Straight to the fingerboard

Music-related posts have been rare on this blog in recent months, so I thought I'd write a little about something that has been preoccupying me for a while now - namely, the slightly controversial subject of solo transcription.

Last summer at the Guildhall Summer School in London, I attended a week-long workshop and seminar given by the jazz violist Tanya Kalmanovitch, which focused on transcribing as a route to internalizing the structural and harmonic principles of jazz improvisation for string players. Tanya recently delivered a paper on the same subject at the IAJE Conference held last month at Long Beach, California. Her approach is primarily an instrumental one - in her view, the task of the student is to learn to transcribe directly to the fingerboard. Describing her own early experience, she tells of how she

dutifully set about notating Miles Davis’ solo on “So What”, but the sheets of neat, Juilliard trained, hand-written manuscript I quickly produced left me no better equipped to improvise on the tune. Some years – and many questions – later I was able to gather a systematic approach to imitating, understanding and mastering the language of jazz. This approach to transcription is the key to all the lessons in the jazz library.

She goes on:

When we talk about “transcription” we usually think about the act of notating an improvised solo. I’d like to challenge you to think about transcription in a different way. In the method I will outline here, notation will be one of the last things you do with a solo. Before you set pen to manuscript paper, you’ll be memorizing, singing and finally playing the solo on your instrument. Learning to construct swinging eighth note lines with good voice leading over changes takes discipline and persistence. Transcription, done thoroughly, rewards the student with a full toolkit to approach any kind of improvised music performance. As the great saxophonist David Liebman advocates, ”Playing bebop necessitates instrumental technique, theoretical knowledge, a good fluent rhythmic feel and training of the ear. It is the calisthenics of jazz improvisation no matter what idiom.”

Over the past six months or so I've been following the second level of a course in jazz eartraining and harmony at a London music college, and in my practical study I've been applying Tanya Kalmanovitch's approach in conjunction with the exercises in rhythmic and harmonic structure we've been doing in the class. So far, I feel it has worked successfully for me: by following the three-part emphasis on time feel, voice leading and vocabulary-building, I've been able to mesh the studies in chord and interval recognition with practical instrumental work in such a way that now, when he have actually begun to examine solos in the class, I feel I have a fairly solid background from which to develop, and one that's related to my own instruments - violin and viola.

Although in the class we have been studying improvised lines of a more advanced type - for example, the Charlie Parker alto sax solos on "Now's the Time" and "Blues for Alice" - I found that the earlier work I'd done, for example, on more straightforward lines of the kind Tanya suggests for practice, such as Lester Young's solo on "Body and Soul" and Hank Mobley's solo in "Hank's Other Soul", helped me to get to grips with the often more convoluted, though always melodic, outlines of the Parker material. In particular, also, the II-V and other progression studies we had done in class helped me with the harmonic analysis of the actual played solos on these recordings. At the moment, I'm transcribing Miles Davis's solo on "Surrey With the Fringe On Top" in the 1956 quintet recording with John Coltrane, and using the procedure recommended by Tanya, i.e. no manuscript paper at first, but simply time feel and singing, followed by phrase-by-phrase learning of the solo directly on the fingerboard. I have to confess that in order to do this I've been using a piece of computer software that's been extremely helpful - it's the Amazing Slow Downer, which enables me to slow the track right down, without altering the pitch, and to loop sections of the solo so I can really find out what is going on. The Miles Davis solo is deceptively simple: in fact, it isn't simple at all, but contains numerous delays and fluttered notes that are quite difficult to notate, but which can be reproduced imitatively after close listening. Eventually I'll try to write out both head and solo on music paper, but first I want to learn to play the lines by memory and ear alone.

It's a fascinating task, and one that is potentially limitless - the amount of musical information that can be learned from even one track is astonishing. Incidentally, the use of transcribing techniques in the learning of improvisation seems to be catching on: in the current issue of the Jazz Education Journal, Dr Carl W. Knox has an article on the subject which stresses the imitation of "every nuance of sound, pitch, articulation, and inflection" in the learning of recorded solos.