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Hey guys,
Just watched a VERY inspiring interview with Stefon Harris, the vibraphonist. He's an incredible player and teacher and has an enormous amount to offer. There are so many great ideas and moments in this interview. It's a bit long, but if you have 45 minutes, I highly encourage checking this out.
I know he's not a guitarist...but his message really transcends the individual instrument. Frankly...it transcends music.
He also plays a bit in it, which is just gorgeous!
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08-06-2015 12:56 PM
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My fear goes right to my right forearm, and I lock up. Gotta feel the bigger beat, still not there. Stefon wasn't there for Winter Jazz Fest! SFJazz Collective wasn't the same...
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Re: muscle memory. I am really trying to get my lines to come from my ear rather than rote muscle memory. Some licks keep appearing, but I want my ear to direct my improvisation (hopefully, after 8 years, it's beginning to do that). Sometimes I'll play lines on my ukulele so they are less dependent on muscle memory I developed.
In terms of ear training, I've found that I best material relates notes to a key and not to an interval. Even when I study 3 distinct notes like Db-G-B, I hear each note against the key. So Db-G-B against C would be May-So-Ti, but you gotta hear each note and not how the three notes interconnect.
For harmony, if the dyad is A and E and I sing a C, then I should hear that as the flat third of the A and E or another way. It all depends on what I heard before. Like a G7 or maybe even a pop song I heard on the radio.
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Yeah, that dude is no joke man...love him!!
Originally Posted by Irez87
My ear tends to go in different directions. Sometimes it hears things based on the key center, sometimes it hears things against the chord it's sitting over, sometimes intervallic.
As long as I'm working on it and improving it I'm happy.
Stefon's ear training stuff is heavy though. He can hear stuff that's just straight up SCARY!
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I love his SFJazz Collective stuff, whew:
I wonder what Stevebol thinks of this?
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Killin
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Cool thing where he made the vibes 'speak' at the end! Like a wah-wah effect.
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I was going to make a joke that everything he plays, he's making his vibes speak....but yeah...that wah wah effect is pretty badass...for sure!
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Very interesting discussion! Thanks for posting that, Jordan.
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No worries M.
Also...I've messed with his app a bit and definitely plan to pick up a copy once it's released. Worth the $ in my opinion.
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Yeah, wow, great interview! I first heard Stefon Harris about a year ago on the radio, without knowing who it was.
Let's face it, the list of great vibes players is short. Okay, it's not Milt (I can usually tell Milt in about 5 notes). Not Hampton, not Burton. It could maybe be Bobby Hutcherson, but nah... not really.
Oh, okay, Stefon Harris -- someone to watch for sure.
So many ideas in that interview, thanks for posting, Jordan! Parts of it remind me of another thread on this forum right now.
And I love how he says jazz isn't so much about spelling out the changes, at least from an audience point of view. There are people on this forum who do make the point that that basically IS what jazz is, and I always resist the idea. Nice to see a top level player confirming that.
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I play with a dude who studied with Milt Jackson, and he's an interesting guy in his own right. He always talks about Warren Wolf:
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Yeah man...he's all about the big picture, the emotions, the stories, and the ideas...and says that just making the changes really isn't enough. Originally Posted by JazzinNY
But that said...this dude spent YEEEEEEEAAAAAAARS not only shedding all that stuff, but formulating his own entire music theory and approach to harmony that's crazy brilliant and so detail oriented. This all reminds me a lot of the Bird thing...learn it all then forget it. He learned it ALL! hahaha
His control over harmony and what notes really and truly work against them and what notes should be avoided is a freakin' encyclopedia of knowledge, muscle memory, and ear....but then like all the greats, he recognizes that the flip side is you have to just play....listen, react, share ideas, tell stories, etc.
He seems to have a super powerful right brain and left brain process...the creative and the intellectual...and not only are they both insanely strong in him but they're beautifully balanced. Which I think is what I love about his playing and his message. It's not leaving anything off the table. It wants to take advantage of every aspect of the human experience for the purpose of making the music better.
