At age 48, with one music degree and more than three decades of experience under my belt, I’m back in school working on a Jazz Performance degree. When I first started this endeavor two years ago I was asked by friends, family, and students quite a few questions along the lines of “I know you need the paper degree, but what else can they teach you?”. I’d have to spend a few minutes explaining that not only am I not a very good jazz musician and my previous education was a little light in some areas but that all musicians continue to grow, even when they are done with their formal education.
I’ve always thought that the beauty of being a musician is that there is always something new to learn, something new to experience, and something new to create. If you magically became a perfect and omnipotent musician I think it would get boring pretty quickly. For me, the sense of discovery and the ebb and flow of progress and artistic exploration are as much a driving force as the act of creating or even just the collection of a check at the end of a gig to pay for my groceries. I’m pretty sure that it is the same for most musicians who stick with their crafts for any length of time.
I have been known to get a little cranky when a parent or prospective student asks me “how many lessons until I am good?” or “until they can play the guitar?”. Everyone who has ever picked up an instrument has had a different journey and for beginners, there are so many factors that come into play that can influence their progress. The first one is just how much time they spend with an instrument in their hands between lessons. Another might be if they have had any other musical instruction on another instrument before they came to the guitar. Some people have better listening skills, or the motor skills that are relevant to playing the guitar might need a little more time and attention than other people might need. I could go on listing these factors but let’s just leave it at the idea that everyone learns differently and at different speeds.
In my current education phase, there have been parts of the program that I have either been familiar with or even could have taught myself (the first year of music theory for example) and there have been classes that have either been challenging or eye-openingly difficult for me such as “Form and Analysis” (we learned to analyze the forms of a classical symphony and the musical forms that lead up to it) or embarrassingly enough Chromatic Musicianship, which is mostly about sight singing and audiating written music. I’ve gotten straight A’s in everything except for the aforementioned chromatic musicianship class (I got a B by the skin of my teeth) and Jazz Arranging (also a B) but some of those A’s were easy and some of them were hard earned. My second whack at music school has been a revelatory and metamorphic experience for me in ways I was not expecting.
Even without the formal part of music education, there are many ways that we can learn music every day. Some of them are obvious, like learning music from recordings or from YouTube tutorials (although sometimes the latter can be an example of “how not to play”) and some of them are more subtle like just listening to music critically and with focus. Playing music with other musicians and paying attention to what they do, both their strengths and weaknesses. Reading books or articles about musicians and how they make music or just discussing music with other musicians. The processes of putting music together well enough to perform with other people (or solo) and the processes of actually having to perform that music for an audience are also strong “shapers” of your musical ability that you learn from in order to complete. One thing that sometimes happens for me is that in preparing a video lesson I run across something that I need improvement on in order to not embarrass myself. Progress comes in all forms.
This summer I had to take a unit of “applied music” or private lessons in order to graduate in time so I had structured lessons but then I also had quite a few gigs that I needed to learn music for, including a wedding where I had to learn 35-40 “smooth jazz” and pop tunes that are outside of my normal wheelhouse. Even though this was “vacation” I probably made as much or more improvement in my playing than I have during a regular semester because of the musical demands on my time.
I have a two-week break before I go back to the Jazz and “classical” world (also with no gigs) and it has been spent with solid body guitars in hand exploring some of my favorite “other” topics such and funk and blues guitar. I even spent a little time working on my Eric Johnson-style pentatonic licks. Here is a small sampling:
