Trumpeter Eddie ‘Tiger’ Lewis sent out an email today about a ‘free jazz’ workshop he attended last week. I owe him a big thanks, as it was Eddie who first hipped me to the value of integrating free playing into daily practice. Frankly, I don’t really like to listen to free jazz. For my senior paper at Yale, I investigated current research on the neurobiology of music, and found, in short, that music ‘sounds good’ in large part because it caters to the preferences of a number of the brain’s pattern-finding modules. Free jazz doesn’t, and consequently usually sounds like a bunch of noise. Emotionally expressive noise, perhaps, but noise none the less.

Still, while I don’t listen to much free playing, recently I’ve been doing quite a bit. Here’s why: a jazz solo, essentially, is a spontaneously composed melodic line – temporally horizontal by nature. Traditional techniques for jazz practice, however, are largely vertical – studying a chart one chord change at a time, then slowly building up patterns through groupings of those chord changes.

Practicing free is a return to the horizontal, a taste of the effortless feeling of blowing through a line that seems to speak for itself, and a chance to explore the relationships built between notes over time. A few months practicing free has brought a melodic fluency into my fingers that seems to transfer over when I return to bebop forms, with their constrainingly complex chordal structures.

So, jazz musicians: try five or ten minutes of playing free each day for a month; you’ll be shocked at the improvement. And non jazz musicians: come hear me play this evening at Opal (10:00p, 53rd and 2nd). Sure I’m going to suck. But just imagine how bad I was before.