Klarinet Archive - Posting 000327.txt from 1997/06

From: Karl Krelove <kkrelove@-----.com>
Subj: Re: Improvisation
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 02:58:31 -0400

At 06:58 AM 6/20/97 +0000, Michael Delceg wrote:
>...One obvious conclusion is that teachers who don't expose
>their students to all of these variations will impoverish them musically
>(Do I feel it getting warm in here?).
>
It is the best of all possible worlds when students are exposed to all of
this, but let's not raise anyone's expectations that any one teacher ought
as a matter of course to be able to provide all of this exposure himself. I
wish I felt as much at home with bebop as I do with swing (and I'm not
quite old enough to have lived through the swing era myself) and Dixieland.
I actually grew up during the later bebop and "progressive jazz" periods,
but never felt so connected to them as I did to Goodman and Shaw and
deFranco and other non-clarinet swing players I listened to on recordings.
I never learned to improvise in the heavily modal, linear styles that got
to be popular during the sixties when I was growing up. I'm still trapped
hopelessly in the chordal, harmony-based approach that I learned from my
teachers who DID grow up in the swing era. For me to try to give my
students any guidance in post-swing jazz styles would be a real waste of
their time. The catch is that most of the guys around here who could do a
great job teaching jazz styles are not as well equipped to teach "legit"
technique or "classical" repertoire. It isn't that the areas are
necessarily mutually exclusive, but that they happen to be so among the
musicians I know and can send students to.
I don't intend any of this to sound like a personal defense. I guess I
just don't want the younger readers on this list who are still actively
studying with teachers to start questioning whether their teachers are in
some way deficient because they don't or can't deal with all styles equally
effectively. We all have our limits.

Karl