Developing Style Part 1

By Hal Galper
As published in Jazz Improv Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 4. 11/2000
Jazz great Miles Davis was once quoted as saying there were no
innovators left, only stylists. Whether an accurate assessment of the
state of jazz or not, one things for sure, there are certainly less of the
former and more of the latter.
Websters dictionary defines innovation as to change or alter by
introducing something new Webster further defines style as
distinction, excellence, originality and character in any form of artistic
or literary expression
Most of us would aspire to introduce something new but it is a rare event.
What we are best left with then is at least the ability to develop our own
distinctive style of playing. To be sure, Most of the great jazz innovators,
for example, Bird, Dizzy, Miles, Coltrane, Monk, Ornette, to mention just
a few, all started out as stylists and transcended style to become
innovators. Very few of us exited the womb as full fledged innovators.
Developing distinction, excellence, originality and character in ones
playing must be one of the primary goals of any jazz improvisor. Only by
acquiring your own musical voice can one hope to ever transcend style
to achieve the rare status of an innovator.
Developing Your Own Voice
If youre a dedicated student of jazz history, and if youre not you should
be, play any recording of any of the jazz greats from 1900 to 1970. Start
the record at any point in the recording and there is no doubt who youre
listing to. Youll understand what I mean about having your own voice. It
was a point of personal pride for these musicians to have developed a
personal style of playing that anyone could recognize within a few bars of
hearing them solo. Although difficult to achieve, the elements of a
personal voice are simply defined as having an individual sound or touch
on your instrument, articulating time in your own way, developing your
own musical vocabulary from the tradition, and a recognizable manner of
articulating that vocabulary.
This article hopes to show that, although not as yet fully expressed, the
seeds of these four elements are already established within each
players mind and body. It remains the students job to develop a process
of study for bringing their own personal voice to the fore.

Historically, the technique used for bringing out your own voice has
been, and still is, to copy or model the music of players from preceding
generations. This modeling generally took two forms: A student selected
one single player to emulate or took the eclectic approach by modeling
many players. In either case, the lineage of the model or models
emulated became an integral and evident part of each new generations
playing. For example, just to name a few, one can easily hear the lineage
in the music of the following players: Roy Eldridges influence on Dizzy,
Louis Smiths on Bird, Dukes on Monk, Dizzy on Miles, Prez on Sonny
Rollins, Dexter on Coltrane, Errol Garner and Nat Cole on Ahmad Jamal.
The list is endless. Over the years, through this process of selection,
the mentors influence led each player to develop their own style. In a
most basic sense, individual style is developed by through each
individuals application of the selective process to the history of the
music.
The Selection Process
Implicit in the preceding is that fact that to develop ones own voice, you
have to listen to a lot of music for a long time. You have to expose
yourself to every possible variety of jazz in order to be able to decide
who or what you want to copy. As there is over one hundred years of
musical history to select from and as there is not enough time in any one
persons lifetime to select everything within that history to copy, it
becomes evident that one cannot copy everything. The question then
becomes how do I decide what to copy that will bring out my own
individual voice?
The selective process is guided by being sensitive to and trusting in your
intuition and emotions. Most students dont believe they have the
instincts to make these decisions, or that you can make a wrong decision
about what to copy. There is no such thing as a wrong decision when it
comes to copying. In truth, most of the materiel youll copy over the years
youll not ever play or throw out. Having a clear idea of how you want to
play is a rarity and, to a great degree, you find out how you want to play
though a process of elimination. You try something new and it either
works for you or it doesnt. If it works, you keep it. If it doesnt, you throw
it out. Truly, finding your own voice is often, through a process of
elimination, a matter of finding where you dont want to be rather than
knowing where you are going. There is no substitute for the agonizing
and on-going process of experimentation and trial and error that is a part
of each players learning process!

