Here’s the free download to accompany this lesson.
I have zero idea if this will be useful for anybody else.
It was sure useful for me.
I also suspect it will trend a little advanced. You can probably do approximate versions of this, but to make it take deep root you probably need to be patient.
With that out of the way, retrieving licks or idioms while improvising has always been a bit of a crap-shoot for me. Like remembering you’re dreaming when you’re dreaming. There were sort of two ways to access something you practiced: by crossing your fingers and hoping it would come out…
…or studiously forcing it in, with all the unmusical downsides.
A few years ago, I started to get pretty decent at teaching myself basic “building blocks”, workshopping those, and getting them to come out while improvising. And truth be told, that’s what I needed to be focused on for a few years. Just learning the basics, and accessing them in flow - playing things that sound like I wrote them down and practiced them, except I’m improvising them.
But key phrase - I wrote them down.
So it was a very effective process of spinning my own idioms and putting them together. Which only gave me one real direction to assemble stuff: inside out.
But what if you hear somebody else’s lick, or aesthetic, and want to assimilate that?
The missing step came to me as a result of an exercise I was doing with my jazz students. With respect to JP, in observance of our ongoing habit of not checking each other’s materials too closely because there’s some parallel thinking and neither of us wants to worry we were too “influenced”…
…it’s something I called “paradiddle flow”.
We figured out how to improvise a “matrix” of 8ths, using combinations of paradiddles and double paradiddles…
…then we could “inject” traditional jazz licks like those of Max or Philly Joe into the flow. Basically.
Fast forward a month, and I was listening to some pocket drummers and realized “I can do this with anything.”
In case this sounds like simple “practice the lick”, here are the novel bits:
Previously, I’d either have to play the lick verbatim or not. I had no way to “stair stepping” it into my playing.
Even after I discovered things like the switching exercises from my coaching program, I still needed another step: the “matrix” of ambient improv finally gave me that
As I said, I have zero earthly idea if anyone’s thought of explaining it this way before. (As I alluded in my interview with Gordy Knudtson, plenty of great players have figured it out in some form of fashion.)
But, novel or no, I’m showing it to you.
And if you’re reading this, you’re getting the full “members-only” version.
Enjoy.