Mike Jolkovski is a saxophonist / flute player who has been in The Jazz Workshop for a number of years. Recently, I’ve been noticing that when Mike is playing with his group, he’ll spend the majority of each session not looking at charts when he plays.
I complimented him on his obvious efforts to really learn and internalize these important jazz tunes that we do, and I asked him not only what he does to learn these tunes, but what the process of internalizing these tunes has been like for him. I asked if I could share his responses on our blog, and he graciously agreed.
Below are his answers.
What compelled you to try to get “off book” with these tunes? What did you think the benefits would be?
It seems to be the best thing to focus on to push my playing ahead into new territory. I want to play jazz the way it’s really played. I’m a decent enough reader and I still love playing composed music, but it’s a different relationship to the music when it’s all contained inside yourself. When I’m occasionally able to just play fluently in a free and relaxed way, it is the most fantastic feeling. That’s what it’s about, right?
To have a tune so well internalized I can solo without thinking — just “use the force, Luke”. That’s something to aspire to.
- What are the challenges for you in doing this? Is it about memorization? What is your process to get off-book with these tunes?
Since I’m a horn player, I start with the melody and just play it a lot. I’m still surprised by which tunes are harder to retain and which ones go more easily. I’m having a hell of a time with “A Child is Born”, which is a very simple tune with repetitive four-bar phrases. It’s a mystery.
Every element of this “off-book” project is fascinating. For example, if you heard someone miss a note on one of the top 200 standards, you’d know it. Which means you know 200 standards. That’s wild. Seems that we should be able to leverage this.
It’s also humbling to realize just how deeply good musicians learn tunes. I have to have a tune in my bones and fingers so that nothing can throw me off — so my mind is free while I’m playing. You know the cliché — an amateur will practice until they get it right and a pro will practice until they can’t get it wrong.
My process is to do a lot of brute repetition and to try to associate the tune and the chords any way I can. I repeat it in different ways: the tune, the root motion and the arpeggiated chords or chord scales. I do simple harmonic analysis — the kind of thing that’s obvious to a chord player at a glance, just determining the key centers and the cadences.
I find it’s a good process to alternate on/off book at home and in the workshop — I play the tune as well as I can and then open the book and zero in on the bits I missed. Having the page and then not and then having it again helps me get more and more of the tune. Maybe it keeps me from panicking that I’m supposed to burn the book at some point and can never go back.
- What do you gain by getting “off book” with these tunes? What, if anything, do you lose?
A great deal is gained and nothing is lost that I notice. Playing off book is more immediate, more musically satisfying and pleasurable. It makes me grapple with the tune in a deeper way. It’s impossible to be bored. Even taking the music stand away feels quite different.
It’s making me relate differently to the composed music I play. It’s too easy to play things without understanding them.
I know that opinions differ about whether theory actually helps you play better. In the past couple of years I connected a certain satisfying sound to the flat-nine. I knew I liked that sound but didn’t know how to find it. I’m in the same position as a child who has just learned that the taste of chocolate and the word “chocolate” are related. I want to learn more of those words that connect with other tasty flavors.
This is a long way around saying it pushes me to integrate different parts of myself.
- Do you have a harder time remembering the melody of these tunes or the chord changes?
The changes are absolutely harder for me to grasp and remember. You have to remember that it’s still touch-and-go whether I’ll do anything coherent even with the changes in front of me. My brain seems to be built to process one byte of information at a time.
Connecting the changes into meaningful sequences is like connecting words into sentences. It’s far easier to memorize a sentence vs memorizing a random list of words. Connecting the changes doesn’t come naturally to me, and I’m trying to accomplish this by a lot of trial and error. Success is coming bit by bit.
(I was fascinated by this chart Mike made for “Joy Spring” — most of the melody is erased, forcing him to rely on memory for the parts that aren’t there, but leaving some key melodic fragments.)
- How do you plan to further internalize this harmony, given that you are a single-line instrument player and not a chordal-instrument player?
That’s the tough question. Very recently I’ve realized that focusing on voice-leading has a lot of power to help internalizing chunks of chord sequences. Just attending to the guide tones, the 3rds and 7ths, gets you pretty far with this. I’ve spent time playing different ways to navigate from one chord to the next, just focusing on the transition between two or three chords. I’ve never had any luck working with any of those books of five billion ii-V7-I licks. They fill me with despair. But getting just one or two sturdy, reliable ways of connecting frequent chord sequences can be a bridge to a wider palette of phrases.
There’s still a lot of uncertainty about how to get from here to there. All I can say is I have these nice moments when it works.
I trust that if I keep working on the changes in these different ways — root motion, voice leading, simple analysis, relating the melody to the changes, playing through the changes with a backing track — something will coalesce and stick in my brain. Or I will go barking mad.
Another insight is that I have a bad habit of easing up on my effort when I learn something to 80 or 90 percent, being a basically lazy and distractible person. An example of this is “sort of knowing” the blues turnaround, as I have for the past 45 years, which lets me play a kind of OK solo. A relatively short period of intensive focus on this ought to give me a good payoff in real confidence and improvisational fluency. That would be cool. We’ll see.
Thanks to Mike for these thoughtful answers! We hope this inspires you to try getting “off-book” for some of the jazz standards you know.