Practising the Pocket Benge

Somewhere in Ghent, Belgium.

Yes, I'm still working hard at it. Practising every day, taking lessons with Martin Shaw, playing once a week at the Loaded Dog in Leyton and hours and hours of playalongs tracks by Jamey Aebersold and from the excellent Hal Leonard series.
It's going well - it's improving.


Photograph by Miel Pieters.

I'm still at it!

Although I haven't written anything here for ages (look at the gap - it's about 7 months and that was just a photo - the last proper written entry was over a year ago!), I've not stopped working hard at my jazz trumpet. I'm now into my fifth year of it.
There's lots to tell and lots to write about. I guess I'm just lazy - or overwhelmed by it and everything else I do... Not sure which but I'm going to make an effort to write more often here.
The latest big thing I have to mention is the Jazz Jam every Wednesday evening a mile or two down the road in Leyton, in a pub called "The Loaded Dog". This has been absolutely great for my playing - and the first real live serious jazz I've actually played.

Another view of the rainbow trumpet

...while I get my act together to write something interesting about my progress in learning jazz on the trumpet.

Rainbow trumpet

This is how I want the photos to look here, in future.
A nice size and clickable to see at fullsize.

Sorting out the photo sizes on this blog.

I get confused easily.
If you look through earlier posts here you will probably find photos that are far too big for the page.
I'm trying to find a way out of this mess but it might take a while.
Sorry!

These days I'm working a lot with the Amazing Slowdowner on learning, as accurately as possible, specific solos. At the moment these are:
"Confirmation", solo by Charlie Parker.
"Kiss and Run" (from the album Plus Four) solo by Clifford Brown.
"Devil May Care", solo by Martin Shaw (my teacher) in the song by Jamie Cullum.
"Bea's Flat", solo by Chet Baker.
I have been slowly developing a pattern in how I go about this. Very fast passages get slowed right down - sometimes to a third of their original speed - so I can accurately untangle the notes and, if they are very complicated, write them down. Little by little I learn phrases and then when they are coming up to about three-quarters of the original speed I start joining them together into longer and longer chunks.
My memory, although I'm sure is not as plastic and able as it was when I was much younger, still works if I stick at it long enough and it's a wonderful feeling to hear myself playing longer and longer sections. When the learning is done thoroughly enough it feels like auto-play, where I don't have to think - I can "sit back" and watch my fingers twiddling the valves and hearing the music come out. This is quite addictive so I find that once I get started the hours fly by.
Speed is my ultimate obstacle, it seems, for most of this kind of learning. I can get most passages up to about 85% of their original tempo but my tongue, so far, is refusing to go any faster. This is kind of frustrating and a huge challenge. I wonder if I can increase its speed... I've never managed it with my horn playing - and always felt that my slow single tonguing has been something of a handicap - but I've always got around the problem with double-tonguing. But in jazz - says Martin Shaw - double tonguing doesn't suit.
Looking at Clifford Brown's fast passage work under the microscope of the Amazing Slowdowner I have discovered that he groups his fast running notes into slurred threes or twos with the result that it all still sounds very articulated without needing an incredibly fast tongue - although, undeniable, he had just that.
Chet Baker, on the other hand, not generally know as a technician, has amazingly fast single tonguing. Slowing Bea's Flat right down reveals strings of singly-tongued notes of a mind-boggling speed. What a star! God knows how he did it - and I know I'll never manage it. It's all fakeable, though, so this doesn't put me off, much...