As a teacher Ive always felt uncomfortable with most students tendency

to diminish their discriminative abilities by casting the teacher in the role
of the expert who knows everything, and the student as one who knows
nothing. A teachers true function is to develop the individual talents of
each student as opposed to stamping out carbon copies of the teacher.
In this way we are not so much teachers but more like coaches. We must
be sensitive to and develop each students own way of thinking and
feeling about music. I cant tell how many times Ive showed a student
something and theyve responded by saying Gee Hal, I was feeling
something like that but didnt understand it until you clarified it by putting
it into words. This reaction can only mean one thing; that students do
sense whats happening, but dont trust themselves or believe it because
they have put themselves into the role of students who dont know
anything. The first element in developing your own style is to trust your
instincts and emotions! With out this trust, you wont be able to apply the
decision making process to the selective process.
As I mentioned earlier, the elements of your individual style are already
part of your mind and body. No two people are the same. No two players
bodys are the same. The science of psycho acoustics is based on the
scientific fact that no two people hear the same way either. We are
already individuals, we just dont know have a technique for bringing this
individuality out.
The Mystery
It would be safe to say that we spend most of our musical careers trying
to solve the mystery of how do I want to play? As in any mystery,
finding its solution is a matter of looking for musical clues. These clues
exist in the history of the music and in ourselves. In this sense we are
detectives, ever on the lookout for clues to lead us down the path of
developing our own voices. This is what makes learning how to play
more of an exciting adventure than an onerous task. Learning how to
play music is a process of self-discovery, of learning more about
ourselves and how we feel about music, and for that matter, life.
The clues can be found only by trusting your instincts and emotions and
listening to a lot of music. It is a matter of using outside stimuli to
discover your internal emotional individuality.
No two people have the same life experiences. When youre a viewer or
listener of any artistic event, you bring your total lifes experience to the
event along with you. The event is perceived through these experiences
and appreciated to the degree that the artist has established a

resonance with the you as the viewer. An art can only be appreciated if a
bond has been created between the artist and viewer and the viewer can
relate to what the artist is trying to portray on an emotional and intuitive
level. If you dont relate to it, you dont appreciate or understand it. The
function of art is to create a greater understanding of oneself and the
world, both as artist and viewer.
For example: Youre listening to a Coltrane solo. It will be a sure bet that
not every idea within his solo will have a uniform emotional effect upon
you. Some ideas will strike you harder than others. Those ideas that hit
you on a gut level are clues to the way you feel about music. A
relationship was established between you and Coltrane and he showed
you something about yourself. These clues must be copied and explored
(Ill show how you explore these clues in Part 2). They will lead the way
to your own individuality. You may not know what it is in the idea that
appealed to you. You may never know. Its not important to know that.
What is important is to follow the musical clue to where ever it takes you
as a guide to solving the mystery how I want to play.
A case in point: Rather than select one particular model to emulate, I
ended up, over the years, picking a series of models. When someone
asked me whos playing I liked, my answer was anyone that can play
something I cant. I started out copying pianists Dave Brubeck and
George Shearing. I guess at that early stage, they were the easiest for
me to hear. Then I graduated to John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet
until I heard Red Garland. I copied everything I could about Reds
playing for years. Now at this point, you might wonder how copying
someone so closely could lead you to your own individuality as opposed
to stifling it?
In the 1950s I attended the Berklee School of Music, as it was called at
the time. A wonderful man named Harry Smith, was teaching there as a
vocal coach and pianist. He had perfect pitch and could hear anything
under the sun. He also was very generous with his spare time and had a
notation hand that was almost machine-like in its perfection. At that time
there werent as many published transcriptions as there are now. You
could go to Harry and request a copy of any solo or voicings and two
weeks later he have them for you.
Id run to the piano and play Reds solos and voicings along with his
recordings. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how accurately I
emulated his playing, I sounded nothing like him. At first I found this to be
depressing. After trying this for a while the truth became evident. I didnt
have the same hands as Red. Nor the same ears. The only thing I could

