Doron

We are truly blessed to have with us one of jazz music’s living legends, Mr. David Liebman. For the three of you out there who might not know who he is, he’s been featured on nearly 350 recordings, of which he’s been the leader or co-leader on 150. As a sideman he’s played with Elvin Jones, Miles Davis, Chick Korea and many more. He’s performed and recorded extensively with his own groups which have featured people like John Skolfield, George Maraz, Richie Byrack, Billy Hart, Al Foster and Vick Juris, among many others.

In 1989 he founded the International Association of Schools of Jazz, which is an organization dedicated to networking jazz educators and students around the globe. He’s released numerous classic instructional books and DVD’s, and in 2011 he was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master. So with all of that I want to welcome you and thank you for being here, Mr. Liebman.

David
My pleasure; when I hear that biography I get tired.

Doron
Well, that’s a nice problem to have, I guess.

David
I agree. Thank you very much, nice to be here Doron.

Doron
Just to kick off with a bit of a general question. I wanted to see what you say in terms of what are some of the skills and qualities of a great jazz improviser?

David
In general, as part of their MO, their personality, a person that is flexible, loose, open, wanting to communicate, ready to deal with the moment. As we know, improvisation is one of the keys to jazz. Just that aspect of personality, the things that I’m describing, you take a test to be a jazz musician, you have those things in your personality, some more than others; but in the perfect world those are some of the qualities that would be present because we need a certain kind of personality to be adaptable, ready to communicate with the other musicians, and a natural curiosity, an openness and so on, and so forth. I think that’s an important part of it.

Obviously a great amount of discipline to get together with your instrument, which is understood; you must be a virtuoso in your chosen instrument and to learn the vocabulary of jazz, and the dictionary. What we know and harmony, melody and all that. The repertoire, and of course now as we speak it’s 2012 and we have basically 100 years of jazz history and it just continues to grow, the research continues to get deeper, and deeper because people are doing that now. It’s a big job to take on jazz music, and to want to play it and be part of it. I’m not talking about the vocational aspects, which is another whole story; making a living, what you have to do and all that- that might be a whole separate topic. Just from the standpoint of the music itself it’s discipline, openness, flexibility and a love of learning. That’s really got to be there.

Doron
It seems like so much of becoming a great jazz musician is just a matter of listening, playing with others and even just experiencing life in general. In a general sense I was wondering what are some of the things that we can actually take into the practice room to help us get to a place where our playing becomes more intuitive and powerful.

David
Well, this is a lot of trial and error type stuff, jazz. It’s experience. There is nothing like experience. That’s true for most things in life, you get better with time; you get more mature, you learn how to cut the fat and get right to the heart of the matter. In this respect, the point is that you have to be ready to go in and really practice, learn how to organize your time, know who to study with, who to have as mentors.

These days, of course school has become a very big part of becoming a jazz musician. It used to be no school and now all the young musicians meet each other, and make their relationships in school; they begin right away in their 20’s to form lifelong relationships. It used to be in former times it was the jazz clubs, the jam sessions where you made your connections. There’s still a certain amount of that but that’s gone down and what you have is the school situation.

The essence of this music is the rhythm, and the rhythm is very specific. It’s a combination of Western African with a whole bunch of other stuff put in. Jazz is, if anything, a music of, it’s like a giant bouillon base; it’s a music of mixtures of all kinds of influences. Rhythmically it really begins with the African rhythm but it got transferred here and it made its own way. It has to do with the swing, and the swing is, technically, it’s not an 8th note or a 16th, is one way of expressing the swing feel; another way of expressing it is as a triplet with the middle 2nd part of the triplet left out, so you have this kind of sound like {wording notes}. That’s the dotted 8th 16th, and the triplet is {wording notes}. In essence you can say ‘Is that all there is?’ well, in a certain way that’s the element, the basic element that one must get and you’re not born with the ability to make that sound good.

What I’m talking about is basically this feeling on a major scale {playing saxophone} – what you’re hearing there, of course, is me playing a major scale with what we called the dotted feel, or the triplet feel. For now, the two, though they’re slightly different we’ll just put them together as a swing feel. Of course, it has a lot more to do with just the rhythm looks on paper; it’s my attack, the way I connect the notes, the nuance, the breathe, in this case the articulation, the kind of curve I might do on it.

In other words, what personality I put into that dotted rhythm. That’s something that I stress in all my teaching, and if anybody of your listenership, or readership here has seen me do my class on transcription – because if there’s 10 minutes I do it, if there’s 4 days I will do it somewhere along the line. Transcription to me means exact detailed copying of a master playing this music, and the ability to be able to capture all of what I’m talking about; the articulations, the nuances, the expressivity of what’s going on. That is something you can get only by imitating somebody who can do it well.

When I say imitation, if you want to refer to my DVD on the subject, or even on my website I have examples of students who are playing with the original and you cannot tell the difference between the student and (let’s say) Sonny Rollins. I think that’s an imperative. You must get the rhythm, and the way to get the rhythm is by copying somebody who does it.

It will eventually end up being your way of portraying the rhythm. That’s what makes one saxophone player different from another saxophone player besides sound, is their rhythmic placement. But that comes after you have learned how it was done and what is acceptable. Even if you never use it, you may never play music that demands it because these days we have fusion stuff, world music, and so forth, you have learned the foundation that jazz rhythm stands on. To be that comes only through transcription because I could ride it out from now to the end of the century but until you hear somebody do it, and copy somebody doing it correctly it really will not have much use. So if there’s one thing, going back to your question that is absolutely essential to learn this music it is to get the rhythmical feel down.