Slowly does it

I've been doing quite a bit of work on very slow fingering, to minimise unwanted fingerflying. I've made some progress, the difference now being that my right hand feels more compact and more quiet than it did a couple of weeks ago.
What do I mean by that?
Subjectively, my hand feels smaller, with less obvious movement - better economy of finger movement and rather less intrusive. Because it now operates a little faster and more accurately than it did it draws my attention less than it did before. I now realise that my undisciplined fingering had been hampering me quite a lot. Martin Shaw spotted this, I'm sure.
Since I don't know how far one can go with it I - how good it can get - think I'd better continue working on it, with lots of very slow scales, in search of really awkward fingerings to iron out. It's purely a coordination thing and slowing it right down is definitely the way to fix it. My fast scaleic runs have improved a lot without me actually doing them at speed. There's the proof.
I've also been working with The Amazing Slowdowner a lot on Charlie Parker's solo in Confirmation. I can play most of it now at 80% of the original speed. It's quite a wonderful process, learning like this. Very exciting to find that each time I come back to a section I haven't worked on for a day or two it's got better. I think my brain does quite a lot of work on it while I'm asleep - organising and streamlining the nervous system for the task. Also, it feels such a healthy thing to do, to stretch and exercise the mind, chops, fingers and breathing in this way - and I hope I will still doing it in my eighties and beyo...
I've said it before but one thing which continually amazes me is that the more I zoom in on a really great jazz solo (by slowing it down) the more detail and refinement I find - at least that's true of Bownie and Bird... It doesn't get grainier, like I'd expect and warts do not start to appear. I find this humbling and inspiring.

Gummy fingers

After a few weeks with very little trumpet practise due to a couple of tours playing the horn in New York and all over Japan I've been hard at it again.

Usually, I start practising with Martin Shaw's warm up. This is a tritone's worth of chromatic run down then up, several times, all slurred. Having done this for a while now, belting up and down at top speed, I have learned that my fingers (the right hand - the horn uses the other one!) are completely undisciplined and need to be trained to operate faster, stronger and tidier. So this means a massive slow down - in fact the more I slow it down the more it's obvious that my fingers are really duff.

For example, I have found that if I move up and down one semitone going from a note played with just the 1st valve, to one with just the 2nd valve, my third finger wriggles around, and sometimes flies around. I'm determined to train it to keep still as I'm certain this will speed up my playing. I've already noticed some improvement in my fast scaleic playing. I'm trying to learn Charlie Parker's solo from "Confirmation". It's going well, if a little slowly, but I need better fingers. It's great fun to learn it with "The Amazing Slowdowner"

I spoke to John Barclay yesterday and tentatively fixed up a day to go over to his place and do some jazzing together. It's a couple of weeks away. I did the same with Dan Newall although he'll be coming here, to my house.

Sir Kenny Wheeler

Kenny Wheeler rang today, just to see how I was. Wow! I've not contacted him for ages and I think he was just wondering if I still existed. How nice!
He sounds well, having got over his recent illness - and he's working again.
I'm going to take little Zak around to his house to show him off (tenor horn - he's 6 and been working hard at it for two years already) and to see what he thinks of the Couesnon flugel horn I bought from John Barclay.

Martin Shaw - 2nd lesson

A 2nd amazing lesson with Martin Shaw.

We spent quite a long time looking into what we have agreed to call "Ghost" tonguing. Having done a bit of work on it since the last lesson and got somewhere (though by no means anywhere near it yet) it has now got a little clearer exactly what I have to do. So now I have an exercise I will put into my work-out to teach my tongue to jump in and out of that precise position on my upper incisors which damps the sound. It's a great effect and I'm chasing after it seriously.

The second half of the lesson was spent trying to find a way of using the ghost tonguing in context. Martin wrote out a couple of little riffs for me, which would work over a 2-5-1 sequence and which contain obviousd places to do the ghost notes.
We talked quite a lot about how dificult it is for me actually to hear what magical thing it is that Martin does (he does it really beautifully) in order to copy it. He tried a variety of ways of slowing it down, with me listening and copying, but not getting anywhere near it. Next time I must bring the minidisc recorder so I can continue analyzing exactly what's going on. I need to do this not just with the ghost notes but with many other aspects of style.

My articulation still needs to be blunter, firmer, more immediate at the front of the notes. I still sound too much like a horn player, shaping everything. I'm completely confident this won't mess up my horn playing because people who learn to speak French, for example, don't lose their Engish accent in the process. I'm sure it's exactly the same thing. The parallels with learning foreign language are very clear to me.
Martin also said I need to listen to tons of Clifford Brown. Fantastic! I'll try to learn some more of his solos.

Homework:

1. Continue the chromatic runs and practise ghost tonguing as workout exercises.

2. Practise the riffs Martin gave me.

3. Study "Confirmation" by Charlie Parker - from the copy Martin lent me with articulations and other useful pencil marks added.

