If you improvise music: listen to Miles. trust your own voice and talent first, over whatever people tell you to do, badly.
I’ve been an improviser for most of my life. Before studying classical, before jazz. I get that having a routine and discipline as an artist, as well as transcribing, can be important – but there’s this way that “college jazz study” frames things as if the study IS the music. Can you learn from doing that? Sure, but that’s the tip of the iceberg, at best. It’s mostly derivative and boring to insist on that. I find it really distasteful. A lot of that is just trying to turn jazz into western classical music. It’s not the way things should be, especially as a be-all approach to making music.
By definition, free improvisation, including forms of that which came directly out of bebop, are based off of spontaneous invention, compositionally if not directly. The way to carry that tradition on is to listen, and improvise. Over and over again. Literal transcription doesn’t make much sense, although it’s possible, and in my experience, going for the shape and feel of things gets you much farther than that. There’s this pressure to “be a jazz musician first”. Why? Breaking with tradition is still in relation to what proceeded it (which is what Ornette did, and said as much). Alice Coltrane, John Coltrane, Ornette – they moved past jazz and explored new avenues and ways of expression. Nobody cares about “how good we are at transcription”, they care about the end result.
That said, tradition is fine! Especially as part of the Black experience from that period onward – but I’m not from that generation of artists, I’m from building directly on what they recorded and performed afterward. It feels fake to assert otherwise. If people want to dedicate themselves to that, fine, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.
That said, there’s nothing wrong with studying jazz in the ways that it frequently gets taught, as part of a larger strategy. I don’t buy that much of what is taught is about “THE heritage of jazz”, though. As if there’s only one heritage! It’s pretty raw to say that John Coltrane in his later years wasn’t part of that tradition.
When jazz is taught that way, especially as rote learning, the idea of heritage goes out the window. Especially in the sense of building on the “free” aspects of bebop musicians’ work, such as rejecting the music-as-settler-imperialism of sweet bands, and much of swing as well. Bebop was a revolution in music, and commodifying that into a sort of “formula for success” is anything but that. Even Jamey Abersold himself argues against this.
There’s more than one way to approach improvisation, and yes, you’re going to have to put in a lot of hours developing your own skills, and most importantly, your own voice. Find your own voice and push on that, then trust what follows!
