The 3 Pillars Of Improv, with Lorin Cohen

Christopher: Have you ever wondered what’s going through a great improviser’s head when they wail? Or maybe you’ve heard conflicting advice about whether you need to master music theory to improvise at the highest levels?

In today’s episode, I’m sharing a clip from Lorin Cohen’s Musical U masterclass, where he lays it all out for you, plain and simple.

So on our last episode, we had our mini-interview with Mr. Lorin Cohen, jazz bassist and educator, and I mentioned in that episode how neatly complementary his approach is to what we do here at Musical U.

And as a kind of preface or context for today’s excerpt from his masterclass, we teach playing by ear in a really unusual way at Musical U compared to how you might get taught it in the context of a particular instrument lessons or in the context of ear training.

We’ve come up with a really distinctive approach, we call it the Play-By-Ear Process. And the point is, we really teach it as being a spectrum. So it’s not some magical skill that comes out of nowhere. It’s not something where you need to master ear training before you can do it. It’s really just the acceleration and improvement of “figuring it out by ear”.

And this is hugely liberating for our students when they discover that they can figure stuff out by ear. And the idea that then to be able to just play something at the drop of a hat by ear is just getting faster and better at that. It’s really empowering and exciting, and it works amazingly.

Then when we teach improv, we have this Expansive Creativity framework, which is all about constraints and dimensions and playgrounds and this feedback loop of Play-Listen, Listen-Play.

And I mention all that because in Lorin’s masterclass, he really kind of brought the two together in an interesting way.

He examined improvisation as being a process of reacting. And the goal is just to reduce your reaction time. So when you’re practicing improvisation, it’s all about just getting faster and better at responding to what you hear musically.

So this was just a really elegant way to marry those two approaches we teach at Musical U, one for playing by ear, one for improvisation.

It’s a way of looking at it that we hadn’t really explored before. And so it was fantastic to have his masterclass and have it align so beautifully with both of those while bringing something new.

So I wanted to share with you a segment from that masterclass. This is from near the beginning, where Lorin was laying out his whole framework. He had just shared a video of an amazing improviser on vibraphone, Stefon Harris. And he had invited all of our live masterclass attendees to share what they were noticing in this improvisation.

He used that then as a jumping off point to talk about improvising in terms of reacting and the three components that go into it.

I’ll just say he wraps this up with a really elegantly simple summary of the idea, something that you can take away and keep in mind anytime you’re working on improvisation. So do listen out for that neat little takeaway at the end. Here we go.

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Lorin: When it comes to improvisation, I like to think that there’s three elements at play: Head, Ear, Hand. And reaction time.

Okay? And I see head, ear, hand as what I call the three pillars of improvisation practice, and relating to reaction time.

Okay, so “jazz reacting”, that is what I call this.

And in many ways, improvisation is a process of reacting. And there’s so many ways that we are reacting when we improvise, but that’s the first thing, which could almost be four pillars, really.

But this idea of that’s the biggest thing that I see that’s happening. And I know Christopher talks a lot about the element of ear training and the element of hearing. I think that was really what we saw there was Stefon’s hearing harmony and immediately reacting to it, right?

So jazz is a process, or any improvisation is a process of reacting.

Now, today’s lecture, I’m specifically really going to be talking from a jazz perspective, but about reacting, okay? And my goal with working through this and thinking about how reaction plays into this was to increase the speed of this process, which decreases the reaction time.

So, for a lot of us, when we’re improvising, our reaction time may be like this. Somebody plays a chord, and whether it’s any information, whether you’re responding to it with a scale that you’ve learned or something you’re hearing, you know, sometimes it could be super slow for us, right?

But as you saw with Stefon in this case of a great master improviser, it gets down to this, right? It gets compressed.

And this is sort of what happened to me, six years or so, I had this “aha” moment, was saying, okay, we need to really compress this process, decrease this reaction time from the moment I hear an idea to that final moment of executing it on the instrument. Okay?

So we need to make our improvisation automatic.

Ultimately, this process of reacting is decreasing. The reaction time is turning it into a reflex. Okay? We want our ability to improvise to be a reflex.

I tell everybody in my program, I was telling Christopher this earlier, I want to be able to wake you up at three in the morning and say “alright, you got four bars of C Major 7, four bars of D Flat Altered, four bars of this. What are you going to play?” And you immediately can tell me how you’re going to react, what you’re going to play on those chord changes.

Okay, so one way jazz reacting is we see a chord symbol on a lead sheet.

We see a chord symbol on a lead sheet and we have to react that way. Okay, how are we going to respond to that? Are we going to play a scale? Are we going to play an arpeggio? What scale are we going to play? What arpeggio are we going to play? Et cetera. So that’s one type of reacting.

The other is the comper. And in jazz, we call somebody who is accompanying us, so if I’m the bass player, I am a comper. I’m accompanying the soloist, I’m accompanying everybody else in the band.

