My “version” of the famous cello prelude takes the basic motif and chord progression as a vehicle to loop layers and improvise in 7/4 time. To skip the loop setup fast forward to near the 2-minute mark.

It’s a real blessing, especially for instrumental acts, when a venue like Jim comes along, (see below) opening the door for you to play on the road. This sounds like a great gig en route to Nashville, Atlanta, Louisville, Durham, et al. If you’re looking to tour down south, give him a call and tell him I sent you. (Seriously!)

You might be thinking, “but it’s just a gig for tips”. But I’ll bet you might be able to convince Jim to charge something small at the door, and if you advertise to local teachers and players, you might pull off a clinic. Maybe a couch to stay on…. It all adds up. Touring isn’t easy, but it’s one way independent musicians do it, and you have start at A to get to B.
See Jim’s note, and offer, below:

“Christian,

I recently joined the Creative String Players group on Linkedin. I wanted to briefly introduce myself to you because I own a venue in Tennessee called The Acoustic Coffeehouse where we host live music every night. I do all of the booking and typically our groups are small touring acts who play for tips, a meal, and merch sales. We stay booked a couple of months in advance. If you have any groups that are trying to get out and find places to play they should contact me.

I also play the cello, and sit in with a lot of the people who play at the Coffeehouse.

Our schedule is listed on our website, www.acousticcoffeehouse.net. My email address is there as well. Take a look at the “cellos rule” tab while you’re there. I’m sure you know some of the people in the videos.

Stop in if you’re in the neighborhood. We’re conveniently located on the way to Nashville. Also, our university here, East Tennessee State University, in Johnson City, Tennessee, has a bluegrass music department, so we’ve got lots of hot bluegrass players around.

Thanks,

Jim Benelisha”

Jim- Awesome stuff! I’ll get the word out for sure and let’s stay connected.
I’m forwarding this to a few of my favorite grass roots touring artists in this email as well, so if you hear from them, you’ll know they came highly recommended by me.

A great young creative violin player  named Rob Flax (he’s also an alumni of my annual Creative Strings Workshop) recently sent me his audition tapes for grad school to get my feedback, and one of the first things I noticed was that, although the violin was loud enough in the context of the jazz combo, it didn’t have the depth of sound that I  know he creates when he plays acoustically. I think this was largely attributable to the fact that his sound was “dry”, i.e., lacking reverb. Although Rob delves into everything from straight ahead jazz to fusion, free jazz,  rock, and fiddle styles like bluegrass, his tape was mostly acoustic and straight ahead.

Rob Flax

The obvious question from Rob to me: What’s a good way to get the reverb I need? An amp or a pedal? Any tips from your own experimenting?

My answer: It depends. Some amps have good reverbs, some pedals have good reverbs, and sometimes you’ll want to rely on the p.a. (when you have one with a soundman you trust) for reverb.

I like the Boss ME-50, which is one big pedal that has most or all of the effects I need including volume pedal, octave, chorus, wah, distortion/overdrive, etc… (thanks to awesome jazz violinist, Zach Brock, for hipping me to this pedal a few years ago when he came to the workshop), although admittedly the reverb in the unit isn’t necessarily that special. Usually I’ll opt for the reverb in my amp. (For more customized help with sound issues related to amplifying strings, you might try getting in touch with Blaise and his team at the Electric Violin Shop I know they spend a lot of time on the phone giving string players advice about gear and sound.)

I suggest that in order to attune your ears to nuances in reverb (there are many levels which won’t be clear to you at first), you simply experiment with using lot’s of reverb, and then a little, and this way you’ll start to hone in on the right amount.

The standard thought seems to be that reverb is sufficient for straight ahead jazz and/or other “acoustic” music, although this isn’t a hard and fast rule. Experiment with delays too and see if you like them. I usually don’t use delay when I’m playing straight ahead, although I do use delay in other contexts. There are three parameters within the delay effect that makes it slightly more complicated to get right than a typical reverb setting. More on delays later.

Anyone have anything they want to add? Feel free to comment.

Use the widget above to check out one of my latest recordings, “City of Spring”:  Jarek Smietana Band featuring Christian Howes from the album “A Tribute to Zbigniew Seifert”

Other featured violinists on this album include Jerry Goodman, Mateusz Smoczynski, Didier Lockwood, Krzesimir Debski, Mark Feldman, Maciej Strzelczyk, Adam Baldych, Pierre Blanchard

Learn to practice what is uncomfortable

My former classical violin teacher, mentor and friend, the late and widely beloved Michael Davis, told me many things which influenced me early on as a classical musician and later came to influence my growth as a jazz player.

Regarding the amount of time spent practicing daily, he felt that, “if you can’t get everything done in three hours, you’re not practicing efficiently”. In his view, the saying, “practice makes perfect”, wasn’t adequate. Better to adapt the mantra, “Perfect practice makes perfect”.
Many of my students at Berklee and abroad come out of a classical tradition and have developed practice habits conducive to making gains as a technician and classical player. Often though, these same habits become detrimental to growth in “creative studies”. This is not to suggest that practicing technique and jazz/ improvisation are mutually exclusive; quite the opposite is true.

