NO, WE'RE NOT JUST MACHINES

The other day at lessons one of my valued students had some questions about working out an arrangement for a song.

But her questions had less to do with the music and more to do with band member relations.

She wanted to know if she should get the other horn players to articulate a line the way she heard it.

My answer was for her to bring it up next time at band practice. What I thought about that line and how it should be performed was irrelevant at that point.

Friends, part of learning music is learning how to communicate such ideas about arranging or phrasing or whatever amongst yourselves in a manner that is  constructive, respectful, and that gets the point across.

I recall a day on the band stand with adult musicians...and one of them was having trouble finding a groove at the place where the  song shifted to cut time. A musician offered an opinion. I'm sure he thought he was only being helpful, but he said it in a way such that the other guy took offense and unplugged his own rig and went home.

If there's a moral to today's post it is this: communication in band class takes place on many more levels than with your respective instruments, and that's part of what you are there to learn -- or, as my friend and guitarist Tom Tice would put it, how to play nice with one another.

WE LEARN TO PLAY MUSIC BY LISTENING TO MUSIC, NOT BY MEMORIZING SCALES

We listen to someone play, and then, we try as best we can to mimic what we just heard on our own horn. We repeat that process over and over until we get it right. Along the way, we learn such valuable tools as phrasing, note choice, dynamics, and so on.

That's been the proven best way to learn how to play an instrument. But instead of doing that, we more often than not get caught up in theory and rote memorization and tests and so on -- especially when we are just starting out.

And this is especially the time that we need to listen and imitate -- when we are in the beginning of the learning process.

Why?

This is much the same way we learned to speak, right? We heard the people around us talking and making sounds and over time and trial and error, we learned to repeat the language. We made mistakes. But our parents encouraged us and we got better. Later, we learned the alphabet, and how to write words.

Now, imagine not being able to talk, but having to learn the alphabet anyway. It would be a meaningless experience, right? Language facility first, then the building blocks and tools.

We do music pretty much in reverse of this. Music education quite often involves learning the equivalent of the alphabet long before we can play music.

And in the end, so many of our students simply never 'get' music. They have no idea how to play, how to develop a sound, because they never listen and imitate. That's not part of a traditional music education.

As s student of the art, you've simply got to listen to music, and you've got to study the history of it. I play R&B style sax, and I know that I likewise replay the roots of that music when I perform, as learned by transcribing the solos of top R&B founding sax players like Jr. Walker and King Curtis and Rusty Bryant.

R&B is a language with a history, and incorporating those elements of the language, meaning all of those particular sounds and articulations and phrasing and riffs passed down through the ages into the dialogue, makes for a successful solo.

We're not re-inventing the wheel here.

Playing music is all about knowing  the history of the music, and how to use it as a soloist. And understanding the context of that history is where a student of music can focus her/his efforts.

The good news is that just about every single note in the archives of R&B is on record and as such made accessible by YouTube.

So go listen, and learn by repeating what you hear. Put on a track by your favorite artist, listen over and over until you have the piece in your memory and can sing the notes, and then pick up your horn and see what comes out.        

SING YOUR WAY TO BETTER SAXOPHONE PLAYING

That's right. Sing.

Out loud.

In the shower, on your morning walks, in the car, wherever.

Why? Because the act of singing does a couple of things that improve our saxophone technique. First, humming a melody over and over implants it in your memory in such a way that recall becomes easier and easier.

Second, singing a melody that you are trying to learn on your saxophone shapes your throat in order to form the notes (and your breath) in order to make them come out of your throat and into the world.

And those two things are Basic Saxophone 101: the shape of your throat through the horn's range of notes, and, how you move breath through the saxophone.

Experiment a little, and sing a tune that has everything from low notes to high notes. Notice as you are singing the different shapes your throat makes for high notes as opposed to low notes, and you begin to get the idea.

This is exactly what we do (or want to be doing) when we play the saxophone: making a 'theeeeeeeee' throat shape in the upper registers, and making a 'the' throat shape in the lower registers.

And singing a melody helps you learn those things without too much effort and it imprints the melody in your memory at the same time.

In the words of one of my wise old saxophone teachers:  "Don't play it unless you can sing it."

It works for me, singing, and it's worked for my students who have added singing to their daily repertoire.

Teaching Generation Z to Play Music

The image accompanying today's post is a cover for a Samsung smart phone. It shows the evolution of man from knuckle-dragger to the pinnacle of evolution: in this case, a sax player.

Sweet! And, on a cell phone cover.

And why not? Most of my students fall into Gen Z, the pre-teen and teen years, and they spend a lot of their time connected to the Internet on their smart phones.

