "Good enough is NOW."

@@jorymil I think this captures it well. The parallels run deeper, but this really gets at what I'm talking about

It's all about consolidation. You should not have to think about all of the notes in the chord, or what sharps and flats are in the key you're playing in. Theory is strangely very surface-level in music; understanding it intuitively first is what's going to let you access the 'meat' of the music. But don't lock yourself out of jam environments until you learn theory first - everyone has those first few jams that go not so great, but after a while you become more comfortable in that setting. You can build the skills of playing live with others and learning theory at the same time, and it is much better for you if you do. Theory must be applied in a context, and the more you do that, the more natural you will be with it.

Do you know if he’s still in Columbus 😭😭