This essay refers specifically to the material in my book, A Modal Framework for Jazz Improvisation, but the logic and thinking can be applied to any method of playing the banjo.
The most common question I get about the book is “how do you apply this stuff?” (single-string patterns). In other words, “why do I have to learn my scales and arpeggios? What can those things possibly do for me?”
Let me start by exploring an opposite example: “why do I need to learn chords?” The easy answer is “so you can play songs with them. What would you play in their place?” So, the easy answer to the scale/arpeggio/pattern question is “so you can use them in songs. You can’t improvise jazz without them.”
What else is single-string improvisation than just a bunch of single-note patterns (hopefully correct or at least good notes)? I suppose it’s easy to think “well, that jazz musician is just naturally gifted; he/she doesn’t really know what they are doing.” That is the common belief among the general public—the popular view perpetuated by Hollywood.
Maybe that’s true for a tiny minority of musicians; that’s called a savant. I know—from a lifetime of being around working jazz musicians—that the majority of them had to work their butts off to get to where they can make it look easy and “natural.” Don’t go thinking one is an ignorant savant just because they can play a bunch of notes. The vast majority of them are far from “ignorant” (or savants).
Anyway, I ask this question again: In the absence of that exceedingly-rare “gift,” how can you expect to improvise jazz—a single-note dominated art form—if you have no single-note skills or knowledge to speak of? “Application?” Um… try to play a bunch of coherent notes without any prior skill or knowledge, unless of course you are a true savant. I’m not; are you?
I myself have yet to develop the courage to “improvise” with the patterns that I have worked out, but at least my fingers know the way now. Meanwhile, my general banjo skills have benefitted greatly from my hard work. That is my next goal: I have trained the fingers and the mind, now I just have to “let go and let music.” And that is an entirely different essay, one that I am not yet ready to write.
Ron, it was once explained to me that learning scales is the same reason an artist has his pallet with colors. The colors on the pallet are the colors he can work with to create. For the musician its the same thing. These are the notes you work with to create something. Your book is very enlightening. Keep it up!
John
Thanks for taking your time to show me those single note exercises. Having played the banjo for over 50 years I thought the left hand chords was the trick. I needed the right hand single note exercises and didn’t know it!
I need to get back to practicing again!