I Walked into the Silver Darkness – Mark Wingfield & Kevin Kastning

When I first heard Kevin’s music I was immediately transfixed.  That rarely happens to me.  I knew instantly that I was listening to something completely original sounding.  This very rarely happens to me. I was also gripped by the depth and richness of the musicality. I listened to it several times and then thought… hey I wonder if we could do something interesting together.  I had no idea what we would do.  But I had a feeling that I really should contact Kevin and suggest it.  I could hear that although we approach the guitar totally differently and that he was obviously very acoustic, and I very electric, that on an artistic level, there was a real connection there.  So I emailed him and suggested we talk about a possible collaboration of some kind.

We booked a studio session for Nov 2010 as I was going to be in the U.S. during that time.  As the session approached we emailed and agreed that we were not going to have any compositions or any preset musical ideas.  Our concept was loosely that we would improvise with the aim of making it sound like a composition, but that was all. I found myself in the strange position of being a week away from a recording session and having no idea at all, what we were going to do.  That’s not something I’d ever done before.  But I remember Kevin saying he had a strong feeling that something good would happen.

When we entered the studio we started recording as soon as we picked up our guitars and I remember thinking, well it could be useful to record while we experiment and work out how we’re going to approach this.  But that idea went out of my head by the end of the first four minute piece we played.  It was immediately clear to me that what we had played was a finished piece. Every piece that followed was like that, finished and complete. There was no question of experimenting or needing to work anything out. We took a short break between each track long enough to say, “who’s going to start?” or “shall we start this one with a tempo?” or “why don’t we change instrument/sound” and then we would be straight into the next piece. I have never experienced anything like it. So each piece on this album is a first take, completely improvised, not based on anything prewritten with no overdubs.

As we played I knew what we were creating was something special, it felt very organic and yet we were going to places in the music which normally just don’t happen in improvisation.  We were ending up in musical places that normally only happen when the music is carefully composed. Of course as is usual when improvising, we were listening very closely to each other and reacting to what each other played from moment to moment, but there was this whole other level happening where strong compositional elements emerged in the music as we played.  Listening back it is this which I find most central to what makes this music unique.

I was discussing practice a little while back with Elliott Randall (Steely Dan, Reelin in the Years fame amongst many others) in the Global Guitar Bar. I met Elliott quite a few years ago playing with him in the ResRocket band. A number of interesting ideas came out of our discussion and got me thinking about the whole area of practice, in particular what key things facilitate and increase control over the fingers and and ultimately the strings.

So I decided to draw together all the ideas I’ve learned and discovered over the years to help students move forward in ways that fulfill their potential.  Many of them need demonstrating so I won’t explain them here, however I can outline some of the concepts that underly them.  Grasping these concepts alone can greatly raise your chances of success in this area.

So I’ll start with the first one here and plan to add more as time goes on.

Its important to consider the fact that the key to all good technique, whether its playing very fast scale passages or slow blues, is developing and maintaining detailed control.  In fact reaching an accomplished level of technique in any style can be defined in this way. There are specific ways to facilitate this.

Its first important to establish in your mind, what areas of technique you actually need, to express what you have to say on the instrument.  If you try to practice every possible area of technique, not only will you spread your time too thinly, but organizing it in a useful way would be virtually impossible.  If you want to actualize your playing potential, you need to direct the time you can give to practice, efficiently into the appropriate areas.  If you get this wrong you’ll waste a lot of time and effort without seeing the results you could be seeing.

Below are some things to consider when determining what kinds of areas you need to practice.

For improvisors:

If you are primarily an improvisor some of the skills your fingers need are quite specific. You have to be ready to do a big range of different things at any moment.  You never know what’s going to happen next, so you can’t rely on set patterns or things you’ve worked out in advance.  You have to be able to play whatever comes into your head and that will react to the music, which will be different every time.  This takes a certain kind of technique and practice.

Some types of improvised expression need a lot of speed some don’t.  Some types needs a lot of detailed articulation, some less so.  Some need harmonic agility but not others.  All need an able ear.

