Rhythm and Soul, with Lorin Cohen

Christopher: Have you ever felt overwhelmed or intimidated by jazz – or by improv? Or maybe by both? Let me introduce you to someone who just might hold the key you’ve been looking for.

One of our Guest Experts this past year at Musical U was jazz bassist Lorin Cohen, a wonderful musician and educator who has a unique perspective and a special framework for improvising in jazz.

In this mini-interview before his Musical U masterclass, you have the chance to hear his distinctive take on musicality, as well as getting a glimpse into the man and musician behind his fascinating approach to improv.

Here we go!

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Christopher: Welcome back to the show! Today I’m joined by Lorin Cohen, a highly-acclaimed bassist and composer, and creator of the popular Bass Improv Mastery course.

Lorin is renowned for being particularly innovative and versatile in his playing, as well as having a specialism in teaching improv.

We are super excited and fortunate to have him with us as our Guest Expert here at Musical U this month, he’s going to be in coaching our Next Level members this coming week, and today is presenting our monthly masterclass for all our members. Lorin, welcome to the show!

Lorin: Hey, Christopher, thanks so much for having me. Great to be here.

Christopher: Fantastic, well, I’d love to start with my favourite question to ask musicians and music educators, which is: what does musicality mean to you?

Lorin: It’s a great question. It’s a great question. I think it’s a tough question!

For me, I think the thing that I’m most struck with immediately is a sense of soulfulness.

And I know that’s so difficult to pinpoint and try and define! But I would say that a lot of that comes down to just honesty.

I come from Chicago, and in Chicago, there’s a deep tradition of the blues, Chicago blues. That’s the first music that I really started to get into.

And, you know, with that, it’s just the most, in my opinion, the most direct expression of just somebody’s soul, you know, crying out their soul. And what somebody can do with one note, you know, what a BB King or what a great blues guitarist can do with one note. How they can move you and how they can really elicit that emotion.

I would say that’s the first thing that strikes me, is a sense of soulfulness. We all can recognize that in our favorite musicians, whether it’s Stevie Wonder or Jasha Heifetz, whatever style of music you play, I think that’s the thing that we can, the main thing that we grasp onto.

And then I think there’s a few other things that play into that.

The next thing I think about is rhythm. Because for me, the music that I gravitate towards most is something that I can dance to, something that I feel in my body.

So in terms of musicality, that when I have that combination of soulfulness and rhythm, that’s it. That’s it for me.

Throw in some beautiful harmony and some beautiful lush chords, and the whole picture is there. But I think if it has that soulfulness and that element of rhythm, there’s an honesty that I feel from the music. And something that I can, that I can really relate to and that I find so musical.

So I’d say those elements, soulfulness, rhythm, groove, feeling, all these things are biggest part of it for me. I could go on and on! But that’s probably it in a nutshell.

But that’s a great question.

Christopher: I love it, great.

And I wanted to ask a bit about your background, and maybe I’ll do it through that lens and ask, you know… that was an answer that comes from someone who’s both really experienced this deeply and really thought about this “what does it mean to be musical, to have musicality?”

Did that start early for you? I know you started playing young. Has that always been your worldview, your understanding of music, or how did that develop over time?

Lorin: Yeah, it kind of has.

I’m thankful and I feel blessed that my mother was a music teacher and just taught in elementary school. So she played a little bit of everything. But for her, when it came to, it was all soul all the time.

In other words, you know, we’re talking, like I said, the Jasha Heifetzes, the Itzhak Perlmans, players of the world. She was coming from more of a classical world, but that feeling of “one note – in tears”, right. And just that unbridled, you know, sense of passion.

I mean, her favorite, one of the first things that she got me into was La Boheme, you know, the romanticism of it. Right. You know, and that was one of the first, I can’t remember the name, but the first aria of La Boheme, you know, the most beautiful, like, romance, the soulfulness of it and the passion.

And my mother wasn’t listening to microtonal music or what I mean is western microtonal composers trying to, it wasn’t any of this heady stuff. It was just raw, raw emotion. I want to just say, like, this raw Eastern European classical emotion.

And then that, coupled with my brother was a guitarist, and his thing was the blues, Chicago blues, and a lot of the players, and then Texas Blues, a lot of these blues guitar players, but really coming from Chicago and actually, interestingly, the Texas players, the Stevie Ray Vaughns, Roy Buchanans, things like that.

And that, yeah, kind of put in me, you know, these early, just that created the brew of, you know, soulfulness and both coming from two very different perspectives.

Like I said, my mom kind of coming from this Eastern European classical tradition and my brother coming from this American blues rock tradition, where that’s what it’s about, you know, just hits you in the head with that element.

So, yes, I would say that those things were inbred pretty early, and then. And then I was the one who started hearing jazz and saying “ooh, I like the way those, what are those chords”, you know, anyways.

But, yes, so I would say that, yes, there was happened early, early at home outside of Chicago.