do was my own version of Reds playing. And thats what everyone who
copies does, their own version of who theyre copying. The only thing
you can do is your own version because no two people are alike.
After a few years of trying to copy Red, I then went on to copy a whole
series of bebop pianists: Tommy Flannigan, Bud Powell, Hank Jones,
Wynton Kelly, Errol Garner, Lennie Tristano, Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner,
and more. Each one of them had something to show me about myself,
although I never knew what it was they were trying to show me. I just
followed my feelings. For one period Id say, hey, I want to play like him
and get into their playing for along time. Then after a while of absorbing
that players music Id say, Nah, I dont want to play like him anymore, I
want to play like this other guy. And so on and so on. It was the eclectic
approach at work. Thats when I began to trust my instincts and started
going where ever the music took me.
In a more recent situation, When I started my trio in 1990, I had fallen
back in love with Ahmad Jamals playing again. I listened to everything I
could find that he recorded and caught him live whenever possible.
During this period my arrangements became rather elaborate and I was
heavy into his formalism; with sometimes alternate interludes and
ostinato vamps. This went on for years. I knew that he was trying to tell
me something but not exactly what it was. I just followed my instincts.
After about three of four years of doing this, I started to change and
wrote more open arrangements. Much less formal. It was one of those
rare times when I actually found out what it was that attracted me to his
playing again. It wasnt the formalism of his arrangements that was I
responding to but how to apply that kind of formalism to my soloing. By
emulating my own version of his formal style of arranging, I was
eventually able to add that kind of formalism to my own improvising.
How And What To Copy
As I mentioned, during the time I was a student, there werent as many
published transcriptions available as there are now. Unfortunately,
though these transcriptions do us a service by making it easier to see
what a musician is playing, making it easier doesnt really help us.
Transcriptions have a value in showing the continuity of a solo but the
process of transcribing should be left to the individual. Transcribing
improves the ear. In the beginning, you may not be copying exactly what
your hearing. Thats okay. You want to do your own version what youre
copying anyway. The more you copy, the more accurate your ears
become.

What is important is to copy only those ideas that strike you on an

emotional, gut level. Make them into exercises and learn them in all
twelve keys. Once youve learned them, try to alter them to fit over other
sets of changes. Redorder the components in the idea to find different
ways to put them together. By exploring that idea in as many ways as
possible you are exploring your own way of hearing and playing.
Deciding what to practice is always a challenge. When it comes to
practicing use one rule and one rule only: Practice only what you like! I
dont mean that once you learned a lick that you play it over and over
again. I mean copy only the ideas you relate to strongly on an emotional
level. Let your feelings be the guide. Trust them.
At this point most educators would jump up with accusations of heretic,
heretic! Their concerns misguidedly being that by practicing only what
you like you may not be thorough . Being thorough should not be one of
your concerns. There is too much to work on to worry about that. Also,
thats a particularly western attitude toward learning music that really
doesnt apply here. Western attitudes tend to separate ideas into their
smallest components in order to analyze and understand them.
However, non-western thinking assumes that everything is connected to
everything else. Thus is particularly so when discussing the body-mindemotion relationship. When you learn something new you dont only
improve just in that one area, you improve in all areas because the bodymind-emotion relationship is all connected together. Everything affects
everything else. There are no isolated events! They only appear
islolated.
A case in point: I joined the Phils Woods Quartet in 1980. During the ten
to fifteen year before that I was heavily involved in learning how to play
pentatonics. It took a while but eventually I became quite good at it. As
you can see from some of my preceding anecdotes, my primary and
earliest roots were based in the bebop tradition. Phils band was a true
bebop band in every sense of the word yet I was still playing a lot of
pentatonics and I felt I was sounding out of context with the band.
One night we were to play a concert at a New York venue called The
Bottom Line. I was grappling with this problem of being out of context
and realized I was approaching the bandstand with a preconception of
how I wanted to play pentatonics. As if I was saying to myself Im
going to play this way tonight. As any performing artist will attest,
approaching the bandstand with any preconceptions about what youre
going to play can lower the quality of your performance. I already new
this but had forgotten it.