Doron
Very interesting. The nice thing about that is that it’s something you can do in the practice room; you don’t necessarily have to go on tour with Miles Davis or something like that. (Laughing)

David
You’re not ready to do that yet. You could also do this without the University. Of course, obviously you’ve got other things but this transcription thing is a solo piece. You’re sitting there with the tape machine, or whatever you’re using, pencil, paper, instrument and it’s you and the music that’s on the tape. When you sound, when you have reached the, what I would call acceptable, you’ll be sounding exactly like the solo and you’re going to tape that, you play with the solo and then you’re going to tape yourself playing without the solo and you’ll know whether you got it or not; and you really don’t need anybody to tell you that.

A teacher will help you in getting to this point, maybe in the analysis, because after that, after we do the imitation we do analysis. We try to figure out what is it that they played, why did they play C, or C Sharp, or they were picking Dorian scale, or mixalidian, or whatever? And we try to second guess the performer.

Of course we’ll never know for sure because they’re not here to answer those questions, or they probably wouldn’t, or couldn’t even do it if they were. You’re forming a way of thinking that starts to permeate your being and becomes part of what you play. This music, remember we’re improvising; we don’t have time to cognize on the stage or in the session where we’re playing what we want to do. We have to have that under our fingers.

When you’re practicing jazz, in a certain way it’s more than a paradox, it’s kind of the completely, it’s just not real. You’re practicing in a room to be spontaneous. How can you practice being spontaneous? You are spontaneous, which means you can’t practice for it; it’s kind of a contradiction. That’s what jazz practicing is about. You’re in the room practicing all of this stuff and then you go out and you’re not supposed to sound like you practiced. You’re supposed to sound like you’re doing it on the spot, in the moment; it’s a contradictory thing. Philosophically it’s very interesting.

Doron
Can you talk a little bit about the process of going from being able to play another players phrasing and swing feel, to developing that for yourself; how do we avoid falling into the trap of becoming a clone?

David
You bring up a very good point and it’s about going through the forest to get to the other side. You’ve got to go through the trees to get to the other side of the mountain, or the road. Our eventual is of course, individualization. It’s to sound like yourself. It’s to know from the first note that its Miles Davis compared to Freddy Hubbard. How do we know that? We know it by sound and we know it by inflection, which is their personality, how they speak. Just like when you hear two people speak you know if it’s your mother, or your sister. You can hear the voice.

That is the goal. But in order to get to the goal in the most complete way, and to be, actually in a certain way legitimate, but I’ll even go further. Artistically valid, in my opinion, you have to be able to sound something like what came before. Now how exact is that? I say as exact as possible. In other words, you want to sound exactly like Sonny Rollins because that’s the essence of understanding how he does what he does.

Once you do a few positions in that kind of in-depth analysis through transcription you basically have the understanding. You don’t have to sit there and do 100 musicians to get the point. You only need to do a couple in-depth, be able to duplicate their feel, their notes, analyze what they did; also, by the way singing is part of it, being able to sing the solos is essential so that you can really saturate your whole body with it. Even if you’re not a singer, if you do a few solos like that over a year or two, and I usually say somewhere between 5-7 solos, on well-known formats, blues, rhythms changes, standards, songs that you will encounter; chord progressions, sometimes no chord progression. For example, on Annette Coleman – you do that for a year or two you are then, in my opinion, ready to drop that and begin to find out who you are.

That will take its own course through you trying to find things, through being interested in other aspects of music, maybe somebody you never listened to. This in-depth copying, or imitation is the first level of artistic growth; it comes before the next stage which we call stylization. Stylization means that you are now playing. You’re playing the music of the time that you’re in. You’re partaking in the music, you’re playing some of what you’ve learned, you’re playing yourself. After that stage, of course it’s not cut and dry but that stage eventually, hopefully grows into innovation.

What’s innovation? Of course, there’s innovation from Louie Armstrong, or Coltrane that’s a gigantic, big imprint and then there’s just you having a sound that’s you; that’s an innovation. It ranges from the large, to the very small but what it all comes down to is that eventually you get out of the forest if you keep forging head, and you will not sound like your teachers, or the people you imitated. It will become absorbed. It takes time and you must trust the process.

Doron
Skipping over a little bit to the study of jazz harmony, can you talk a little bit about the importance of playing piano for jazz musicians?

David
As far as I’m concerned anyone who purports to be a musician, at least in the Western world where harmony is there, except for maybe Rap music in this day in age, even pop music is harmony. The piano is where the harmonic language comes from. The ability to be able to put down 10 fingers didn’t exist before the piano. As a non-piano player, for example, here we’re talking about saxophone, when you see a piano it’s in front of your eyes. You can see what you hear, you can hear what you see, it becomes visual. It becomes another aspect of the learning process that becomes included is the verbal, there’s the intuitive, there’s the mental, this is visual and it’s a good thing to be able to use.

Even if you don’t know what it is you can see what it is, and eventually when you see something long enough it grows its meaning. It becomes something else and suddenly you start to hear what it is and you can duplicate it on the piano. It is mandatory that you play piano just to understand harmony, and of course secondarily, if you have any eyes to compose you need the piano to check everything.