4. Get hold of David Baker's book on Clifford Brown in the Giants Of Jazz series. DONE

5. Get hold of the Charlie Parker Onmibus. DONE

6. Tongue firmer all the time.

7. Listen to Clifford Brown. Listen to Clifford Brown. Listen to Clifford Brown. Listen to eClifford Brown. Listen to Clifford Brown.

Martin Shaw - 1st lesson

Before:
I've been practising pretty regularly and, I feel, steadily improving but increasingly feeling myself to be in a music vacuum. What I need now is fresh air, not my own stale stuff to breathe; so with that in mind I've arranged to have a lesson with Martin Shaw, who has been enethusiastically recommended by both John Barclay and Derek Watkins.

I'm taking a trumpet and a flugelhorn but no books or printed stuff of any kind - jazz is supposed to be an improvisational musical form - plus I don't want to be in a position of telling Martin the way I want the lesson to go.

What do I want? Not sure, but I'd like him to get me loosened up my playing and then gently guide me towards better ways of doing it. The fact is I don't know if I'm any good at any aspect of it. John Barclay has been vey encouraging, even flattering, and so have Valentin and Dan Newall, but I don't really know if I'm heading in the "right" direction, hence the need for a lesson ...or several.

After:
Well, that was amazing. Martin Shaw is a great teacher, and very generous with his time. He gave me two hours! It felt like half an hour. It seems that I'm basically on the right track and he was very encouraging about my attempts - after hearing me struggling through All The Things You Are, although a few things came up which I'm writing down now to remind myself about.

1. General articulation: I'm doing it too softly! My tonguing needs to be more positive, or harder, less "classical" - this surprised me but he demonstrated the difference and convinced me. It's part of coming from my highly classical horn technique and rounding the starts of the notes. "It's a beautiful sound but not right for jazz trumpet", I think he said. So I must try to remember that.

2. Learning the modal flavours: Up and down scales thinking in terms of raised and lowered 2nds, 3rds, 6ths etc.. Make cards or use Psion... Go to the ninth and back down each time. Then learn them from the ninth down then up. Then in broken thirds, fourths etc...

3. Playing Aebersolds using only the chord notes. Up, then up and down.

4. Playing Aebersolds up and down the straight simple scales notes - so, for example, when encountering the altered scale Calt, just stick to C7 (for now).

5. Same as above but improvising using only the scale notes first in minims, then in triplet minims, then crotchets, then triplet crotchets then quavers, then, triplet quevers etc...

6. Don't use double tonguing in the fast stuff - it's almost never done in jazz. The fast licks seem to all be slurred pairs or threes, across the main beats.

7. Learn the closed-tongue Clifford Brown thingy sound. Like muting the sound by putting the toungue against the teeth so the air has to squeeze around the teeth to get through. This is a new departure - something unheard of in classical technique and I don't think it's been analyzed yet by jazz trumpet players. They just do it.

8. The timbre can be less bright - Martin's was considerably smokier, or more lush than mine. No idea how to do this.

9. Chromatic scales: very useful and need to be clean and accurate and fast. Good for warming up. Use a more postive finger action - slam the valves down a bit more !

Thank you Martin!

Intermediate?

After a long period of fairly intense study I'm now having something of a lull in the trumpet practise due to being busy every day recording from dawn to dusk at Abbey Road Studio One, the film score of Troy, playing the bigger, curlier thing in F (go here if you want to see some pictures of that).
This does not mean total cessation, though. Far from it; I am lugging around with me a new book by George Bouchard.



I've been studying this on my fingers and in my head in the studio and on the underground and have found some very intrigueing stuff about use of what Bouchard calls the "Altered Pentatonic" scale. The notes of this scale, if it starts on C, are C, D, Eb, G ,A. This doesn't look like much but it's a huge chunk of learning. I want to learn them in all keys, first of all, and then learn use them out of their root keys in the clever way Bouchard describes for use over dominant, altered and half-diminished chords. For example the C pentatonic shown above will sound great played over B7+9 or over Aø.
This is poing to be a big job for me, particlarly as I'll have to learn to play a scale with a C "feel" over a B "feel" harmony. I haven't tried this yet but I as can't hear the damn thing in my head yet I know it's going to be problematic. A very good challenge, though, and Bouchard is pretty insistent that it sounds great.