That night, before the gig, while sitting at my kitchen table having coffee
after my nap, I decided that I was going to approach the bandstand with
the proper attitude, no preconceptions. My attitude was going to be what
comes out is whats happening. Im just going to go up there and play
and what ever comes out comes out. And thats what I did.
What was so illuminating about that experience was that all my earlier
bebop roots came out. My bebop playing had improved over the fifteen
years that I had been improving my pentatonic playing, as if I had been
playing bebop during those intervening years!
Its not necessary to take a linear, straight lined approach to practicing.
Jump around and practice a variety of things. It doesnt make any
difference what you practice as long as you improve in that area. Any
area you improve in improves all other areas of your music. Practicing
should not be boring, it should be interesting and fun. It should be a
process of self exploration and discovery. I cant think of anything more
exciting in life than learning something new about yourself.
As published in Jazz Improv Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 1
In Part One the processes involved in the development of style was
discussed. The proposition being that style is based on the selective
process . That you use your intuition and your emotions to select those
musical ideas you wish to copy. This article examines the questions: how
much copying do you need to do and what to do with the ideas youve
copied?
The Myth Of Information.
When I first started at Berklee College in the early 50s I was under the
impression that to become an improviser one had to learn thousands
licks, practice them in all 12 keys, and string them together when soloing.
It appeared to be an awesome and mechanical task. However, over the
decadesas I learned more about the learning and playing processes, I
began to see these processes in a completely different light.
When I had my quintet in the 70s, every time we went to the bandstand
Mike Brecker would say oh man, youre going to have to listen to my
twelve licks again. I had a similar experience when I was playing with
John Scofields quartet . Hed say Oh man, youre going to have to
listen to my seven licks all night. I thought they were kidding. Then Mike
and John would get on the bandstand and play every kind of idea under
the sun.

It wasnt until I examined Coltranes solo on Giant Steps and isolated

seven of his solos most repeated 4 note groups that I realized the key to
improvisation wasnt the information but the attitude toward the
information that was crucial. I transposed these seven groups into all the
keys finding infinite ways of using them to spell out any set of changes
inside or outside of a key. In a very true sense, what Mike and John were
talking about wasnt very far from the truth.
This truth was best expressed by the great jazz educator David Baker
who once said If you want to learn how to improvise, take one bebop
head a month and learn it in all twelve keys. By the end of a year youll
end up with enough of a musical vocabulary to be an excellent
improvisor. The point being that you dont need to collect massive
amounts of licks, you need to collect a small amount of the right kind of
information and learn how to get the most out of it.

Developing Style Part 2

The Big Picture.
What you get from applying the following techniques is what I call The
Big Picture. Contrary to popular thought, you dont memorize a bunch of
licks and then try to play them as a solo. Thats not improvisation, thats
craftsmanship. Youll discover that although you might be making some
nice sounds by playing rote ideas , you will be, guaranteed, bored to
tears and so will your listeners. It wont be what Wayne Shorter call
spontaneous composition. You dont want to play what you practiced.
Thats not what practicing is for. Both you and your audience want the
adventure of making stuff up as you go along, playing ideas you never
practiced. Thats why its called improvisation.
Ive defined the goal of practicing as a quest for self knowledge. That,
however, is just one of our practicing goals. Another goal of practicing is
the development of an intuitive understanding of how musical ideas
relate to each other. How they work together. Its the cultivation of this
understanding that eventually leads to an underlying concept of how
things work, or the big picture. Its this deep understanding of how things
work that you take to the bandstand with you when you play. It develops

your musicality so that while improvising, its working in the background,

on an intuitive level, helping you to spontaneously make up strong ideas
.
Understanding how the mind collects and manages its information can
be best explained by combining two of sciences most current discipines:
Chaos Theory, and Information Theory.
The premise of Chaos Theory is that there are no isolated events.
Apparently isolated events are an illusion. Though their relationship may
not be readily observable, all events are related to each other. They
appear to be unconnected because we lack the information needed to
achieve a perception or point of view with which to observe their
connections.
Information Theory studies how the mind stores and utilizes its
information. The mind collects and stores individual bits of information.
As the number of bits increase, some of them eventually combine to form
a concept, which, when further combined with other concepts, becomes
a perception or point of view.
For example:
If you dont have another idea to compare or relate it to, its difficult to
understand a single idea in a vacuum. It has no meaning.

As soon as you add a second idea to a vacuum, although not readily

apparent, the possibility beings to exist that the two ideas may have
some relationship to each other and may mean something.

When you introduce a sixteen ideas, the possibilities increases

exponentially and two ideas may interelate creating the beginning of
meaning.

With 32 ideas in the pot you begin to see how more single and grouped
ideas relate to each other making the information even more meaningful.