Maybe I’m just old fashioned because you can do all that stuff in media and you don’t even know how to play piano; but for me you sit down with chords and you play the right hand against the chords, and you can imagine it being the saxophone, and you can imagine the left hand being the harmony, the guitar or the piano – to me that’s mandatory to check your compositional process.

Playing piano is mandatory, and I’m going to throw in here drums, in the sense that, as I said, jazz’s rhythmic music, if there’s anything that’s really unique and important about jazz it’s the rhythm. It’s true of any music. You have to have an understanding of what it is to play jazz rhythm not just on your instrument, but from the standpoint of percussion. The drummer is the fire engine, the caboose of a jazz group. Drums is where you really hear what jazz is about.

I say to my students a rudimentary understanding of being able to sit on the drum stool and play with your right or left hand a rye beat {wording notes} and it’s variations {wording notes}. You can sing that, why not play it. I urge all jazz musicians in the process of learning to learn piano, but also get a rudimentary symbol, snare drum, or bass drum and just ask a drummer how to hold the sticks and what to do, and then just start playing along with records. Put the records up, turn it up to 11 and have a good time. It’s a lot of fun.

Doron
Sounds like all this stuff can take a good amount of time. How much time do you suggest someone spend on those instruments; is it just kind of in between practice sessions or?

David
You’re asking me a larger question about practicing. Again, I have a DVD on the subject where I talk about all the elements of practicing; it’s on my website, also. You only have 24 hours in the day and you have something called life, which means whenever that picks up and that depends on your situation at the time. You have responsibilities, and of course the older you are the more responsibilities that you have and the less time that you have to practice. A good part of being older by the way, something that your readership or listenership might be not in their 20’s, but older and they might say ‘God, how can I catch up?’

Well one thing about being old is that you practice more efficiently than a younger person because you’re just wiser and more experienced. I’m being very general but if an older person does 2 hours it’s kind of the equivalent of a younger guy doing 3 hours. But that’s neither here, nor there.

These things like piano and drums, and other aspects of being a jazz musician, not the main thing, they are peripheral but they do demand a certain amount of time. At some point, one of the big things that I say about practicing is that the word priority comes into play.

Priority, like anything in life ‘What’s most important that I do today?’ Is it say hello to my wife? Is it go out and get a cup of coffee? Is it pay my bills? Is it go to my horn? We make a list of priorities every minute of our lives. We’re not necessarily aware of it, but in this case there might be a period, a three month period (let’s say) where I tell my students – I don’t tell them to put the horn down but I tell them to do their rudiments – but the next two hours is piano. If you do that for 3-6 months you’ll never have to do it again. Then you go back to whatever the next priority is. You can’t to do everything.

One thing about practicing that’s often the case, and I encounter this when I do master classes. I go around and point to a student and ask them what they practiced yesterday and invariably it’s always – ‘Well I started with long tones, played through a book, did some scales’ – I asked them how long – ‘An hour, hour and a half.’ – Then I said ‘Then what did you do?’ – ‘Then I played some tunes and blah, blah blah.’ – And basically they just ended up playing, and not practicing. Practicing means hitting the nail on the head over and over until it is at least mostly accomplished; it doesn’t have to be 100% but it’s got to be 85-90%. That means you can then move on.

So if I say to the student ‘piano is important. For the next couple of months put the horn down except to do your rudimentary stuff and get 2 hours in churney or hannen exercises, the very basic classical stuff to get your fingers rolling. Get a voicing book, there’s a million books of voicings, cop the voicings, do it 12 keys, see if you can play it in time. If you do that for 2-3 months you’ll be fine. Now go back and do whatever is next on the list. I wouldn’t obsess about these extracurricular things like drums and piano but I would definitely say that at one point I’m going to have to devote time. Drums isn’t true like that, drums you just pick up some sticks, put a record on and go play and have a good time. Piano demands time.

Doron
The piano, it seems like a lot of what you get out of it is like you said, the visual picture. It sounds like in jazz music it’s a combination of being able to visualize what we’re playing in terms of….?

David
I hope so. That’s a good point because we’re talking saxophone here; I guess everybody has another way of looking at this but I used to, at least when I was starting, would see the saxophone as a piano keyboard because I started on piano. Piano was not a second instrument to me, it was my main instrument as a child. I wasn’t killer on it, but I could play. The visualization thing, I don’t want to make more of it than it is.

It is that when you look at a piano you can see what you can hear harmonically. That will somehow transfer to a single line instrument, saxophone, trumpet, trombone, etc…it’s not like you’re standing up there and necessarily see it; although I must tell you that for a longtime I did see piano in my head. In other words if you stopped me in the playing and asked me what I was seeing, not what I was thinking, I would probably have said I’m seeing a little keyboard that.

That was part of my process but I think it’s because piano came first in my case; so I don’t want to overemphasize for your students, and for the people listening, the importance of piano visualization. It’s just evident that you can see and hear, you can see more that helps you’re hearing. That’s the same with drums; one of the things I tell the guys for learning drums is stand in back of the drummer.

Listen to me carefully, usually a saxophone player is in front, we’re facing the audience and our back is to the rhythm section; if you want to learn drums, part of learning drums is the physical aspect of how the body moves. You can almost predict how the guy plays by his motion. I can tell Elvin Jones by the way he looks. I can tell you how to play by the way he held the sticks. It was inevitable that they sounded a certain way because their body language spoke about it. If you stand in front of the drums, you’re getting a mirror image but reversed; if you go in back of the drummer and sit there, and be in that same angle and then go to the drums and play by the way that it looks it will help you.
It’s a little tough to explain without showing but just advise to get behind the drummer, look at his right hand, and his left hand and look at the picture of that, and then when you get a minute go over to the drums and sit and try to look like that. Somehow it has an effect, I think.