I can't tell you how good I feel about being "intermediate". It's a such a great leap up from being a beginner and I hope to remain here for a very long time, and make the absolute most of it.

To finish today's entry, here's a photo taken last night at Abbey Road, during an "overdub" session for the film, Troy. It's an impressive brass line up but the two biggest highlights are my jazzdaddy and teacher, John Barclay, 2nd trumpet from the left and, far right, England's greatest living lead trumpet legend, - and designer of my trumpet - Derek Watkins.



Incidentally, this overdub session gives a total weight of brass, for some parts of the score, of 16 trumpets, 16 trombones, 16 horns and 3 tubas. Utterly awesome!

Benge in Belgium

I've just spent a week in Antwerp, Belgium, playing Schubert's 9th Symphony with the Flanders Filharmonic orchestra (KFOV) and stayed with an old friend and fine photographer, Miel Pieters, a fiddle player in the orchestra. Here's are some pictures he took of me practising my Benge pocket trumpet. It's perfect for travelling as it fits in my horncase - and there's still room for the horn.

Brownie

Yet another, even longer, gap!

New year's resolution: to get this diary/journal going again after quite a long period of neglect (look at the date of the previous entry).

A large part of what stopped me writing was that every time I thought of doing so I felt the time would be better spent practicing the trumpet. Also I lost the sense of importance of keeping a progress record. One of the things I like to do is to teach, and it's not inconceivable that one day I might teach jazz, perhaps specifically to people who are already "classically" trained. If I do, then a well-kept journal, of my own trials and tribulations, could be a very useful teaching resource.. Not only that - I do think that what I'm attempting is unique; I've never heard of an established horn player switching not only instrument but an entire musical discipline before. I feel something of an explorer, and I suppose a good explorer should make maps as they go along.

Apart from a period of some four months last summer during which I worked quite intensively for the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Glyndebourne Opera, I have been working pretty hard at my jazz. I'm still a long way from any kind of public performance but I've not lost any of my enthusiasm or energy for the task of learning.

During the period since my last writing here my collection of playalong recordings has enlarged quite a lot and nearly all of them are Jamey Aebersold's excellent books. Also I've found another absolutely great tool to help me learn. It's a software program called The Amazing Slowdowner (available to download from www.ronimusic.com). This extremely clever software will get hold of the CD player in your PC or Mac and make it do the most amazing things. It can play a track - all of it or just a section of it - looped if you like if you like if you like if you like - at any speed without altering the pitch. This is incredibly useful in itself but there's more - it can transpose the pitch of the track up or down by any amount you want - semitones or fractions of semitones or combinations thereof - up or down. The great thing is that pitch and tempo can be chosen independently of each other. It's an incredibly easy to use, no frills, sensibly written program. Congratulations to the author - a jazz musician himself, for turning my PC into the most useful learning tool imaginable for learning jazz.

I keep finding new ways to use it but here's one way, just to help demonstrate how useful it is: say I want to learn a solo by Clifford Brown - from one of his recordings. I'll put the CD in (or I can rip the desired track to an MP3 file and store it in my computer for ease of access - The Amazing Slowdowner works just as well with MP3 files, or other types of audio files on hard-disk, as with a CD spinning in your drive) and find the start of the actual solo and set it to loop the first bar or two - a chunk small enough for me to learn without breaking it down still further. I'll slow it right down so I can hear every little detail and then commence trying to play it. When I've got it, I'll start to speed it up a little and move onto the next chunk.

It's the ability to play around with the speed of the playback and the length of the loop which is so wonderfully useful. It's hard to imagine a more efficient way of learning something by ear. And I'm now certain that "by ear" is the way to do it. I've a book of Clifford Brown's solos transcribed and printed. They certainly look nice but if you play them "from the dots" they come out sounding stilted and mechanical - the opposite of Clifford Brown's way. I reckon the only way you'll get it to float, fly and dance like Brownie is by copying him directly. And that's why we learn solos, isn't it? Jazz is supposed to be an aural tradition. I want to learn Clifford Brown's rhythms, grammar, syntax, accent and dialect - and I can't do that from a book. My best chance is with the great man's recordings and the amazing Slowdowner. This is the way it's always been done, incidentally. It used to be constant repositioning of the needle on a 78 record - and I've heard it said that many jazz musicians used to completely wear out their records learning like this!

