My future tax return purchase

Welcome back, everyone. I hope those of you in the U.S. had a happy and safe holiday weekend. Mine was great, thank you very much. During the extended weekend I had a gig with my jazz quintet. It’s been quite a while since we’ve played together. One of the great things about playing jazz is that you don’t have to rehearse all the time if you are playing standards; all of the musicians know the tunes, so as long as you agree on the set list ahead of time (and often you don’t even have to do that, really) you’re good to go.

One of the bad things about playing jazz is that you don’t have to rehearse all the time if you are playing standards.

If you have the desire to continue to improve as a performer, critiquing your live performances are just as important as keeping a practice journal. Performances are where you test your mettle as a musician and try to incorporate all of the things you practice, but if you don’t self-evaluate, how do you know if you are improving?

Get It On Tape

First and foremost, you are most likely never going to remember everything that you played the night before, so it’s important to record your performances. Video or audio is fine, but you need something that you can listen back to. You can probably remember some things, but that’s not a very productive way to do your due diligence.

Take Notes

As you listen back, make notes of where you heard something you didn’t like. It doesn’t even have to be a “mistake” per se; just something you think you can do better.

For some reason when my quintet was playing Blue Bossa over the weekend, I kept missing the DbMaj7 chord. I have no idea why; it’s a very simple song and I’ve played it a million times. But for some reason, on this night, I just wasn’t hitting it at all. I kept trying to play EbMaj7 instead. So I made a note of it and I’ll be going back and seeing if I can find ways to fix it so it doesn’t become a permanent problem.

Listen First, Fix Second

Go through your entire performance and evaluate first, before you pick up the guitar and try to work through the issues. You may have made the same mistake throughout the performance.

Organize and Categorize

Once you have listened all the way through and taken notes, it’s time to group them into workable pieces. How you organize is up to you, but you should experiment until you come up with something that works for you. The goal here is to group your work so you aren’t flying back and forth all across the map to address similar issues.

Evaluate

Once you are organized you can dig into the actual issues and see if they are just “one nighters” or if they are indicative of something bigger. For example, if you are constantly missing a cue for coming back in, that’s something you want to work on. If you can’t seem to remember the Melodic Minor scale even though you’ve been working on it for months, then you perhaps need to refine your current practice routine and come up with a different way to review that scale. If your B string kept going out of tune, by all means you need to get your guitar looked at before your next show. (Yes, technical problems are just as important for evaluation as performance problems.)

Getting back to my Blue Bossa flub, I know that hitting the DbMaj7 was a one-night thing. I’ve never had the problem before and probably won’t again. But what it did tell me was that the chord voicings I was using for that section weren’t really working. I was trying to play richer, more full-sounding chords and it was screwing me up. So, I can decide to either play more simple chords, or try to reduce what I was playing to keep the essence the same but make it a little more manageable. I’ve determined that it’s not something I need to actively address, but perhaps working on some new chord voicings might help.

Now Fix It

Okay, so you’ve made your list (checked it twice) and gotten a feel for what’s a temporary glitch and what’s more serious. Now you can pick up your guitar and start to work on the problems. Maybe you need to modify your practice routine for a few weeks in order to make sure they are fully fleshed out and fixed. Maybe you only need to spend one session exclusively working on a solution. Either is fine; you are the best judge of what you need to do, you just have to make sure you do it.

Self-evaluation, in an honest way, can be difficult, but it is essential for your growth as a musician. You are your own best (and worst) critic, and you’ll know better than anyone where you are struggling and how you can overcome it.