Doron
Drums are very explicitly physical, and it’s kind of easy to see the way people are moving bigger limbs. It’s not subtle movements of the fingers like on a piano, or guitar or saxophone.

We talked about visualizing things, what about hearing, in terms of ear training? When someone like yourself plays a solo are you hearing every single note before you play it or is there a certain amount of material that’s just kind of based on melodic and rhythmic shapes that aren’t 100% defined in your mind?

David
Perfect. This is a little controversial and it depends on who you’re talking to. I think it’s a little bit of a myth that you hear what you play before you play it. If we played all quarter notes (laughing) at slow tempo ok, I’ll grant that. We’re not playing {playing saxophone}, there’s no way that I’m going to hear that before I play it. It’s out of the question. Do I hear the beginning and end of the shape? Absolutely. Do I hear it as it goes on? Yes. Is it a certain amount of finger digital memory? Absolutely, that’s what we’re practicing. Is there something that is mechanical about it? Absolutely, but what’s not mechanical is my phrasing.

In other words, I could talk to you right now and read a script, if I read, I’m taking a book in front of me hear that’s actually about rhythms, it’s a pretty heavy book but – the underlying beats could be quarter notes, 8th notes, or other. What about this, the underlying beats could be quarter notes, 8th notes or other. I could say this 50 different ways. So even though my script is written, the way I deliver it is in the moment, that’s what makes what may be under your fingers, that’s what makes it come alive.

I don’t expect to come up with a new line, or a new way of playing every minute. Dizzy Gillespie in his biography, he said he could count on one hand the times that he played something, I don’t know the word he used, fresh or new, something that wasn’t predictable to him. That is something that you have to be aware of. We’re not just sitting up there making up pearls of wisdom that have never been heard before. I wish we were, and in an ideal world we would be but the truth is that we are reciting the poem that we know already.

Now the good guys recite it differently every minute. You listen to a guy like Lee Cohnes, he has been playing his language since 1945 or something like that and he still plays ‘All the things you are’ every night, he still plays ‘You don’t know what love is’, etc… He never sounds the same. I did a record with him 2 years ago; he’s just always melodically fresh. It’s unbelievable. I don’t know how much more we can do on a C 7 chord and this guy somehow comes up with it, it’s astounding. That is what we do. I don’t think we hear it right before we play.

Now of course, ear train, yes. You should be able to recognize chords, you should be able to recognize intervals, it’s obviously going to help you on the bandstand if I’m playing and a guy plays something and my ability to respond to him, that’s of course, normal ear training that you get in University, hopefully it’s done right and you do on your own; but of course that’s standard and that’s necessary. Hearing before you play, I’m not sure if it’s really real.

Doron
What are a few of the things that we can do to sharpen our ears to the point where we can get closer to playing what we’re hearing?

David
It’s transcribing. This is ground floor ear training. You’re taking off something from the record and you’re not doing it except by ear. Your fingers then go to it on your instrument, and then you write it out, write the right rhythms and so forth, to me that’s the best ear training that you can do besides sitting and doing any kind of rigorous interval training and so forth that you would get at a decent conservatory that you can pretty much do on your own anyways. There’s so many books out there now with ear training that you can sit in a cave, and do it now. That’s number one.

Of course again, back to the same thing that I sort of started with 20 minutes ago, and that is experience. Your ear gets better because you’re hearing the same things over and over again. When you think about it, we only have 12 notes in Western music, and think about all the amazing amount of music that has been made from only 12 notes; it’s incredible when you think about it. The combinations that have been going on since Palastrina, and whoever Monte Verte, the beginning guys. So you’re bound to hear the same thing over and over again, although it might appear to be different it’s the same thing. You get familiar with it by experience. In a certain way ear training is about playing a lot and being involved in the music; the more you are the better you get at hearing.

Look Doron, there are guys, obviously I just came mixing a record two days ago in the studio and the guy has perfect pitch. It certainly helps when you’re mixing a record, that he can say that F is sharp, or that F is flat; there’s no question that if you have great, perfect, or relative pitch it’s going to be huge. I’m not sure how in the actual act of playing, we’re not looking for you to repeat what somebody else did.

That’s the other thing. Remember, jazz is not about your question and my answer to your question. Your question, I comment on your question. If I play {wording notes}, I don’t want the drummer to go {wording notes}; I may want the drummer to go {wording notes}. I want him to note what I did but I don’t need him to spit it back to me; this is not a cat and mouse game. In that respect it’s a lot to do with experience.

Doron
There’s so many heavy harmonic concepts we can apply. Obviously we’ve heard a lot of great modern players such as yourself take harmony really far, and in learning all this advanced harmony can you talk about how we maybe avoid the trap of playing music that sounds like mathematics, and how we develop a melodic sense?

David
Very good question and I would say it is a trap that can easily be fallen into. The reason is because the fingers lead the way. I call it fingeritis, like dermatitis (laughing); in other words, your fingers become what you hear and what comes out of your horn is your fingers moving in patterns that you have practiced. A good practice has a lot of patterns. I’m not really in favor of somebody practicing patterns. I think a certain amount of them you have to do because they provide a lot of good finger agility, but it’s predictable. I’m going to go up by 3rds, or 4ths, or whatever.