A recent study posted by NPR in fact claims that Gen Z kids spend more time on the Internet than they do sleeping. Gen Z kids are the most inter-connected generation we have ever known. They can (and do) multitask on several screens, and they crave social contact as well.

They move about the planet in groups; hence the rise in popularity of pop music festivals.

Most of the Gen Z-ers in my lessons came to  music as an elective, not as an outgrowth from their home life. Few of them had the kind of childhood I did -- where my parents played records almost non-stop, especially at dinner.  Listening to music was a group thing in my house, and I am grateful. That's where my own deep and abiding love of music comes from.

And wanting to make those sounds is what inspired me to want to take music farther than the fifth grade band class where it all started for me.

Now, as a music educator, I am keenly aware of how environment nurtures creativity. Likewise, I know that everything I ask my Gen Z students to do -- namely, spend much time alone in a room, running music exercises over and over and over again -- runs completely counter to their generational needs.

How do I compete with a generation that has so much of the Internet at their fingertips on demand that they are able to become curators of their own lives?

I don't know. Learning to play an instrument in our current model is all about woodshedding. It takes time and patience alone to learn, say, all of the blues scales.

The one thing the Internet can't do is learn them for you. You can find dozens of tutorials posted by master sax players on YouTube, but by the end of a day, you have to knuckle down and learn them by playing them over and over.

I'll leave you with this question: how do I keep lessons interesting and relevant and still get my teen students to cover the bases and actually practice during their spare time?

Comments are enabled. Fire away -- I'm listening.

It's Harder to Practice than You Think

Yesterday, I was talking to the extraordinary bebop saxman and private instructor Christopher Hollyday about the value of having a steady practice routine.

Same practice time, same practice place, and so on.

Also, the need for setting goals. Without goals, there will be zip in the way of any real progress.

But, he said, (and I agree with him) life conspires to interrupt one's goals.

Now comes the bigger rub:  private lesson goals often run counter to my student's own goals.

Quite a few of my students fall into Generation Z. These are the post-Millennials and as such are studying music as an elective either in elementary or middle or high school.

Gen Z teens are the single most Internet-connected generation yet. They literally have the world at their fingertips, are online more than they sleep, text instead of call, and within this culture of instant information-connectivity all the time have learned to curate their own lives.

They have an eight-second attention span. That, and they are a highly social bunch.

Practicing an instrument is pretty much the opposite of  most of the above. It requires systematic application, takes what time it takes,  and requires a lot of alone time.

Especially doing those dreaded long tones.

I often joke with my students that I must be genetically defective, for I look forward to long tone practice.

In fact, I love it all. Practice for me is a labor of love, because I not only love music, I love to share it.
And this is what Mr. Hollyday said we can (and need) to teach -- the love of music. He seemed to think that it all starts there, as it did for him in his childhood home (and in mine as well.)

Another problem that kids face today is that in most cases, their instruments stay at school during the week. Most of them only bring their respective horns home on the weekends, and weekend time is generally already spoken for.

Gen Z kids are way busy.

In the final analysis, my students really only get to work with their instruments in band class, and that time is limited to band assignment work.

I'll be working on this challenge over the next few weeks...instilling a love of music, and goal-setting, and putting together practice routines for the connected generation. And as always, I'm open for any suggestions that you, my valued students, may have.

Being a Woodwind Student Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

Last week, a middle-school-aged student signed up for lessons with me. He'd been a clarinet player, and now he wanted to switch it up to alto sax.

Needless to say, even though he was a relative newcomer to the saxophone, his clarinet chops carried him over the beginning hurdles.

But I noticed something in his classroom behavior that was not serving him well at all. Every time he made an error (and quite naturally, there were many of them) he stopped playing, took the horn out of his mouth, and said this:

"I'm sorry."

Which means we'd have to start over each time, re-set his embrochure, get his breathing back on track, and recall his fingerings. Not to mention that being ultra-critical of his playing defeated his forward momentum.

Negative self-talk is the single biggest enemy of progress in the practice room.

'Sorry' is not a word I ever want to hear from a student. The classroom is where you (and I) are supposed to make mistakes playing our respective instruments -- and lots of them.

Think about it -- none of the saxophone greats was born with any of the skills they displayed later in life. They, too, were not so very good when they were just starting out and learning the horn.

And the one common denominator of music is this -- we all start at the same place, at the beginning, right?

So blow your horn, try things out, make music, make noise, and please -- make lots of mistakes.

But never apologize to me or anyone for making them. It's part of the process of learning, mistake-making. And if you had a teacher in the past who created an environment where you felt intimidated, well, just put that behind you. Those days are over.

A man much smarter than me once expressed it best when he claimed that perfect is the enemy of good.

It truly is.