But if I’m taking a solo, maybe the guitarist, the comper or pianist is playing a chord just like in the video.

So in the video, whatever sound source he had coming would be considered the comper, right? He had a track and he was reacting to it.

So we have to immediately react to what we’re hearing around us, obviously. Maybe you’ve heard of jazz improvisation or improvisation being call this process of “spontaneous composition”.

And that’s essentially what we’re talking about today. Not so much the composition part of it yet, but just this ability to react immediately to what we hear or see around us.

Okay, so how do we develop those reflexes? And that’s one of the big things I want you to take away from today’s discussion, is thinking about your improvisation as a reflex that you have to develop in the same way that you would have any other reflex in your life. Okay? It has to become a reflex. It has to become automatic.

So how do we do that?

We do that through a lot of things, but essentially what it’s going to look like is what I call head, ear, hand. And this process has three pillars. Head, ear, hand, okay? And I know you’re probably familiar with this because it’s funny, Christopher, I was telling him earlier, he’s the only other person – I saw a YouTube video – who I’d seen break it down in this way.

Head, ear, hand. These are really the three pillars at play, okay? And let’s talk about pillar one, okay? The head level, given that you’re coming from. Yeah.

Given you’re in Musical U, and this is such a big part of what you do, this may be something that you have worked with before, but this is the knowing, okay? What you know, you know, the notes of the chord. Okay? You know, you know, chord scales. It’s just what you know, it’s the intellectual stuff. Just the head stuff, right? What you need to know away from your instrument. Okay?

Second level, second pillar. The ear level. The ear, okay, Hearing. You can hear what’s happening around you. Now, in improvisation, especially in jazz, this is the level, right, that everybody talks about the most.

I performed for a few years with one of the great jazz icons, a pianist named Monty Alexander from Jamaica. And Monty does not read, I mean, he reads a little music, but he’s all ear. If you ask him what a scale is, I mean, he doesn’t know modes. He doesn’t know scales. He’s hearing everything.

We were once traveling to a little, they’re called the Aeolian islands, these little islands off the coast of Sicily, gorgeous.

And just a dumb, dumb “music dad joke”, almost, right as we were traveling over there, I said “hey, Monty, I bet they love the Aeolian scale over here!”

And he said “what’s that?”

You know, he didn’t even know what it was!

So there are, in the history of jazz, there have always been musicians like that.

Somebody like him, or Stan Getz famously was like that. Young Jacob Collier is like this, right? Although he’s got all of it together, right?

They’re just hearing stuff. You know, they’re not necessarily operating… Well, Jacob is. Let’s go back to Monty and Stan Getz, okay, they’re not necessarily operating at the head level. They have heard something, and they can just play it for you.

And in jazz, this is the level that we usually talk about the most. It’s my view, however, that can make things a bit more difficult for some of us when we’re starting, because we may not know what, we may not be hearing anything yet.

So a lot of times, if we’re beginner improvisers, we may not hear stuff yet. We have to have a little bit of, unless you’re the Monty Alexander or the Stan Getz and you are just hearing it, I feel like it helps to bring our head into the picture a bit and have a sense of just some simple, very, very simple – I hate the word theory, by the way. That’s why I just love the word head. It’s just “the head stuff”.

I think the word theory is just such a triggering word for so many people. It creates roadblocks for people.

So many people come to me and I’m like “what do you want to work on with your improv?” They say “Well, I want to learn more theory” – that has nothing to do with it! Or they say “I want to work on my reading” – that has nothing to do with improvisation! Certainly we want to be literate musicians, but you do not need to be a great sight-reader to be a great jazz improviser.

Reading, really, on the hierarchy of what is important for improvisation reading is, you know, way down there. Okay, but that’s a side note.

But the word theory, right, or even the word ear training, it just triggers people. You know, it’s like, I remember when I went to conservatory and I had to go to ear training, and I had to go to theory, and they just drilled me, and it’s just, you know, if you can relate, give me a thumbs up. Okay. A couple people. All right, that’s okay. Anyway, that was me.

Right, just all that stuff is just, just triggering, right? Just head, ear. Right.

Anyway, so as we’ll talk about and as we’ll talk about throughout the week if you can make it to the workshop where we’re going to dig more into some of the simple how I teach improvisation, which is just some raw, super simple awareness of what I call “unlocking the chakras of chords”, okay? Just learning how to unlock the chakras of certain chords and unlock the chakras of certain chord progressions.

And that’s, you can call it theory, you can call it whatever you want, but it’s just the head stuff giving you some stuff that you can play as opposed to, you know, you may see people say “well, for me, improvisation is I sing it, zap, bubble, and I play it. Now you go do that”. Right?

Alright, great. But, I mean, I don’t have that! You’ve been listening to jazz your whole life. You have that awareness or you have that knowledge. You have that vocabulary. I don’t.