I think it’s important to do that at a certain stage but I would be leery of practicing patterns because inevitably those patterns will appear in your music; so you have to be careful. How do you avoid that? You have to be in the moment, and in the moment means not let the fingers get ahead of the ear, and brain and soul.

There are three parts of learning, of anything – body, mind and spirit. That’s the triangle that philosophers have talked about since Aristotle. Another way to put it is head, hand and heart. Head knowing what you’re doing, hand doing it and heart is the expression and communication and what the feeling is of it. Sometimes the hand goes ahead of the heart and you have to check yourself. Then you have to go back and say – Am I being too mechanical? Are my fingers just going places that I really don’t intend? – You have to be your best monitor of all, is you.

I always talk about the guy, there’s a little guy on your shoulder called Igor, in other words, ego. He’s sitting on your shoulder and he is checking you out. Sometimes he says ‘Don’t play that. Somebody else played it. That’s to this, it’s to that.’ Sometimes he’s a drag and he gets in the way because he makes you too self-conscious, especially if you’re trying to compose; he’ll sit there and he’ll say ‘That’s not original. That’s no good. Rip up the page.’

On the other hand Igor has a place in saying ‘Are you playing what you really intend to play or are you just letting your fingers move because you happen to be doing that right now?’ I think that’s something that you have to be careful of, and watch out and be monitoring yourself all the time. That’s the main thing. Are you aware of what you’re doing? You have the tape, you can go back and listen and I absolutely urge all students to tap themselves and listen; not forever, just listen to a little bit and be very, very critical and objective about what you play. I think that’s really important. Then you can realize ‘that phrase really wasn’t what I intended.’

That recognition in your mind will help towards the next time not doing it. A lot of what we do is mental; your mental strength is really key in improvising when you get to a certain level. Let’s say you learned the language, you’re pretty good, adept at all the stuff, you’ve got everything under your fingers, you passed the test so to say, and now it’s about mental acuity. How much can you think about that will change your behavior; because the mind is a very strong thing. The mind pushes you to places that the body can’t sometimes. Sometimes the body follows the mind. I totally urge self-monitoring and being aware of what you play by checking it out. Your question then will become self-evident. If I hear myself playing patterns I’m going to say to myself ‘Did I really intend that?’ I think the answer, by and large will be no, my fingers got ahead of me.

Doron
Without playing patterns do you have any techniques of taking a short phrase and expanding it into a bunch of material?

David
Definitely, this is called theme and variations, and Bach is your man on this. This is how you take 3 notes, and I urge beginning students to do this right away. I would give a beginner 8 year old kid, once he can play 3 notes, I would say take these 3 notes and let me hear you do so and so. Of course with a kid I would give him examples, but it’s very simple. You’re looking rhythm. {playing saxophone} That little phrase {wording notes}, {playing saxophone} that was a tempo about one, two, three four, one, two, three, four. Maybe I go slow {playing saxophone}, start in different places and then maybe add a pitch or two {playing saxophone}.

So the chord is still there. I would make a student, depending on his level maybe write out 10 variations using rhythm, using maybe neighboring tones, maybe changing the order of the notes, maybe changing the range {wording notes}. I would urge somebody to write that out because writing makes you really have to decide, and concentrate on it and really focus. Then just play, like I just did.

In a certain sense Doron, what we really are doing is theme and variations; that’s what we do. We take something and we vary it; of course the ability to do that, the amount of sophistication ranges from less to young, who you could hear and you can really hear how he’s developing to Coltrane which is beyond most of us to understand what he did. It’s still a game of theme and variation.

Doron
I hear in your solos, you seem to incorporate a lot of really wide intervals in your melodies, which especially as a horn player that’s not always intuitive, it’s not like the piano where you just rock your hand to the side and you’re up an octave. I was wondering if you could share a little bit about how you became so creative in using intervals?

David
I practiced them, especially 7’s and 9’s. As you say it’s not that natural on the saxophone to play wider intervals, this is more common {playing saxophone}, I can go on forever with little 2nds and 3rds, and so forth. 4ths and 5ths get a little bit tricky {playing saxophone}, and of course 6ths are really mirrors of 3rds, 3rds turned around {playing saxophone}, you’ve got to think about that. Then finally 7’s and 9’s are definitely take some practicing {playing saxophone}. Did I practice it? Yes, absolutely. There are some guys who really practiced it, especially the so called “free jazz players”. A guy like Anthony Braxton, he can play wide intervals from now to the end of the night and keep it going because he practiced it. This is not a natural thing that will fall under your fingers, and you’re correct in that respect; especially with the saxophone. I’ll tell you where it’s really hard, trumpet. It’s almost impossible on trumpet unless you really practice because it’s all in the lip, it’s not the fingers. I do urge that, and I do- do that because using wide intervals does set off a phrase in another way – no question about it.

Doron
What do you do in your practice session; do you just play a solo with a large interval as the theme?

David
I might do that, or I might, of course I could play along with ‘All the things you are’ and practice playing wide intervals on the changes; that’s very, very good. Or I just sit and practice wide intervals as a separate entity and I do it off the top of my head; either way. Of course it is more demanding to do it in the context of harmony, modulating harmony. I do urge that anyone who is going to practice wide intervals to first get it a little bit under your fingers and then try to play it on the blues and see if you can play the right notes. (Laughing) That’s another level of it, of course.