Christopher: That’s fascinating, yeah. And I think one of the reasons I’m particularly excited to have you in with us today teaching about improv is whenever we’re talking about improv at Musical U, we really focus on that idea that the music’s coming from inside you and that it’s expressing something deep and emotional.

And, you know, you’ll hear a lot of musicians talk about that. And then if you go over to the teaching world, most teachers are much more intellectual about it, and they give you the kind of nuts-and-bolts of improvisation.

But there aren’t that many educators who really focus on that side of it and specialise in teaching it. And so we were particularly excited to have the chance to have you come in and give this masterclass and really dive into that side and what does that…

Everything you just described sounds wonderful, but how do you actually do it? And to get your perspective on that. So I’m excited.

Talk a little bit about your approach to improvisation, or creativity in general, and how this all plays together.

Lorin: Yeah. So for me, I think that, again, when I started getting into jazz and hearing, actually, it started with harmony for me, which is interesting on the jazz side, because that was the thing I first started hearing. I think it was like Steely Dan, you know, and I think I heard like a dominant seven sharp eleven. Dominant 7 13th chord with a sharp 11.

You know, I call like “the jazz chord”, and I immediately, you know, was like,
“what is that?!” You know, and started gravitating, I had gotten kind of the, thank for my mom, my brother for this raw blues element, just, or just soulfulness of a single note, you know. And then started thinking, oh, what is happening with this harmony.

That’s kind of what drew me in on that level. And then when I started discovering more jazz musicians, the first people that I really drew to were the ones who could make me dance.

So, for instance, I was really into jazz fusion at first, people like Chick Corea and Jaco. One of the things I loved about Jaco Pastorius was that he brought together this, I call it the “South Florida patois” of everything he was hearing in South Florida. Jaco Pastorius was really great genius of jazz, and bass guitar and composition, but he brought together this patois of the steel drumming, the funk, everything he was hearing in South Florida, particularly. And then Chick Corea, maybe more heady, but very rooted in the jazz tradition as well.

But all of those musicians just made me feel something. For instance, there was a Chick Corea, Corea at that time had a group called The Electric Band, and he put out an album called Eye of the Beholder.

And everything I saw in that music was, I would just envision stories in my head as I was listening to the music.

I guess a classical composer would think I had “programmatic music”, I was like Strauss or something, somebody.

I was, like, seeing a story, and I was creating these stories that along to the music. And just imagination. It was just really touching on my imagination and my soul. And the music was very compositional at that time.

The thing about “good jazz fusion”, let’s call it. And it’s funny because jazz fusion gets a bad rap these days, but unlike a lot of straight-ahead jazz, it was very compositional.

Do you know what I’m saying? It was certainly solos. We tend to think about jazz. Obviously, improvisation is soloing. And take the Chick Corea Electric Band, for example, everybody in that band was just an unbelievable jazz soloist, but they came together as a band, and it was very much oriented towards Chick’s original compositions that were involved, that were very involved.

They were not what we would call in jazz, like a “lead sheet” sort of tune, he had done a lot of that already. And so, you know, when I started hearing that sort of these elements coming together, but also this from this compositional side of things, I think unlike somebody who, you know, when they first hear jazz, they’re like, what’s all those notes? I don’t understand what’s just. I don’t get it. You know, this guy’s just blowing through a saxophone, and it’s just making me crazy.

I kind of came to it, you know, I had this, like, we’re talking about this blues, this, you know, “bring the tears out”, you know, with the emotions, and then started hearing “ooh, this mixture of improvisation, but also very compositional”.

So it had both of these things happening. So I started hearing, like, stories, you know, but also I could move my body to it.

So I guess it was not so much from just this raw sort of Coltrane 30 minute solo, which at the time, I didn’t really understand.

It was bringing these bigger picture things together of, okay, the emotional side of things, just what the music is, how’s touching your soul, the rhythmic element, something that I felt, really, with Jaco’s stuff.

I mean, the steel pan, when I put out my album, I incorporated steel pan because just loved that sound and loved kind of what Jaco did with that and all the Caribbean sort of influences that he was bringing into his music, plus the unbelievable just groove element from his playing and everything, his music.

But then also this storytelling element. So it’s sort of taking what you’re talking about, this element of just feeling it and coming at it with your heart, but also just from things that. Not theoretical at all.

You could teach somebody how to improvise by saying, all right, let’s take a story.

Right? Let’s take the Hero’s Journey, something from Star Wars. All these things are based on it.

The hero goes, slays the dragon. What is that? You know, the hero or the hero is in, you know, her village, you know, in the Shire, and everything’s cool. And then what does that sound like?

And then, then the deer comes along. Oh, what does that sound like? Right?

My sense is classical composers have been doing this for years, but I came through it kind of from that background. And then later on was when I started getting into the “Okay, now let’s stretch out and open up and blow”, as we say in jazz. But even if it’s didn’t have those bigger picture elements, specifically, like, moving my body to it, I couldn’t relate to it.

