“Ready or not.” That easily summarizes my first experience with improvisation. Jazz was a foreign concept to me and I found myself enrolled in the “Beginning Jazz” class at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp. The instructor spent an hour discussing what appeared to be rocket science. (Later, I realized it was simply beginner’s jazz theory, and that often chords by the name of “dominant” were used. Who knew?) After this crash course in Confusing Symbols 101, a rhythm section started to play and the teacher started pointing at each student to take a solo. Upon my turn, I simply stared back at him wide-eyed, frightened, and embarrassed. I maybe played two notes. By the end of the week I had progressed to about seven. Ready or not – there’s much to be said for that. Often the best way to learn is to be thrown in head first.<\/p>\n
However, readiness rarely gets its due. As a result of the above experience, I completely avoided jazz for another ten months before attempting to tackle it with my private teacher. I had wanted to ever since my failure of a debut at camp but was too embarrassed (even though no one I knew saw me crash and burn). I was interested but far from ready.<\/p>\n
Conversely, last week I practiced some flute etudes (on saxophone) by Benoit Berbiguer. I had gone through them in graduate school at my professor’s request, but I was far from interested at the time. I begrudgingly got through them, often wishing to practice other material. However, last week’s work on the etudes was far more productive because I was interested and ready<\/em>. Instead of going through the motions I had a vested interest, and my practicing reflected that.<\/p>\n The moral of course is not to never leave your comfort zone but to become aware of your boundaries, interests, and readiness. Such awareness can be a wonderful, intuitive guide to improvement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Ready or not.” That easily summarizes my first experience with improvisation. Jazz was a foreign concept to me and I found myself enrolled in the “Beginning Jazz” class at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp. The instructor spent an hour discussing what appeared to be rocket science. (Later, I realized it was simply beginner’s jazz theory, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-performance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95,"href":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions\/95"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelteager.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}