Doron
Yeah, definitely.

David
I could do more of that, I’m not anywhere near accomplished at it; and of course, the speed to be able to do that at a high speed is real practice. Probably somebody is practicing it right now as we’re speaking, somewhere in the world; I’m sure of it.

Doron
You touched a little bit on free jazz, and I know that a lot of people listening might not be familiar with that but how would you define free jazz?

David
Well, this is of course, historical. The beginning of so called “free jazz” started in the late 1950’s, particularly 2 people important, Arnet Coleman and Cecil Taylor on piano. The word free there meant, there were a lot of implications here because of course you’ve got to remember there was this whole sociological thing happening with African American’s and the situation in America, and so forth. The word free has a lot of connotations. Any kind of history, you could do it right now in Syria. The word free can be turned into a lot of different things. Let’s just talk musically.

It did mean at that time several different possibilities, a mixture of them or any of them alone. It meant not steady time. What does that mean? Instead of {wording notes}, we’re used to jazz up till that time, we’re used to the walking bass quarter notes and the symbol going {wording notes}. Now it meant we’re not going to have a steady tempo. Somebody could say ‘If it’s not a steady tempo, what is it?’ Some people used the word ruboto, its Italian meaning to take from and to give, to stretch the phrase. This is even more like out of rhythm.

For example, I’ll play again {playing saxophone}, you can hear {wording notes}, let’s say I just go {playing saxophone}; suddenly there is no steady rhythm so that’s so called “free” of a steady rhythm. Next would be harmonically, that they don’t necessarily have chord changes. They might not even have a pedal point. Pedal point means one note serving as the harmonic center. It might just be completely devoid of chord changes, meaning that the only thing we have are the intervals that are being played.

So “free” meant free from what they considered the straightjacket of steady time and of a harmonic entity. That was one that was traditionally. The word free now, I use it as a way just to mean guys that play not necessarily more of the main stream. Somebody could say that Dave Liebman plays harmonically free. It’s kind of an open kind of thing, and I certainly play a lot of music, especially in Europe where the style is much more common; we say ruboto without steady time.

There’s a whole school of jazz that’s called a Nordic sound, and Yan Gobrick is probably the most well-known exponent of that; very well documented by ECM Records over the last 40 years. That music up there is very dreamy, very textural, it’s not in time, it’s often very lyrical and then it can change in one second from being very lyrical to being very bombastic, chaotic and sound like everyone is banging on their instruments. In a way that’s what I call free jazz at this time, but now the word free is a little different than it was to start with. Basically it means without harmony and/or without steady time.

Doron
You obviously have extensive history playing what’s known as free jazz; how has that affected you’re playing traditional jazz? If you’re playing a regular tune do you ever just completely throw the changes away and go into a separate thing or are you always kind of anchored?

David
Excellent question, and of course there are no rules and it depends on the situation. Remember, we’re saxophone players, we have one note. We have very little control over what’s going to happen behind us; we’ve got drums which are blasting, the bass is kind of like us in a way, but then you have your piano, guitar, and maybe other horns….at any moment the band can go free and I’m either forced to by the situation or because I want to join it up. I won’t say that’s the most common.

It can be done, and it’s usually done, but more common is to loosen the tune up and stretch the rhythm while trying to more or less observe the harmony. That’s intricate. That’s not easy to do. How can I play a 32 part tune, a standard with chord changes every 2 bars (or something like that) and stretch it out and still keep the harmonic underpinning. That’s rather challenging.

Does it happen? Sure, it happens. I won’t say it’s very common. More common would be that we would play a tune free right from the beginning and it’s understood that after this melody, or this set of intervals; sometimes it’s not even a melody, that we’re just going to play what’s in our head and converse with each other.

I’ll tell you one thing that’s really interesting philosophically, and that is that in a certain way, if I put 3 or 4 musicians together and we play free, it’s truly improvising. When I put a piece of paper in front of us, even if it’s a blues, even if it’s let’s play in C, or let’s play this rhythm, I’m kind of already not being spontaneous. I’m back to that paradox. I’m putting a structure, whether it be very loose from one note, or like giant steps which is very complex harmonically;

I’m putting a structure between me and you for us to converse on. It’s like we’re going to sit at a table in a restaurant and we’re going to talk about, and we have a list and it’s going to be in that order. Well instead of sitting down and having a drink, sitting and talking about whatever comes up, and in a certain way playing free is probably one of the best, and most direct ways to communicate with your musicians. Of course, on the other side is it takes great skill not to sound like its just gibberish.

That’s the trap of free playing. It can sound like I’m just moving my fingers. In other words, what I thought when I started in the 60’s and I was playing a lot of free jazz, because that’s what was on the plate then in NY City; I thought ‘Wow, this is it. I’m current. I’m cool.’ And then of course, after a few years I realized I really didn’t know what I was doing and to play truly free meant I had to be able to play everything before that.

To be free of something you have to know it. You can’t be free from something unless you know it; otherwise you just didn’t pay attention to it. That’s not free, that’s just ignorance. (Laughing)

Doron
What would say is the most important thing to keep in mind when you’re playing with a small group?