So when I started getting really into straight-ahead jazz, the first group for me was the Oscar Peterson Trio, very much coming from very, very… I see that stuff coming from a very, like, almost church, African American church sensibility, swing sensibility, just kind of a merging swing and hard bop in a way. But really a tradition of, if you’re not grooving, if you’re not rocking the house, you know, it sort of falls flat to me.

And so it was these bigger picture things, you know, things that I was feeling, you know, as opposed to analyzing originally like that, if that makes sense.

Christopher: Yeah, love, love, love that.

And certainly, you know, we really try and pull our students out of the kind of dots on the page and get some of that imagination going, whether it’s visual or storytelling or the pure emotion of it. Because ultimately, that is what’s going to bring it to life, isn’t it? Rather than just the, am I following the rules? Am I playing the right scale over this chord? That’s wonderful.

Could you give us a little teaser or taste of what you’ll be talking about in the master class today for our membership?

Lorin: Yeah. So today I just wanted to give a brief insight into something that I’ve heard you talk about, Christopher, and maybe just put it into a jazz, a jazz improv lens.

But it’s something I call the three pillars of jazz improvisation practice. And these are just the three elements that I see at play when we need to work on, I guess, really any music, but especially jazz. And that’s what I call Head, Ear, Hand, but specifically in relationship to how these are about what I call “jazz reacting”.

So improvisation is a process. Is basically a process of how we react. And so, yeah, so I’m gonna talk about jazz reacting.

How we react in jazz is sort of the first principle, and then how these three elements inform that process of jazz reacting.

Christopher: Fantastic. I can’t wait.

And for anyone watching or listening who happens to be a bass player, your primary instrument is bass. I know you’ve put together this phenomenal course on bass improv in particular. Tell us a little bit about that for anyone who’s interested to go check that out.

Lorin: Thank you. Yeah. So the course is called Bass Improv Mastery.

And essentially what it is is it helps. I help bass players to make their improv reflexes automatic.

So that, to me, is when you feel a sense of mastery or confidence with improvisation, it’s because just sort of that thing we were talking about, the idea of reacting when it becomes automatic.

I tell everybody in the program, I want to be able to wake you up in the middle of the night and say “Alright, Christopher, you got four bars of C dominant 7th, four bars of D flat altered. What are you going to play?”

And I’ve developed, basically, in the course, we have two paths, two things that we focus on that really help bass players, give bass players the harmonic tools that they need to make their improvisation automatic.

So I feel like I’ve tried to get at this element of which theoretical, which harmonic elements are going to unlock those soulful notes. I call them the “money notes”. And how can you unlock those in the most immediate way possible, which is that, to me, is when you feel like you’ve developed a sense of mastery with improv, when it’s something that is automatic.

I say that we take a limited approach, but it’s not limiting.

And my approach with this course was, there’s so much information out there. So much of what so many bass players are feeling is a sense of overwhelm.

There’s this person’s course. There’s this person’s course. There’s YouTube. I gotta master this, I gotta master this, I gotta master that.

And essentially, what I’ve done is taken my method, which is just, I have really two approaches that allow me to unlock, that allow me to leverage a lot.

So two pathways that allow me to unlock a lot of improvisational – that’s the word – that allow me to do a lot, as opposed to practicing 9 million scales and 9 million modes.

Just two simple paths that can help us do a tremendous amount.

So that’s the essence of Bass Pro Mastery. There’s 80 lessons. It is a sequential, comprehensive course, but it’s all also, there’s coaching calls every week in combination with the self-paced modules.

Christopher: So thank you for having. Fantastic. Well, yeah, if you are a bassist wanting to hit those money notes, I would highly recommend checking that out.

We’ll have a direct link in the show notes. Lorin’s website is lorincohen.com. it’s lorincohen.com, we’ll have a link to that in the show notes as well.

I’m super excited, I can see people piling up for the masterclass, so we better go and prep.

A big thankyou, Lorin, for joining us for this quick pre-masterclass interview, and I look forward to having you back on the show again!

Lorin: Thanks so much, Christopher, It’s been a pleasure speaking with you.

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Christopher: So we always try and find Guest Experts at Musical U who really complement what we do while being totally aligned with our philosophy.

And as you can imagine, that’s not always the easiest thing to do!

There are incredible music educators out there, but sometimes their approach doesn’t really fit with what we believe, the values of the education we provide.

And sometimes what they do is just so overlapping with what we do, it wouldn’t add that much.

But Lorin is a perfect example of someone whose own framework, developed completely separate from ours, has a lot of overlap with what we would call our H4 Model of Complete Musicality.

So with us, it’s Head, Hands, Hearing, and Heart. And his approach with Head, Hands, and Ear was a beautiful complement, while still adding his unique perspective in terms of that “jazz reacting”.

So it was a super cool masterclass, and I’m excited to share a clip from it with you tomorrow in our next episode, stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, if you are a member, you can jump ahead and go dive into that full masterclass, that’s waiting for you in the members area.

Or if you’re not, then lorincohen.com is the place to find out more about Lorin, check out the Bass Improv Mastery course, and we will of course have a link to that in the shownotes for this episode.

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

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