Goooooooooooooooooooooal!

Yesterday, I put the finishing touches on my new practice routine. As I mentioned when deciding to embrace the suck, I’ve felt that my practice sessions have been floundering. Although my sessions have been very good for technical practice, I think they were falling short of my actual needs. I was substituting activity for productivity. My practice routine did not include any goals; it was an amorphous, “to infinity and beyond” ideal that had no true metric for progress or, even worse, a way to identify what was working and what wasn’t so I could make adjustments.

So after some soul-searching and heavy doses of gingko biloba, I have come up with a six-month practice challenge for myself.

This challenge kills several birds at once. First, it gives me a definitive timeline to work with. Now I have a deadline that needs to be met, with its associated pressures. I also have a specific set of things to work on. Lastly, I am working directly on the things I want to; rather than working around my goals I am working on my goals!

So what are my goals?

1. Learn 20 jazz standards (melody, chords, and improvisation) – the idea here is to get away from the fakebooks. As much as I love fakebooks, I’ll never be able to internalize the music if I have to rely on sight reading while playing. It’s too distracting and drives my attention away from listening to the rest of the band.

2. Pat Martino’s “Linear Expressions” – Martino wrote this book many years ago as an introduction to his minor reduction method of playing. Every chord gets reduced to a minor equivalent, which he then uses to improvise. I want to learn this method and incorporate his ideas and lines into my playing.

3. Jerry Bergonzi’s “Pentatonics” – Saxophonist Bergonzi wrote a series of books on jazz improvisation. Volume 2 deals exclusively with pentatonics. I have seen many examples of the pentatonics being applied over jazz progressions and love the sound, so I figured now was as good a time as any to dig into it and learn.

4. Shore up the songs I already know – As much as my memory sucks there are a few songs that I can play. But just to be safe I’m going to continue to work through them to make sure I have them nailed, with no doubt.

5. Improve Improv – All of the above goals will help me improve my ability to improvise. But, ultimately, I want to get better at this and so I’ll also be analyzing/transcribing solos and copping licks, learning some ii-V-I ideas, and generally trying to absorb whatever improvisation concepts I can get by listening to others. I figured the best way to do this would be to cop the solos from the songs in my list of twenty.

Why all of the jazz? Because to me it’s a means to an end. I am a firm believer that if I can “master” jazz (take that loosely, please) I will be able to play anything else I want. I’m also a huge jazz lover and want to be able to play it as the end itself. Licks don’t impress me, I already know how to play a barre chord, and learning country music will come later. For now I want to concentrate on learning the language of jazz.

And so what does all of this mean to you? Probably nothing. But, hopefully at least a few of you will read this and take a look at your own practice routine to see if it’s really helping you achieve your goals, or if you, like me, were substituting activity for productivity.

I’ll be sure to update the blog with my progress, and I will absolutely share any revelations I discover with you all. I encourage you all to take a step back and see if perhaps it’s time to create your own six-month challenge.

Have a great weekend!