David
It’s the general shape of things. We use the word communication a lot, and of course there’s communicating but it’s just being sensitive to the situation. It’s just like any group activity. Again, back to the conversation at the table, if you’re sitting a table with 3 other people, you’re not just going to bogart and take over; you’re also not just going to sit in the corner and not talk. It’s possible you might, but you’re going to partake when there’s something to say of interest that you have to offer to the conversation. In a certain way that’s really what this is about. Do I have something that’s of relevance, first of all, of importance (in my opinion) that needs to be stated musically? You don’t make those decisions in real time because there’s no time to do it; but in a certain way that’s what we are doing. We are conversing with each other, either with subject material or not, as I just described, and we’re trying to make something artistic; bringing on 4 people to the same thing, so it’s being sensitive, being open and being flexible.

Back to your first question and that’s why it’s so important that I answered in the beginning, which is this openness, flexibility and ability to change on the spot without any kind of judgment. You must suspend judgment. That little Igor on your shoulder, you’ve got to get out of the picture. You cannot judge what you’re doing when you’re doing it. You can talk afterwards about how it worked. Did it work as well as it could have? Could it be improved? Of course, but in the process, when you’re in the midst of improvising there’s no time to monitor yourself, or anybody else. Just dive in, get in the water and then get out of the water and worry about what happened afterwards. It means being really free from judgment and that’s not easy for people to do.

Doron
The magic of all the great recordings we’ve listened to is just the way the musicians interact with each other, the horn player plays something, the drummer plays something in response; what are some ways that we can spark the musicians around us to interact a little bit more actively?

David
Well, outside of verbal, which I am totally in favor of, by the way. A lot of time some musicians feel better left unsaid, it should come all through the music, through the vibration of the music and man I’ll tell you, if we had all the time in the world I’m totally in line with that kind of philosophy.

Jazz used to have a lot of time, meaning if we were talking now in 1965, 65 up to even the 70’s I’d be working gigs 6 nights a week, 39-45 weeks a year. Coltrane, Alvin Jones told me they worked 40-45 weeks a year. Miles worked all the time. And worked means they played every night, the man hours spent meant that you could a lot by just doing.

We don’t live in that era anymore for obvious reasons and therefore I feel that the only way to compensate for the loss of the naturalness of doing it a lot is I have to say something. I will say ‘Hey guys’, if they believe in talking, but even if I’m just a normal guy playing, and again, you have to judge your personalities right without getting personal, without judging. ‘Man, I’d really like it if you played a little to the drummer, or if you played a little bit more active. You could just do more.’ The drummer probably never thought anyone would ever say that to him because we’re always putting the handcuffs on the drummer because of the volume. Or the piano player, you might say ‘Those chords you’re playing, can you show me what they are? I wasn’t quite sure we were in the same harmonic realm.’ Or something like that. I’m all for verbal interaction. It’s not music, obviously, music is beyond words but there’s nothing wrong with trying as much as possible to talk and discuss what has transpired, or what could transpire.

Then of course, back to the real situation of playing, the first level of interaction is rhythm. If I go {wording notes}, that is a strong statement and you will get attention. (Laughing) You might not get the right kind of attention but you will get attention if you play something that is rhythmic. Especially a horn player, I say to them ‘We don’t have to always be playing what we call lines. {wording notes}’ This ongoing curving around and all that. Why not just one note like a damn bass drum, {wording notes}, you do that and let me tell you something, everybody will look up at you. No, you don’t want to do that only because it’s really rudimentary, but rhythm is a good way to get everybody’s attention; that’s for sure.

Doron
I was wondering, do you have a specific method for learning tunes?

David
I do not. I have my bunch of standards that I’ve been playing for decades. I don’t know a million tunes. There are so guys who do. I play mostly original tunes, my own included. I don’t play it enough to learn it. The way we used to learn tunes was we did it a lot. (Laughing) We’re back to that discussion of seeing as it was. When I played with Elvin after six nights, three weeks I didn’t need the music anymore. I never said anything; it was just obvious that I didn’t need it.

Learning standards, the best, the only way I can think of is use the great reservoir of play alongs, Aba Soul, of course obviously and whoever else now, there’s many, and just put that tune on and play that tune for a week; play it for 15-20 minutes a day and believe me, after a while you won’t have to look at the music. Go to the piano and play the chords and the baseline to help you enhance you’re learning of the tune; but I think that one tune per week is plenty. That means 3 months, 12 tunes, that’s enough for a lifetime if you pick 12 good tunes that everybody does you’ll be able to handle most jam sessions.

Then of course you can be able to play a tune by ear and just do it after you’ve heard it a few times. That’s going to get better by experience and by time, depending on what the tunes are. I think a lot of it is experience, but you can sit and practice a tune every day, 15-20 minutes play alongs are usually 4-5 minutes each selection, just a little 4-6 times, 30 minutes you’re doing 6 times, I think you’ll learn it in a couple of days.

Doron
And how important when we’re developing as musicians do you think it is to learn the tune in all 12 keys?

David
The discipline of doing something in all 12 keys is obvious. {The audio is having a lot of technical interference / breaking up 49:00 minutes} we go to *** keys, I don’t see ***, you’re going to see the key in B, E and F Sharp ***. On the other hand esthetically remember just because you can do 12 keys doesn’t mean you have anything to say in one key. (Laughing)

So could I *** in 12 keys? Not necessarily as great as I could if I practiced it. But you know what, in E flat *** C to because that’s too *** in this case. I have a lot to say and I can play *** from now to the end of time. So as a discipline, if you have the time, getting back to this priority list of what to practice, if you have enough time that you can do something in 12 keys of giant steps It’s certainly going to help you. It’s going to be a help to you finger wise, and ear and all that. Is this an important aspect of your artistic message? I’m not sure. But is it a discipline? Absolutely.