For non-improvisors:

If improvising is not such a big part of your playing, or not part of your playing at all, then you will need to concentrate on other areas.  Some of the things you play might be quite different from anything anyone would or could improvise. What you are concerned with is being able to play sets of ideas, which you have worked out or learned, as naturally as possible with as much feel as possible, while keeping the execution as close to the intended idea as possible.  This takes a certain kind of technique and practice.

Some of these styles require a lot of fast playing, others almost none.  Some of these styles are primarily about detailed articulation, others not so much.  Some players combine several different styles, some only one.

I’m stating the obvious here, but for a reason.

You need to examine very carefully what you do play, or what you want to be able to play.  This is the starting point for establishing exactly which areas, out of the incomprehensibly vast areas that actually exist, you need to focus on in practice.

I can’t emphasize how important this process is if you want to reach your potential.  A lot of young players make this mistake of thinking they can cover everything, that its indeed important to cover everything. Or that they don’t know what they might need to play in the future so they’d better cover everything.  This is the wrong way of looking at things.

Its easy to prove this to yourself, buy just comparing the best players of different styles you know of – try some famous ones.  You’ll see that part of what makes them so good, is that they sound different from each other – they don’t sound like anyone else.  They have found their own road and travelled so far down that road that no one else can follow them.  That, by definition, means they have concentrated on some areas more than others.  They have found the areas that are important to what they want to say and put their time into those.

The term “Jack of all trades and master of none” really does apply here.  Some young players are so star struck by their favourite players that they believe they are capable of playing anything.  The myth is that these god like  players can play anything brilliantly, but they just choose out of all that, to play what they want.  Its important to realise that however good these people are, they are human beings with human limitations.  This is a myth.  No rock player for example, however good, can play jazz as well as a great jazz player.  No jazz player, however good, can play rock as well as a great rock player.

The reason is that these two disciplines are fundamentally different, they consist of different skills, different musical languages, different sensibilities and different mind sets.

You might be a rock player or jazz player who plays classical as well.  Its a mistake to think you can be equally brilliant at both.  Choose one and use the other only if it will in some way help your primary focus.

Once you have your focus you can look at some of the other important factors in how to spend your practice time.  As I said above, the specifics of these need to be demonstrated, but the underlying concepts can be explained.  I plan to cover these in turn in future posts.

Some people say jazz is “intellectual” music or “head” music but actually its the opposite. Most jazz is total gut driven, instinctive music, its primarily about the heart not the head – which is one reason its so related to the blues.  If you don’t hear this when you listen to jazz, you need to look to yourself for the reason, not the music.  The emotion is there for all to hear.  In fact you could say that a lot of jazz is just that: pure emotion translated into sound in as pure a way as the players are capable of (that varies from player to player and performance to performance).  If you are not hearing this, then you are not listening in the right way.  But what ever you do, don’t misunderstand what jazz is about.

To learn how to play jazz you have to learn a lot about how music works and that takes serious study and you have to get very good on your instrument. To be able to really play jazz though – you have to learn all this so well that you don’t think about it when you play.  Its just like learning a language.  Say your native language is English and you want to learn to speak French.  You have to learn all the vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar etc… But to be able to really speak it well – you have to learn all this so well that you don’t think about it.  When you are talking to someone you aren’t thinking about sentence structure and when you play jazz its exactly the same.

Every good jazz player knows: if you are thinking you are not playing.  You are basically playing what you hear, what comes into your head and the musical sounds that form in your head are based on how the music makes you feel.  Of course to be able to do this does take years of study and practice and I think this is why people sometimes think jazz is intellectual music.  But to say that is to misunderstand what is actually happening for most jazz musicians when they play.

Yes of course a jazz player has a fleeting thought here and there about which scale to use or what chord is coming next, but primarily they are immersed in the feeling of the music, and reacting to that on an emotional level from moment to moment, this is the essence of what good improvising is all about.  So its primarily not an intellectual activity, but an emotional one.