As more connections between ideas and concepts are established, a

kind of critical mass (to borrow a phrase from nuclear physics) occurs
and you begin to acquire an overall intuitive understanding of the
information and get The Big Picture of how things work. The concepts
acquire meaning. At that point you transcend mere information collection
and become a user of the concepts derived from your overall
understanding of the information. This is a very dynamic process. As
more ideas are added to the concept, the concept expands exponentially
and begins to create more new ideas on its own.
Although it would appear that this process leads to more complexity it
actually does the reverse by simplifying and reducing apparently
complex ideas to their most simple and basic elements. If a musical
concept appears complicated its because youre looking at it wrong.
Behind every complex idea is an elegantly simple one. If an idea looks
complicated its only because you are looking at the results of what its
simple basis can produce. Mathematicians use the term elegant to
describe a formula that is in essence very simple but has the potential for
infinite complexity. For an example of this see my article Melody and
Embellishment on my web site at halgalper.com.
Its generally accepted that music and mathematics are close cousins.
Joseph Schillinger demonstrated how any musical idea can be reduced
to a mathematical formula. This idea was further confirmed by an
experience I had in the 70s while performing with the Donald Byrd
Quintet at Howard University.
I met a musical mathematician who was a professor at Harvard
University. He had invented a computer into which he had programmed
thousands of bebop melodies. The purpose of this was to create a

machine that you could play for and it would analyze your playing in
terms of its strongest and weakest attributes. A musician could then
work on eliminating the weak ideas and enhancing the strong ones. He
told me Coltrane had played for this machine.
His theory was that any strong musical idea has, as its basis, a strong
mathematical formula. That what we do when improvising is intuitively
sense the strength of various ideas while playing. He suggested was
that, and it had, from personal experience, a ring of truth to it, when we
play a note at a certain point in time and space (the changes and meter)
its sets up a certain number of possible strong (and weak) choices of a
second note. Of these possibilities we select one of the strong ones. This
now becomes two notes in time and space and these two notes create
another set of possibilities for a strong third note. We select one of them
and the process continues. Each time you add another note to the series
it suggests new sets of strong possible next notes based on the previous
ones. As we begin a solo the number of possible good note choices is
small. As we progress through a solo sensing the direction the solo is
taking, the number of choices expands. As we proceed toward the
resolution of a solo the number of good note choices begins to reduce
again to the point that there are only a limited number of choices left from
which we select a strong ending.
Graphically represented a solo takes the following shape:
Beginning of solo
-End of solo

Naturally, the intellect works too slow to make these decisions on a

conscious level. We intuit the mathematical logic of these choices. It has
been suggested that the intuition makes decisions at a speed 20,000
times faster the speed of intellectual thought. The quality of these
decisions are based on each players sense of musicality and ones aural
imagination (hearing) working in conjunction with each other. This sense
of musicality is acquired by practicing as many strong melodic ideas as
possible.
By practicing and experimenting with strong melodic ideas, we eventually
come to realize, not only on an intuitive level but an intellectual level as
well, the elegantly simple basiss of various musical concepts.

For example; in the early 70s I began to work on pentatonic playing. I

started with the one basic component I new, the pentatonic scale. As
time went by I learned, through experimentation and suggestions from
other musicians, the second, third, fourth and fifth components of the
pentatonic concept. At first the concept seemed complicated. When I
finally learned these five components, the concept became simpler.
Idea Expansion
This process of interrelating single ideas to create more infinite
possibilities of ideas can be musically demonstrated in the following
examples.
To demonstrate how to achieve the maximization of a small number of
ideas Ive selected one of the most common 4-note groups used in the
history of jazz, the major and minor triad with an added note. Taking the
groupings 1, (2), 3, 5 and 1, (2), flat 3, 5 well see how many potentially
infinite ways they can be used on a set of II-Vs, descending in whole
steps, two beats per chord. The directions of the notes within each
grouping may be either ascending or descending.
Calling the first grouping ( 1, 2, 3, 5 ) Idea A ascending, well find
places where A will fit on the changes.

Over the same set of changes well use Idea A with the notes in the
groupings desending.

Using IdeaA again, well alternate directions.