The Amazing Slowdowner is much more efficient - and you can learn it in a different key from the original if you want.
A lot of the Aebersold playalongs are still too fast for me to get my head around the chord changes. With the Slowdowner I can highlight any tricky bits and run them as slowly as I like until I've got the hang of it, then speed it up bit by bit.

Incidentally, I've been very surprised and humbled by putting Clifford Brown's solos under the microscope in this way. One would think that the more you slow it down to dissect and investigate it the more minor imperfections of rhythm and intonation would show up until, at high magnifications, it would start sounding rather ragged. Wrong! What has been a most amazing ear-opener for me has been the discovery that the more I dissect and magnify the more detail and accuracy is revealed. Hats off to the incredible Clifford Brown.

Small Giant Steps

Another long gap!

Still practising! I've been working on John Coltrane's essential standard, Giant Steps. It's a real earbender, harmonically, but I think I've found a way in - an initial way of taking the fear and confusion out of it.

It's a colour coded grid of the chord changes. Pretty self explanatory. It shows that the whole piece can be done, as if by magic, using only the notes of three major scales - in this case Db major, A major and F major. The three colours correspond to the three chords so you get visual cue to change chord. Please take a look. Please note that this is a pretty drastic simplification of what needs to be done!

Please note it's for Bb trumpet. I use it with the excellent slow Aebersold playalongs to Giant Steps found in volume 65, "Four and More".

NittyGritty

After a bit of a long gap!

I'm still practising!

Here's an excersise I'm working on a bit now. The idea of it is to get me right into the feel, into the nitty-gritty, of the melodic minor by getting used to some awkward angular intervals contained within it. The melodic minor (up) or MinorMajor scale is so useful because its modes yield a lot of common jazz scales, such as the altered "Alt" scale (7th mode) or the half-diminished scale with a raised 2nd (Locrian #2).

I'm going to try to learn this in all twelve mM scales. It's very awkward, particularly in the keys furthest away from C. Gulp!

At Jim Rattigan's house

I spent a bit of time over at Jim Rattigan's house yesterday. We did some rather basic work on 2-5-1 progressions. Exactly what I needed. Then we worked a bit on "All The Things You Are". Here's a lead sheet.

Valentin's visit has made quite a difference. This morning I made an assault on Chet Baker's amazing solo from "Bea's Flat". I spent an hour or so looping sections of it at half-speed and trying to capture every not and every nuance. It's coming along quite well, I think - I've learned about 75% of it (at half speed). Another hour on it and I should have it, and then I can start speeding it up.
After that bit of work I opened up a blues file in the same key, C, in my computer and was delighted to find I could fit bits of the solo from Bea's Flat quite nicely here and there. This ties in very immediately with something I read last night in Paul Berliner's book. Here it is:

Rhythmic ingredients can also constitute the fundamental idea for original figures. Walter Bishop Jr. says that after absorbing Bud Powell's phrasing he "began to thnk like Bud" so he could abandon Powell's precise lines and create his own "in the same idiom, playing with the same kind of feeling and intensity". Arthur Rhames views the process as analogous to emulating personal styles of speech. Because all artists speak with "their own natural rhythm and sequential order." it is possible to "emulate a person whose speaking you like, using his same effect - how he comes into a sentence or the way he constructs his things" - but without saying the "exact same thing". That is how Rhames learned from John Coltrane.

"Without directly copying his melodic line, I tried to get the feeling of the line, the phrasing, which allowed me to understand how Trane was talking when he played. What I wanted was the form, the basket that he was using, but the contents I wanted to fill myself. I knew that I had something to say, and I wanted to deal with that. So what I copied was the way John constructed his phrases and their rhythmical base, the stems without the notes, and I put my own noes and harmony - the things I thought about - on top of it."

