One of the most deceptively difficult concepts I stumbled upon in my journey improving drums is listening to jazz.
Background
I’d grown up primarily in concert settings. I was in a couple of jazz bands, but I never approached the music intentionally enough to try and understand it. I listened to a lot of metal, rock, punk, and anything else you could mosh to on a Tuesday night. I was also in percussion ensembles, marching bands, wind ensembles…if you name it then I was probably in it.
The running theme I’ve found in these ensembles while looking in the rear-view mirror is that all of them are structured enough that you can skate by without ever having an individual voice in the ensemble. The purpose of the player in these settings is contributing to a curated experience. Under a great composer, every note was placed with precision and intention, and your part is not to deviate from that. When you play it right, you get rewarded with some of the most beautiful music you will ever hear. And for the most part, you can get the gist of it after listening to one take.
Jazz is nothing like that.
To the uninitiated (aka myself a year ago), jazz is frustrating. It looks like the cool crowd that has their own slang. They talk a certain way, they walk a certain way, and all you want is to be a part of it. But as much as you listen, you don’t understand it. You can’t. How could you be expected to? Coming from a background where every note was made intentionally and everything is blast beats, the melodic soloing of Bill Evans on Peace Piece sounds like someone just fell on the piano.
Only after having force fed myself a diet of Art Blakey, Max Roach, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, and many others can I even begin to answer the question “How to Listen to Jazz.” So for you folks who are just starting, I hope this helps.
Jazz is a Language
You will hear this everywhere, but if you’re like me then it’s difficult to understand what that means off the bat. This is a summary of one of my favorite explanations of this from John Riley.
I’m willing to bet you didn’t come out of the womb knowing English. Or any language for that matter. Instead, everyone around you spoke English. A plethora of times, you didn’t understand them, but you tried. They’d laugh with you and smile with you, but no one could tell you what to do. Ahh, a simpler time. You made gibberish noises with your mouth until one day, you said “mama” and the whole world changed. Everyone applauded you! Since then, you learned by listening and reading. When people are in the room, they say something and you either know the emotion behind what they are saying, or you don’t and you have the ability to ask them. You read books to pick up on new language, and you see a word enough and it becomes a part of your vocabulary. Over the course of years, that vocabulary becomes refined because you stayed with the culture long enough. Each word generates deeper emotional context over time. One day, you can ready poetry and it makes you cry tears of joy.
Jazz is exactly the same, except many people are talking at the same time, in unison, and trying not to overpower each other (unless the phrase calls for it). We learn the language not by playing, but by listening and then recalling. Each instrument is a voice, and each chorus is an improvised narrative. Learning to listen is so important here, because it’s the only genre (that I know of) which asks us to be both the observer and the observed simultaneously. The most important part of playing jazz is being able to listen while you play, meaning that an essential part of the practice is listening without playing. You’ll find the words come more naturally when you do so.
When I started adopting the language, I felt there was so much ambiguity. What do I play? Where and when do I play it? Do I do brushes for this track? How did they know what to play during their solo? Or even while supporting the other musicians?
There are no answers to these questions in English. All of the answers are obvious in the language of Music.
A General Approach
Pick an artist. It doesn’t matter who, so I’ll just let you know the artist I’ve picked is Philly Joe Jones. The intention is to understand who they are, what they do, and why they play what they play.
Study them for 3 months. Why 3 months? Because it’s a quarter of a year, which is a great division of time for growth. By the end of the period, it’s just enough experience with that artist to identify them on pretty much any record. Learn their background, who they play with, etc. The more you invest in the players, the better the music sounds.
Pick an album of theirs and actively listen to it through every day for a week. Don’t just stick it on in the background. Pour yourself a cup of tea, light a candle, and lose yourself in the music. Research the album. Who is playing piano? Bass? Drums? Who is soloing when? And what is the form of each song?
Notes on Active Listening
I want to be clear on how to get the most out of listening, because it is deceptive. It’s not something that can be hyper optimized. I tried, and I failed. Approaching it like a meditation instead changes everything. It’s not important that you try and analyze every little note for the same reason that you don’t analyze every word in a conversation. It’s about the sentiment of what’s being said much less than the microscopic details. The practice. These are some of the core things you can label so that your unconscious mind can start connecting dots.
Identify the era. There are several eras of jazz, starting all the way back in ragtime/blues roots all the way up to the modern jazz we see today. Listening to music in a consistent era narrows the scope of the language being used by the players so that music its easier to compare songs against each other.
Identify the form. Each era has a couple graspable structures. While modern music is more akin to verse-chorus-verse or classical takes on many different forms (eg sonata, rondo), Jazz typically has a head (the main melody and chords), a series of choruses (solos), and the head again. The choruses are usually the same structure as the head but repeated for each soloist. Learn to feel where you are in the song at all times, and you’ll get so much more out of listening.
Identify the players. Jazz favors the individualist. Each person’s voice comes out uniquely across songs, albums, and the course of their lifetime. Knowing who played what and when creates an emotional connection to their parts which makes listening so much more enjoyable. Not to mention quotable!
Never lose count or place. Drummers like to get crazy with their poly-rhythms, but that’s because they understand the underlying beat. If you find yourself losing the groove of the song, clapping and counting out loud “1 2 3 4” helps quite a bit. It’s a way of internalizing time even off the instrument, so whenever you play live you can understand where in the pocket everyone is.
Paint a picture. This is my favorite part. All it needs to be is a mental image of what the music feels like. There’s really no wrong choice for this, but I think creating your own imagery and filling it with your emotions helps to internalize the music better. Like I think Parisian Thoroughfare by Max Roach and Clifford Brown perfectly captures the feeling of being in a new city for the first time.
Thanks for sticking along! I hope this is able to any other jazz initiates, as it answers all the questions I had when I started.
Happy drumming!