You know my feeling about method books: transcribing clarifies everything,
most books lead you down an academic and circuitous path which slows real
growth while you are patiently waiting for the method to somehow "kick in"
and be your saviour. That said, most of the struggling jazz
students/musicians are just not putting the hard work into transcribing which
is necessary for their improvement and the various school programs of jazz
tend to under emphasize its extreme importance versus their academic and
sometimes too tidy answers.
I find all academic rules are consistently broken by the greats and the music
still sounds and feels great. I think a major part of the problem is that
many musicians in their earlier public schooling took classical style
training which is very book oriented (none of my classical violin or piano
teachers ever told me to "learn by ear" in fact they frowned upon the idea as
an illiterate approach). This leads the crossover musicians to think that
what worked in their earlier training would transfer into jazz training,
which years later most find it doesn't.
Jazz's speedy development in this century can be traced to the proliferation
of output by the recording industry, if it weren't for recordings it would
have taken much longer to reach this point if ever. I doubt a book with all
its words can describe, let alone teach, the sound of Lester Young without a
companion recording.
I suggested the Barry Harris method for the reason that he actually uses a
minimal amount of theory over the length of his two videotape and workbook
package. The majority of the time is spent on creating melodic solos,
phrasing advice, and being able to negotiate tough or new changes. He has a
good warmup routine for ingraining scales over changes to gain fluidity
within a song. He tries to simplify the scale thought to as few scales as
possible and has some good insights into the Charlie Parker style.
I knew I would have trouble accurately representing his approach in a post.
He is oriented in his tape to having the musicians repeat back the ideas he
sings, the musicians on the tape do this all by ear with no written music.
The companion booklet is written by someone who tried to distill his ideas
into a practice companion to be taken with the student as reminders when they
are away from their videotape player. I find it most challenging and helpful
to not use the book but just try to play as a member of his video class by
listening to him and repeating by ear.
In his section on adding half steps to scales he eventually gets to the point
that the half step can be added anywhere in the scale which achieves the
desired result of a flowing line. My original advice should have just been
"get the Barry Harris tape." Leaving the chart was very confusing and
didn't translate well in this format. All mechanical or book only methods
of learning chromatics have their weak points when they get bogged down in
academic concepts.
The ultimate way to add chromatic notes to your playing is to listen and
transcribe from your role models, after all we had to hear chromatics in
someone elses playing in order to get the idea that we want it in ours, why
not take it from the source? My personal favorites for obvious use of
chromaticism are Mike Stern, 1960's Miles Davis, John Scofield, and Randy
Brecker.
Brian Oates