So that’s the head stuff is. Okay, let’s give you some of that stuff. Let’s give you some of that vocabulary just so you understand how I’m putting this stuff together.

And then the next level is, of course, the hand level. And this is playing the notes on the instrument, finding the notes on our instrument, and executing.

So much of what we do is, you know, yeah, find the notes and executing.

Now, I want to say these three pillars, head, ear, hand, is really for the practice room. These are the three things that we’re thinking about when we are working on our improvisation.

When we’re improvising, when we’re at the jam session, when you’re on stage, that’s when we do throw the head level out, okay? By that point, we want to just be operating at the ear and the hand level.

We want to just, we don’t really want to be thinking, we want to just be at that point, hopefully, by the time we get to the gig, we’ve worked on developing, you know, some vocabulary. We sort of know what to play. We know the head stuff. We’ve practiced that.

So when we get to an actual performance situation, it’s just, we’re hearing an idea, we’re executing.

And somebody just said, “my head pillar is too slow for performance”. So that’s part of the thing, too, right? Our reaction time is slow. We want it, when we’re on the gig, we want that reaction time to be – or performing, that’s when we want things to be like this.

Okay? So we practice slow, breaking down these elements super slow in the practice room. Head, ear, hand. So that when we get to a performance, we can just operate at the head, at the ear, and the hand level.

Okay, so let’s dig into this a little more. Something I just sort of talked about this. So “theory, ear training, technique”. That’s essentially what we’re talking about now. We’re just taking away these scary buzzwords.

Now, one way that I break this down even further, and this is, I think, probably the most beneficial way of thinking about this, these three pillars, is “head, ear, hand = say, sing, play”

Head, ear, hand – say, sing play. Okay.

So at the head level, you can tell me what is happening, okay? So in a jazz situation, if you go to even do just a jam session, right, oftentimes, you know, somebody may say alright, let’s play Blue Bossa. And somebody may say “yeah, I forgot the chord changes to it”.

You want to be able to say, to tell that person, okay, what the chord changes are. That, to me, is how I assess the head level.

Can you tell me what is happening? And I’m not talking about “Can you give me a detailed harmonic analysis of that Bill Evans solo we just heard?” I’m just, what are the notes of, okay, see that chord, C Major 7th, can you tell me what the notes of C Major 7th are? CEGB. Great, you’ve passed the head test. Okay. You can tell me what’s happening.

The next level is sing, the ear level. Can you sing to me what is going on? And obviously, it’s not about the quality of your voice or your vocal range.

It’s just, can you even just hum the rhythms to me? Can you vocalize in some way?

And of course, I mean, we heard Stefon doing that a little bit. So many jazz musicians do this. Somebody mentioned Keith Jarrett. Maybe sometimes, in Jarrett’s case, he’s a genius, so he can get away with it. Sometimes it can maybe get a bit much! And there actually is a bit of an art to doing it. I found that it’s best to sort of just literally hum along because you can do that with your mouth closed. I think sometimes if we actually start singing, it can just sort of overpower everything we’re doing.

But if we just literally have our mouth closed and hum it. Mm hmm. You know, that can work.

Well, there’s a great bass player named John Clayton who does, like, sotto voce, I guess you would say, when he’s playing. Anyways, there’s sort of an art to that too, right?

But you can sing what’s happening to a bit.

And then the last level, the hand level, play, right? So to me, this is actually the most important element.

Head, ear, hand are the three pillars. But I’d love for you to walk away today distilling that down even more to “say, sing, play”, okay? “Say, sing, play”.

Head, ear, hand. Say sing play.

And so let’s talk about these a little more in detail.

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Christopher: Awesome. Wasn’t that cool? I feel like jazz is a genre that really mystifies people. And even if you’re in the jazz world, there’s so much gatekeeping and over-intellectualisation of everything, it can get very overwhelming very fast.

And so I love hearing a master jazz improviser break it down so simply.

If you happen to be a bass player, definitely check out Lorin’s Bass Improv Mastery course. You can check that out at lorincohen.com, we’ll have a link in the shownotes.

And if you are a member of Musical U, the rest of the masterclass was awesome. He went into more detail on each of those three pillars and what it actually looks like to practice each of them during your music practice, so that you can get that reaction time really down for each of them. And like he talked about there, when you’re on stage or you’re jamming or you’re in a group, you’re performing, your reactions are fast. It’s become a reflex and you can just whip it out at the drop of a hat.

So if you are a member, check out the full masterclass, it’s waiting for you in the members area.

If not, check out everything Lorin has at lorincohen.com. Or hey, become a member! You’ll get access to that and 50+ other amazing masterclasses, which, as amazing as they are, are really the icing on the cake of everything that’s included in membership. So if you’re not a member, you’re crazy, to put it simply! You can learn more about membership at musical-u.com, we’ll have a link in the show notes.

That’s it for this one. Cheers! And go make some music!

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