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But why wait until that's all under the hood so to speak. Take a risk, play some crap lines, maybe meander, but listen to the band and forget looking at the chart or remembering how the chart looked like in your memory. You can't expect to tell a story if you don't practice making many flubs trying to tell a story when ya solo. Also, sing as much as possible.
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Like this recording I did on I remember clifford. Totally lost the form at the end and had a lot of flubs. But there were a few decent moments that came from listening what was going on around me:
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by the way, that vibe player is the guy who studied with Milt Jackson.
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Yeah I would agree with most of that.
To me the left brain/right brain are not do this THEN do that. They're complimentary. I don't think you should just shed theory and muscle memory ONLY for years, and then just play and goof off once you're done. Likewise, I don't think it's healthy to feel we've reached a certain level in our playing where we can stop pushing in the practice room...to learn more, to build more vocab, to develop more muscle memory, to dig deeper into our harmony, etc.
To me these two aspects of our humanity are not mutually exclusive...one or the other....instead I seem them as complimentary. They help each other.
It may just be semantics...but the one thing I don't agree with is the notion that we should play crap lines or meander. I'm all for taking risks, being playful, being creative, listening, etc. But I personally don't feel it's healthy to go into the mindset of...well let me just play some crap and see if some part of it sounds cool by accident...nor do I go to meander. I may intentionally play something unexpected, or a 'wrong' note or rhythm. But intention is big for me. And the idea of meandering seems to stand against intention.
I can tell you with Stefon, that if you study his method with him...for probably close to the first year...you don't get anything close to a 'scale'. You get chords, and little 4-note mini scales. He calls them quadrads. You learn to hear them, play them, sing them, and be creative within them. It's truly amazing how musical and masterful you can sound using JUST these quadrads and chromaticism. Eventually you will start to add a 5th note to each chord and get a "pentatonic" scale for each chord. And slowly you grow out until, like he said in the video...you MAY end up with a 7 (or 8) note scale for a chord...but not necessarily. I love his approach to teaching it because it places the two aspects side by side. Rather than expecting someone to learn all the theory and all the scales and all the modes and all the everything else, and then to go back and try and figure out how to be creative and make something musical with any of it....he starts at the ground, and let's people learn how to be creative within the fundamentals as they're being learned and slowly building those fundamentals up alongside the creativity.
I've actually used some of his ideas with a few of my students that were interested in learning to improvise...and the results were scary. One girl went from never having improvised and knowing ZERO scales to 3-4 weeks later playing some beautiful shit that seriously could have been on a record. Not jazz...just like modal I'll strum a diatonic chord progression and you improvise. But she was playing some gorgeous lines. Man...it took me years and years and years to get to that level, and she literally did it in under a month with a weekly half-hour lesson.
Different approaches work worse or better for different types of people. I have a VERY strong left brain and am super analytical. But I also love nothing more than turning all that stuff off and jumping headfirst into the creative unknown...so his approach really jives with me.
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By the way...is the vibes player in that video Warren Wolf? Or your friend? Or both? I'm a little confused. Either way...sounds killing! Thanks for sharing it!
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Nah, that's the guy who studied with Milt Jackson. I wish I could play with Warren. Since I've gotten farther in my ear training studies, hearing modulations, and big beat studies, I am definitely intentional with my playing. But I make a point not to use my eyes when I solo these days. I try to get all of the harmonic and melodic information from my ears, hope it shows. But I could only get to that point by taking a leap earlier in my playing and saying, let me listen and try...
Stefon's stuff sounds really interesting. I like how it doesn't sound tied to purely intervalic solfege stuff. Bruce's stuff is all about memorizing the sound of space between clicks, the sound of a note in a key, the sound of a note against a dyad, triad, and four note chords. If you couldn't tell by many of my posts, I find ear training to be the most rewarding part of my practice.
Like I said before, I live in NYC...
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Anyone got any news about the app mentioned?
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