For 35 years, I've resisted memorizing tunes...

but a few years ago, when I moved to the NY area, I started to show up at jam sessions with my Real Book (or Pocket Changes) in hand. I soon learned that this practice is looked down upon somewhat in these parts, and I guess there are some good reasons for it.

First of all, it's great to show up at a jam session, say "what tune do you want to play?", and then all jump in without anyone fumbling for books or groping for music stands. It makes everyone look more professional, makes the flow go smoothly, etc.

But, more importantly, memorizing the tune (a) lets you really learn it and get inside it, and (b) learning the melody in particular improves your ear and gives you a readily-available musical vocabulary for quotes.

So, now that I've started going back to a regular weekly jazz jam session (great Wednesday night sessions at the very friendly and comfortable Cornerstage Music & Spirits in Middletown, NY, led by the fabulous bassist Robert Kopec and the great house bands he brings. You have to check it out if you're in the area.), I've finally bitten the bullet and embarked on a program of memorizing a tune each week, both chords and melody. Sometimes I fall short of that goal, but I am making steady progress.

One of the big issues is how do you pick the next tune to memorize? Well, first of all, it's a good idea to make a list of all the tunes that you've nearly memorized, and work on really getting those down. After that, what I do is to try and identify one or two tunes (depending on difficulty) from each week's jam to memorize (I do bring my Real Book to play tunes that other people call that aren't yet in my list).

Next, how do you memorize a tune? This is an extremely important and interesting question, with no really simple answers. I'll be covering some aspects of it as we go on. But practicing it a lot with Band-In-A-Box (see below) is a great place to start.

Resources

Before I sign off on this entry, let me recommend the one critical piece of software for practicing jazz tunes: Band-In-A-Box from PG Music. (disclosure: PG Music does distribute some of my own software, so the sales of certain BIAB packages yields a small amount of income to my stream, but this recommendation has nothing to do with that, and everything to do with the way I practice myself). What's really cool about BIAB is that the arrangements are more-than-good-enough for practicing, the speed and looping are easily altered, and there's a vast library of jazz tunes available for free if you join the Band-In-A-Box Files Group over at Yahoo

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This is my first public writing in quite a while. My most recent effort was the pre-blog electronic newsletter Woodsheddin', a journal of what I hoped would be "best practices for practicing". I was writing the newsletter partly as an effort to promote sales of my software, SlowGold and SlowBlast!, but also just to share the results of the transcription work I was doing and the my observations of the learning processes I was going through as part of my continual musical evolution. Some of you may also know me from my various articles and columns in Guitar Player magazine and other publications.

My contributions to Woodsheddin' were greatly disrupted when my family and I moved across the country from Oregon to NY in early 2001 for various personal reasons. We spent two years in Brooklyn, and are now happily settled in a rural exurb of NYC.

In the past few years, I have often been tempted to reactivate Woodsheddin', but the effort involved in publishing a full-blown "issue" has seemed daunting, with all the other demands on my time (you don't want to know...) Now, it seems that blogging and RSS feeds will allow me to put out such nuggets of wisdom and entertainment as I can manage in smaller, more casual "chunks", and maybe even get some feedback happening. So I'm going to give it a shot. I've accumulated a few bits of extremely condensed wisdom, particularly about jazz guitar and also some general improvising and practice principles, over the last few years, and I'm going to try to convey some of that wisdom, along, with some useful Web-based practice tools and utilities, as I develop them. I always welcome your comments.

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