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Public-facing note to self: tell the story of my learning jazz guitar
Okay, so the story of my learning jazz guitar is this. When I was in college, I was a completely self taught rock/blues player. I worshipped in the church of Jerry Garcia and wanted to start learning jazz to chase down that aspect of his style.
I self-taught jazz as far as I could, not so easy in those days but it could be done. And then I got super into it, not just for jam band purposes but as a thing unto itself. As a senior, I took a couple of semesters of jazz theory, and those were transformational.
(Side note: there is no universally valid music theory approach, but if we had to pick one, jazz would serve most students better than Western classical does. For sure we should center it way more heavily. Anyway.)
So then I spent some time taking lessons with a guitarist named Joe Giglio. He's from the Jim Hall/Pat Martino school, clean fluid streams of eighth notes, but he knows and loves rock too. Great guy, look him up if you're in NYC and want to study.
Joe did not succeed in making me a jazz guitarist. It was through no fault of his. I did learn a ton from him, he improved my playing by leaps and bounds, but I can not play jazz on any kind of level.
This is because I didn't actually want to play jazz that badly. I thought I did, I had a steadily gigging jazz group that I was deeply committed to, I loved the music and still do.
From Joe I learned what it takes to become an excellent jazz improvisor, but he couldn't make me devote my whole existence to transcribing solos and learning them in all twelve keys, because, as it turns out, I don't care enough about my jazz chops.
The thing that I was actually trying to do was to understand Black music generally, to understand groove and the blues and soul. Jazz is an excellent window into those concepts but orthodox 1950s style bebop is too small a window
Someone should have grabbed me by the shoulders and said, dude, hip-hop, the thing you are searching for in these lessons is hip-hop, and everything leading up to hip-hop. Which includes jazz! But jazz is not enough.
The most useful things Joe ended up teaching me were tangential to jazz. For one thing, he made me learn a Bach violin partita, that was an excellent use of my time for a variety of reasons.
Also, after many hours together, he put his finger on my main obstacle as an improvisor: anxiety disorder and dissociation. He didn't use those terms, but that's what he was talking about. He saw that I was constantly losing focus and confidence.
That I was changing my mind all the time, interrupting my own flow, second-guessing myself in real time. No amount of shedding or transcribing was going to fix that. Joe is a great guitar teacher, but not a shrink, so he didn't know how to help me there.
It's okay, I sought out psychiatric help elsewhere, and while I haven't overcome this set of problems, at least I've named it, and can sometimes flow for up to five seconds at a time now before getting paralyzed.
The people who really helped me understand the state of mind necessary to attain flow were not jazz musicians at all, they were (are) hip-hop people. I'm writing a dissertation about @ToniBlackman because out of all the educators I've ever met, she has the best handle on this.
Toni figured out decades ago that the main obstacles to improvisation are self-consciousness, anxiety, fear of being judged, and overthinking. Her teaching approach is devoted to breaking those obstacles down directly, through theater games and such.
If I had the power, I would go back in time, take a half a dozen lessons with Joe, and then go devote several years to freestyle rap with Toni. I would be a better jazz player today for sure.