Using IdeaA again, well reverse the alternating directions.

At this point the possible uses of only one idea have increased
dramatically.
Combine each of the above examples into a single line, when played, it
begins to take on the quality of an improvised melody.Apply the above
process to the grouping 1, 2, flat 3, 5, calling it Idea B, ascending and
descending, to increase the number of possible ideas.

Combine these groupings and directions as in examples 2-5.

At this point it appears as if we are beginning to collect quite a bit of
information from just two ideas. But we have just begun.
Lets combine Ideas A and B ascending:

Combine these groupings and directions as in examples 2-5.

Change the order of the ideas and try Ideas B and A ascending over
the same set of changes:

And now Ideas B and A ascending and desending:

The number of ideas increase exponentially by combining the two

groupings and directions in as many way as possible. So much so that
limitations of space will not allow us to show every possible example of
the many ways these groupings can be combined to come up with new
uses for them.
However, just to show you how this concept continues to expand, try it
using them on some altered II Vs.

It should be apparent by now that applying the above techniques to a

small amount of information can greatly expand its potential.
Before we go any further with these techniques lets backtrack a little to
Part One and and how it relates to what weve done here in Part 2. When
you use your emotions and intuition to select an idea to copy youve
embarked upon an adventure of self discovery . When the preceding
techniques are applied to copied ideas, you further clarify your personal
style, learning more about your individual way of hearing.
Youll note that the above triadic examples contain no chromatics.
Melodies that contain other types of melodic components need to be
treated with different techniques.
Except for the preceding triadic examples, most tonal melodies are
composed of four basic components in any number, order, direction or
combination: scales, arpeggios, chromatics (appoggiaturas and
approach notes), and intervals larger than a fourth (usually broken
arpeggios) and their connecting intervals (the interval between the last
note of one component and the first note of the next).
The following example contains all four components:

Analysis: An ascending interval, to a descending half step connector, to

a descending chromatic appoggiatura, to a descending half step
connector to a ascending two-note arpeggio to a descending whole step
connector, to a ascending four-note arpeggio, to a descending half step
connector, to a descending three-note scale, to a chromatic approach
note, to a four-note descending scale.
Reorder the components, their direction and shape, to find other ways to
use a melodys content.
For example:

Discover other ways to use a melody on other chord changes and chord
qualities. The melody line may also be applied to other chord changes as
well.

If you change the chord and the melody doesnt fit you can change any
melody note to make it fit.

Four Of Everything
The information can be exponentially expanded by applying the
technique of Four Of Everything. The concept is based upon the fact
that all musical ideas are built around either basic or superimposed
chord tones. That being the case, there are always at least three other
versions of a copied idea based around the other three chord tones of a
chord or set of chord changes. This can be best demonstrated by taking
the first example above.

Note that the first note of the example is the 5th. of the G-7. Move the
whole idea upward to start each new version of idea on the 7th., Root,
and 3rd. Of the chord

In the example above I changed some intervals to make the line fit the
chord. The line works well for E-7b5 A7 alt. as well. You can mix and
match any of the melodic components from any version with any melodic
component of any other version.
This process can be extended in the extreme by trying Seven Of
Everything where you move the line up diatonically in scale steps for
versions that start on every note of the scale. They may not fit the
original set of changes but they will fit some others.
Closing Comments
Im sure youve noticed that when practicing an exercise, there is a
tendency for the ideas youre working on to take on a life of their own.
They branch off into directions that were not originally intended. Do not
resist this tendency. Let it lead you wherever it goes. This exploratory
work will take you into surprising areas of self discovery. At a later time
you can always come back to the original idea you were working on.
Practicing then becomes more of a creative than mechanical process.
In themselves, the techniques of Idea Expansion can be intellectually
fascinating. They can open up limitless, new melodic possibilites for the
student. However, the focus of this process is not the mere collection of
new melodic ideas themselves but the global effect continued
implementation and experimentation with the process can have upon the
mind! The musical ideas not only serve a higher function than their mere
memorization, they are the tools you use to achieve general state of
musicality. Its what one gets from doing this kind of work, The Big

Picture if you will, that eventually becomes one of the most basic tools
an improvisor takes to the band stand.