I learned guitar at age 8 from my father’s girlfriend who showed me fingerings for E, A, D, and G chords. I used these four chords in combination to create squeaky renditions of the poems in The Hobbit, my first compositions. In making up tunes I learned about the guitar, and something about melody and harmony. I never took another guitar lesson -- save for the time I tried to study with the great Jack Wilkins in NYC only to be told he wouldn’t teach me.
I did study – extensively – jazz improvisation, learning bebop from the renown LA teacher Charlie Shoemake. After nearly not being accepted for lack of chops, I spent 5 impactful years under his systematic tutelage where the mysteries of swing and harmony were etched into me like a musical lathe. Many hours in the practice room and, later, huddled by a fire woodshedding in a freezing Cape Cod house, I emerged a devout disciple, at least in spirit, of the esthetics of 20th century harmony and the magic of extensions on 7th chords, playing in the pocket, and creating harmonic lines through chord changes rather than melodically above them like the rock guys. My musical language, my operant conditioning, has been bebop ever since.
This brief history is to introduce the 'Unlearning Project’, my attempt to “unlearn” 4 decades of this canon. Why, might you ask?
Breaking Habits that Got Us Where We Are
About 15 years ago I took a hiatus from music to pursue a PhD in cognitive anthropology. In that course of study two things happened. First, breaking the habit of daily musical practice allowed me to “hear” music in a different way. Second, I learned quite a lot about embodied cognition, the emerging field of how mind, body, learning are deeply embedded and entwined, consciously and especially subconsciously, with physical and cultural experience. We are not just products of our experience: every facet of habit and routine is indelibly part of who we are and how we think, in substance and form. The world shapes us as much as we shape the world. The tools we use, including cognitive ones, influence how we think. We are, through and through, what we do and how we do it.
Out of this sabbatical I came to the realization I needed to play a different way. I needed to return to the ear, as it were, to play what I hear without recourse to rules.
This is by no means an endeavor unique to me. The history of jazz is filled with attempts at rejecting, or rather absorbing and synthesizing what has come before to create soil for new growth. It's what makes jazz such a vibrant art form. In my case, it's about emancipating from the strictures of bebop. A technical way of saying it would be to learn a kind of improvisational solfège. Or, simply, forget what I know and just let it flow. In other words, more like my 8-year-old self.
The Science of “Flow”...and Breath
If you have read anything about the art and science of flow, you will know what I’m writing about. The term was popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the early 1990s. A recent neuroscientific study of jazz guitarists, strangely enough, validates the idea that mastery needs to be followed by a kind of letting go of control to achieve a transcendent state of maximal creativity, And if you are at all studied in yoga or breathing practice, this should also sound quite familiar.
Future editions here will chronicle this unlearning process, which may be interest not only to students of guitar and improvisation. The underlying question is more universal: how does the old dog learn new tricks? What does it take to unlearn what one has held dear as part of one's identity for the better part of an adult life? And does knowledge and training as a student of mind, habit and culture in any way help?
Stay tuned...