Miles Davis once said that if he’d spent half of his practice time on the piano, he wouldn’t just have been a better piano player, he would have been a better trumpet player, too.  Based on which, about a year ago, I started including some piano playing in my trumpet practice sessions.

The piano is a visual instrument – you can see the notes laid out in front of you – and I found that even playing painfully slowly through the chords of a jazz song was a great way to understand better the harmonic structure.  It inevitably gave me ideas and insights for improvising on the trumpet.

That said, most people don’t want to hear a jazz piece actually performed at a two notes per thirty seconds pace – the speed at which I was able to clumsily bang out chords with my fingers.  So piano remained strictly an academic tool, not something I could actually play as a musical instrument.

Two months back, I decided I needed to change that.  I got two basic piano methods (Alfred’s and Thompson’s), to work through site-reading, correct hand placement, etc.  And I whipped out the encyclopedic Patterns for Jazz, which lays out 500 or so stereotypical jazz phrases that work as building blocks in improvisational solos, which you can then transpose in your head (and out through your fingers) in all twelve keys.  And, for about twenty minutes each morning since, I set to work.

At this point, I’m still not booking Carnegie Hall or the Village Vanguard any time soon.  But, this morning, for the first time, as I worked on a Maj9 chord bebop pattern, I caught myself thinking, “that actually sounds pretty good!”  Which was gratifying enough to ensure I’ll be sticking with piano practice for the foreseeable future.  Sure, it’s slow and painful going.  But after even this short stretch, it’s amazing how fast progress adds up when you chip away at something day in and day out.

“I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”
by Frederick Loewe, from My Fair Lady

Recently, I discovered this great blog series on jazz improvisation, which has been excellent food for thought. If you’re a jazz musician trying to improve your game, it’s worth a read.

And, similarly, I’d highly recommend this ear training app, developed by the author of the series.  Unlike most ear training programs, which depend on tapping answers on screen, this one uses pitch recognition to let you play in call-and-response format on your actual instrument.  It’s a challenge, but one that seems to translate much more immediately to real improvising.

It was the final song of a two hour session, so my chops were basically fried, but I love the song too much to have not recorded it:

Another jazz story:

While I was a student at Yale, I was lucky enough to study with Allan Dean, a trumpet player who taught in the Graduate School of Music, but who occasionally would take an undergrad or two as a student for private lessons. Dean was a legendary freelancer for decades in NYC, and recorded on everything from an array of Phillip Glass pieces to NBC’s Olympic Fanfare and the soundtrack to The Wiz.

When he first came to NYC, barely twenty years old, however, Dean wanted to be a jazz musician. So his first night in town, he brought his horn to a jazz club (I think it was the Village Vanguard) for an open jam session. Just as he arrived, an equally young black kid was going onstage with a trumpet in hand, so he put his case down next to his feet, and sat down to listen.

Over the first song, and the ones that followed, Allan started slouching in his chair, scooting the trumpet case further and further under the table. The kid was amazing. Mind-blowingly good. And if the first random kid you heard in a city was that impressive, he reasoned, there was just no way in the world he’d cut it playing jazz professionally. So, he went home, started working on the classical end of things, too, to balance out his skills, and embarked on a commercial freelance career instead.

It was a year or two later when Dean realized that kid had been Clifford Brown, who quickly went on to become one of the two or three greatest jazz trumpet players of all time.