Doron
As far as expressing yourself artistically, when you play it’s obvious that you’re in a zone, you’re not just playing mentally or by row; can you describe what it feels like when you’re playing in a real life musical situation when you’re in that zone where the music just seems to play itself?

David
Can you go on to DaveLiebman.com while you’re sitting there, and when you do you’ll see something called Le Roi du Monde on the main page, which in French means the King of the World {50:00} – can you read it?

Doron
For those moments when I, as a horn player, am playing in front of a good rhythm section I’m simply “the kind of the world”. Everything is perfect. One is complete control. You can do whatever you want within that space inhabited at that moment. You are truly the master of the universe. Not the cliché, the real deal; getting to that place takes years of experience and observing those who are ahead of you on line. There is a confidence, an unseen swagger, an assertiveness, even if the music is gentle. It’s so good that all you want to do is repeat it, like a junkie, hooked forever.

David
That’s it. That’s what it is and that happens to varying degrees every time you play. Sometimes it’s really amazing, sometimes it’s ok and sometimes it just doesn’t happen and you’ve got to ready to accept that and be onboard for ever changing status; that zone, or what I call King of the World. Those French love the way they describe it. It means that you’re at the top of the mountain and everybody is there with you; it’s a team effort, jazz. It’s really sports, in a way and it fills everybody on line, everybody is talking together, and everybody is right and you’ve got people listening; which is an important element.

They always say what’s the effect of the audience? Without kow towing, without putting on pink hair and smoke bombs I want the audience to love it and I feel when they like it; if they don’t I go on, but I would certainly rather have them like it, then not like it and that adds to the moment. We’re all in it together, in a way it’s a communal act and it’s almost religious in a way; however you think about religion. By that I mean it’s a calling to the higher spirits, whatever they call it. That’s what we’re doing when we’re together. When you have 4 people, not more than 4, 5 maybe and then it’s another story. I’m not discounting a sextet or a band, but 5 people on one mission is plenty of activity, and plenty to get pretty, pretty high off of and to go into the cosmos. That’s really the zone we reach for.

I’ve got to tell you something, I think that’s why we play this music. If a 12 year old kid gets interested he doesn’t understand what I’m talking about but somewhere in his being he likes that, or wants to go to that place and he’s ready to do all these mechanical things that we’ve been talking about for the last hour to try to get to that place. It’s beautiful.

Doron
Is there a specific methodology or steps we can take before we start to play that can increase our odds of making it into that zone?

David
Certainly there are some who do things, and anything from a pray to a chant, to a drink, to a pill to a shot, to whatever, whatever your thing that you like, whatever it is for the day or for who you are. I’ve been around; I’ve tried everything, done everything in that respect. Our generation was the test generation for many of these things. Whatever works, works. Obviously you don’t want to harm your body, and you don’t want to harm anybody else. If you find something that helps you I say use it on your own, privately, it’s nobody’s business. Whatever makes you ready for the stage, or for these moments of your spiritual quest, so to say, whatever works is fine. I don’t like when anybody puts it on anybody else and makes anybody else do it; and I’ve had that occasionally with some people, that to me is a little bit over the line, but if you’ve got something that works go right ahead.

For me, at this point in my life I like to have a drink, a glass of wine of a little vodka and hang out with the guys, keep the atmosphere light, maybe mention something about the music; but by then there’s not much to say. Just try to make the playing natural. I think if it’s an extension of that life. In other words, I’m there, I’m behind stage, it’s obvious that we’re there for the event and then the next thing you want to do is go reality, natural flow, not a big deal, not smoke bombs and white lights and stuff like that. Jazz is a very understated, non-pretentious, not ostentatious music; when I see anyone go to that way I really get a little upset about it, I just can’t stand it. We are basically 4 guys in a bar, against a wall playing. That’s really the reality of it. If it happens to be a different setting, fine; but it’s not any more than that and it’s certainly not any less than that. It’s a natural pursuit of group activity towards a common goal. That’s what human beings do. They build cities, they make bombs and they play music. (Laughing) That’s what they do.

Doron
Absolutely. We’ve covered so much incredible information. There’s years’ worth of things to apply here, so I wanted to thank you so deeply for being here; I’ve gotten so much out of it.

David
I appreciate it Doron and I think you’re doing a very positive thing, and you’re spreading the knowledge through the way of communication now. We’re talking on Skype, and internet and so forth; the good part of this whole thing is that somebody is sitting in Thailand will be able to hear me talk, and hear you talk and hear whoever else you have. That’s the beauty of this new world of communication; obviously there is a lot of things that are drawbacks but the positive aspect is you don’t have to be in person to hear somebody talk.

Eventually as you people are doing, taking lessons and so forth, and I think eventually playing together, I know it can be done now, the rock guys do it, we could be playing in 4 parts of the world and playing giant steps together in real time and everybody in the world watching it. I hope in my lifetime that will become common place. I don’t know if it’s a good thing, or a bad thing but it’s certainly going to happen so we’ve got to be ready for it. I think you’re on the right path. Thank you for your interest and very good questions and conversation, I appreciate it.