Valentin Garvie came around this evening. He had phoned up to say he was in London for four days between a tour around Sweden and a pile of work with Ensemble Modern in Germany, so I invited him around straight away. We played through a few blues pieces and one or two standards, all with the Aebersold playalongs.

To summarise what came out of the evening:

1. I've improved a bit since the last time we tried this together, which is encouraging in itself, but in addition Valentin was particularly encouraging. He's very good at delivering praise and encouragement wrapped up neatly with some constructive criticism. (If you are reading this, Valentin, THANKS!)

2. My polycarbonate mouthpiece is really not bad - we did a sound test and the differences were not quite so obvious as they had seemed last time we compared it with his metal 1.5c.

3. Valentin is a really good jazzer! I don't know why he hasn't been doing more of it. As we got warmed up he got much better, very rapidly, indicating that he has been very good at jazz improvisation in the past but has let it get a bit rusty. After half an hour or so he was producing some amazingly impressive stuff and by comparison I felt I was sounding worse and worse. The most noticable thing for me was that I don't seem to have any sort of style, rather I play in what might be called the "Blandissimo" style. The gin didn't help. For a moment or two I felt like giving up but then Valentin managed to find yet more encouragement, somehow.

4. He agreed wholeheartedly with "Really, the best way to learn is to take tunes off records..."

5. He thinks that rather than trying to learn all the turnarounds, all the two-five-ones, all the blues progressions in every key etc. (not that I have been, entirely...) I should I should stick to the simpler more common keys only and concentrate my efforts more on learning a big repertoire of patterns, licks, riffs, whatever they are called, extracted from recorded solos. I must find a ways of chaining chunks of this sort of remembered material together in my improvisation. Hopefully, this should to prevent me meandering around aimlessly, which is what I tend to do when I'm reading chord symbols.

Now, that's a lot of learning in one evening - and all it cost me was the preparation of a bowl of stif-fried vegetables with rice and a gin&tonic!

(6. I must persuade Valentin to come over more often.)

Spent a while ripping some carefully chosen Aebersold tracks into MP3 files in my PC. I've done this so that I can open the tracks up in special software which enables me to slow all or part of the tracks down, loop them or transpose them, or do all those things (Don't worry Jamey, I'm not going to make them available on the www - they're for my own use only!). I've found it's a very efficient way of disecting jazz solos for learning them by ear.

Right now I'm well stuck into some "turnaround" exercises. The one I'm currently chopping away at is one of the simplest from Aebersold's book of turnarounds (Volume 16, Ex. 3). Basically, this is a four chord repeating sequence, for example - F#M, A7, D7, G7 - which needs transposing into all keys. It's making me do what Ken Bartells told me to do a year ago, which is to try to be conscious of which notes and what chord I'm playing. I still find this really difficult but I'm confident that I'm going to crack it eventually.
Another landmark I've passed recently, I now realise, is what might be called the acquisition of "trumpet finger pitch". Ever since I can remember I've had "horn finger pitch" meaning that I only have to imagine I'm holding a horn and make a certain valve combination for the note I'm wanting to hear to pop conveniently into my mind. This is an extremely useful thing, particularly for playing atonal music - in fact I don't know how anyone could play the stuff without that having this facility.
Although the trumpet is in Bb, just like the French horn, the hornplayer reads and thinks in F. Thus, while the trumpet fingerings are quite similar between horn and trumpet (although one octave apart) the notes have completely different names. On one level, then, trumpet fingering is completey different to horn fingering - which is, I think, why hornplayers and trumpet players are now an entirely different species and generally do not interbreed. I must be quite a rare "sport" or crossbreed.
Now that I can "activate" my right hand and imagine certain trumpet piston combinations to get any pitches I want in my head I think I can say I have got "trumpet finger pitch". It's taken longer than a year to acquire this, and I wasn't sure it would come - in fact I was actaully slightly worried that if it did come it would mess up my horn pitch. Luckily, trumpet fingers and horn fingers, being on different hands, don't seem to conflict at all. Phew!

I was in Waterstones bookshop browsing the jazz books today when I discovered this quote from Kieth Jarrett - from "Jazztimes", May 1999

"Jazz is one of the least learnable art forms!"

Amen