How to play uptempo jazz - 6 tips for any instrument

[Music] playing fast is fun and there is a tradition in jazz of playing fast we don't do it all the time but occasionally from time to time once or twice a gig we might take something Up Tempo and kind of test our limits it could be exhilarating for the players and also for the audience members so I thought I would just share some tips and tricks here about some things you can do to help your fast playing the first tip I want to talk about is being comfortable in the fast tempo and the way that we're going to do that is we are going to feel bigger divisions because when we feel small divisions that tends to make us tense so for example if I play this track and I'm feeling quarter notes if I feel every quarter note as the base pulse that's going to make me tense 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 [Music] 4 so what I want to do is I want to look for larger divisions so instead of counting at 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 I'm just going to try to feel bigger Cycles so for example I could feel a cycle like this one 2 3 4 1 2 3 [Music] [Music] 4 so notice when I have this big pulse I can still play off the eighth note I can still play some fast stuff it's just that my fast playing is fitting inside of a bigger slower conception and when you kind of have bigger slower conceptions or bigger slower beats that you're building off of you just feel like you have a little more time to think and and make some choices rather than always being in survival mode so I could even consider this I could even think of this as a ballad underneath the fast tempo [Music] [Laughter] [Music] as an advanced version of this you can also have kind of different types of claves go underneath this uh fast tempo when I use the word clav usually that refers to kind of the AFR Cuban clav which would be 32 or 23 but we can also make up other claves but for example let me use um a 32 clav here that one basically goes you know one and we're going to do that now over the fast tempo so what we're doing is we take the fast tempo we reduce it to a slower Tempo and then over that we put the clav let's see what that sounds [Music] like now I'm just using that as an example of kind of giving a shape to the slower pulse so it's not all just wide open slowness and I can actually blow over that if I want I can kind of hearken to the clavate and then build even fast lines that have that pulse contained within I'll try that [Music] now [Music] can you get the idea I mean even though I didn't strictly to stay with the the actual clav the wholeway it it just kind of giving my phrasing um a structure underneath and something that will help me actually just relax and make my phrasing a little more interesting this next tip comes courtesy of an old classical teacher I used to study with and I remember once after playing for her in the lesson she said to me somewhat annoyed you Jazz musicians why do you always play until you get stopped why don't you stop before you get stopped and I thought that was kind of insightful and uh I want to bring that idea to you here now especially in playing up tempos so the idea is we don't want to pass our limits in the process of improvisation especially if we're on a gig because if we continuously play until we kind of hit a wall and then start again start again we're really setting up it's just not a great Flow State for ourselves to be in so so what basically the trick here is just play a little shorter find your limit and then don't hit that limit play a little shorter so I'll give you two examples here one example is me playing until I get stopped and then I'll do a different example where I stop my my line before I get [Music] stopped so that's me playing kind of until I you know hit a wall and now I'll show you an example if I just play a little bit shorter so that I I live to try [Music] again [Music] basically this approach boils down to play a little bit shorter play shorter phrases shorter phrases tend to have more space and which is always good for the listener your Rhythm Section as in the drummer and bass player will appreciate you're playing more people tend to listen more the time tends to feel better and you're not constantly running into brick walls stop before you get stopped this next tip will be about looking for Unnecessary tension that you might be holding in your body so a typical example is uh raising the shoulders and then U playing with the shoulders raised or maybe gritting your teeth or uh a lot of times people are tapping their feet um in my opinion tapping your foot at a fast tempo can be a little bit of wasted energy so we want to kind of scan our body and make sure things are relaxed one thing you can do is if you scan your body and you find that you're doing something that creates extra tension in your body you can do a little trick where you play with that thing and you actually exaggerate it so for example I'm going to raise my shoulders on [Music] purpose [Music] and now I'll drop my shoulders and relax and play [Music] it then I'll raise them again on [Music] purpose [Music] [Applause] [Music] Etc so that's the kind of idea it's just to to kind of scan your body and see if you can discover any unnecessary tension in your body and then as you practice releasing that tension you should find that you gain a little bit of ease this technical tip is about efficiency so basically we want to strive to be efficient in our technical approach and that can mean a lot of different things but I'll give you a few examples if you're a piano player and you're playing a [Music] scale and you're coming up high off the keys for each note that's not as efficient as playing close to the keys for each note now I'm getting the same sound and volume that I did before but with about a quarter of the effort so you're going to again it's about scanning your own techniques sometimes you can take a video of yourself and see what's going on and strive to find improvements in efficiency uh another example is a drummer when a drummer Dr plays a r symbol he has a back swing when the back swing is too large it becomes hard to play fast because it's inefficient as the drummer plays faster he would want his back swing to become a little shorter and this apply this same kind of idea applies across all kinds of instruments another thing on the piano I might do is for efficiency's sake and not dig into the key so much I might play a little more shallow and that'll give me more kind of ease and speed and and really it's going to vary for for everyone you don't need to strive for perfect efficiency and you also don't need to strive towards some idealized version of playing your instrument but what you can do is just look for the biggest inefficiency that you might be committing and if you deal with that if you improve that you should see the whole level go up it's kind of a big bang for your buck situation where if you can find something that you're doing that's inefficient and then you can bring that down then you'll see some results pretty fast the last musical tip I'll give you for playing fast is just a reminder to not let go of certain musical expressive ideas so for example you want to have Dynamic shaping you want to have different articulations you want to have good phrasing and hopefully working on some of these things will allow you to be more comfortable so that you can remember to include those because in the end just playing fast is not good enough we want to play fast and also well so it's worth practicing just saying like I'll play fast and I'll think about some Dynamics I'll play fast and I'll think about different articulations [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hopefully this was helpful for you and uh thanks for checking out the video see you next time for

Channel: Sam Yahel

Views: 9,053

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Id: Fb36Rco5xgs

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 23 2024