It’s actually advantageous to consolidate improvisation practice with technical practice. For example, one can focus on technical issues such as string crossing, bow control, intonation, double stops, etc. all while improvising- this is the equivalent of killing two birds with one stone, and offers the added advantages of 1)developing technique beyond the “given” and limited possibilities of the classical repertoire and 2) providing the student w/ a sense of ownership in the vocabulary he/she is practicing/creating.

You Are a Novice 

This is you.

However, regardless of how many years you have studied your instrument and/or classical music, the moment you begin to study jazz and/or improvised tonal music, you are a novice.

Accepting this is difficult, because you have come to identify yourself as an expert. Both can be true, i.e., that you are an expert musician and instrumentalist, and at the same time a novice in jazz or improvised tonal music.

In studying improvisation or jazz, you are embarking upon a journey to obtain an entirely new and different skill set. It will take time.  In his 2008 book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell refers to a study which holds up the “10,000 hour rule”, i.e., it takes about 10,000 hours, or 10 years at 3 hrs per day, to effectively master any given discipline. Even accounting for your accrued mastery on your instrument, you might want to allow yourself about 6 years.

I’ve referred before to the difficulty and discomfort that comes out of accepting your new status as a “novice”. For many musicians switching from classical to jazz, this discomfort is intolerable. It can threaten one’s self-esteem and cause all sorts of defensive thoughts/behaviors to arise. One of these is denial.

The sooner you accept the truth about where you are in your development and get over your insecurity, the sooner you can begin to make progress.  Remember, you can still take credit for the mastery that you have developed over years of practice. You have a lot to be proud of in taking the plunge into something new. Ultimately, by forging ahead in a discipline which is totally new to you, you will come out stronger for it.

If You Sound Good, You’re Probably Not Practicing

One of my favorite and most accomplished young adult students frequently arrives to his lesson with a list of concerns and questions including things such as sound production, shoulder rests, philosophical questions about the state of the mind while playing, posture, et al. These are all potentially very good questions for a classical student, but often they strike me as distractions for a jazz student, (especially given that this particular student has his technique really together and claims to be primarily interested in studying jazz for now).

Every week, as he plays solos for me over standard tunes, most of the things that I notice holding him back are related to gaps in his grasp of harmony, i.e. “playing the (chord) changes”. Sure, there are other things worth working on as well, but this is a consistent thing that comes up which he continues to evade. It’s not that he can’t execute ideas on the violin- it’s that he can’t conceive of the ideas because the harmony is challenging and eluding him. I continually give him exercises for internalizing the harmony, and he continually avoids doing them.

Is this denial? Why do so many of us have this same tendency, I wonder. I have to be ever vigilant in my own practice to make sure I’m not “practicing” what is comfortable, but rather addressing the gaps, the uncomfortable areas. Every day you practice you are faced with one crucial challenge, which is to practice effectively. Make it count. Practice the things that matter.

Michael Davis once also told me, “if you sound good, you’re probably not practicing”. Most of your practice time should be devoted to things which you don’t sound good doing, or you’re uncomfortable with. Once you sound good and feel comfortable, it’s time to move to something else. (This is equally true for classical players)

Perfect Practice Makes Perfect

Concerning growth in jazz and/or improvised tonal music, there are several ways you can go about drilling harmony such that, over time, you assimilate and internalize the information (and once you have internalized harmony, the understanding will never go away.) I’ve covered many of these in other articles, but to recap:
1) articulate the chords on the violin in various forms (as dble stops or arpeggios in all inversions or shapes), being sure to play properly voice-led inversions when the chords fall into progressions. (It’s not really very helpful if you only play chords and arpeggios in root position).
2) play the voice-led chords on the piano (or guitar). You can also play the root/3rd/7th in the left hand on the piano and improvise, rubato, in the right hand.
3) when you listen to music, focus on the harmony instead of the melody. Try to use your ears to transcribe the harmony in any music you listen to (when in doubt, refer to the bass line for help. if you need to, sing the bass line up an octave to find your starting pitch).
4)play voice-led arpeggios or double stops of chord progressions (including both chord pairs and/or longer progressions)
5) harmonize melodies and/or solos in doublestops (both as parallel thirds, 4ths, 6ths, 7ths, 2nds, and also as non parallel harmonies)
6) play 3rds and 7ths of chords in various comping styles. Play root/3rd/7th voicings of chords. Play voice-led upper extensions of chords. Walk bass lines.
7) harmonize the melody of a tune with the chord tones underneath(root/3rd/and/or…
8) Play 4-note melodic patterns up and down first position, Changing the scale through the chord progression (but don’t start on the root of each scale; Instead, start wherever you left off from the previous scale).

One’s brain is typically only able to handle this kind of practice for so long. Perhaps an hour tops. So, if you practice 2 hours in a day, you might want to spend 1/3-1/2 of your time drilling these harmonic issues. The rest of the time can be spent on other things.

But if you ignore this practice, you are just stalling, and nothing can replace real harmonic understanding. It will never come easily, and there’s no way around it. You have to practice the important things or you will just be living in denial, copping out, and on some deep level, you will be frustrated. On the other hand, make these a regular part of your practice and you will see results over time. The rewards are worth it.  

Sign up for a free trial to learn improvisation with me online at the Creative Strings Academy.  Learn more about the intensive week-long Creative Strings Workshop.