Even though I usually tell only stories in which I appear as the hero at the end, today I am going to make an exception: this is the story of how I got to sit on stage with a phenomenal group of musicians at a jam session and yet could not participate in most of the tunes.
After my last session at the Bierhaus I decided to take a couple of weeks off to learn new tunes, hoping to be able to play in more of the pieces that were called by other musicians. So I did, went home and got some solid practice and learned new tunes.
The house band had just started when I arrived yesterday. It was a trio of tenor and soprano sax, bass and drums. They were playing originals at a very high level, and the first thing that came to mind was the album "The Beautiful Ones are not yet Born" by the Branford Marsalis Trio, whose title is borrowed from the novel by Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah. In both cases, very complex and inspiring music, as well as very challenging.
When the jam started, all guest musicians were sax players, still no pianist or guitar player, the level was very high and the house band was calling tunes I did not know or could play on by ear due to their complexity, especially so not having a pianist on stage to mark the chords. I jumped on the only easy one they played and improvised on that one. After the break, I was given the chance to call a tune myself, and we all played "Bye Bye Blackbird" with Werner as a singer and that saved my day. The rest of the tunes that were played were not under my fingers and all I could do was sit there and listen to some of the most advanced improvisations I have heard on this club to this date.
I am going to have to change the way I practice completely if I want to avoid these kinds of situations in the future, or at least make the best out of them. Learning tunes and their harmonies very well is one thing, but it seems like a better strategy could be to learn just the melodies of the most played standards as soon as possible, continue learning the harmony little by little and at the same time work on gaining the flexibility to improvise to any set of chords on the fly, thus being able to participate in more tunes every time.
In the meantime, it is easy to forget that in order to learn anything in life, you have to be wheeling to make a fool of yourself. You can not get to be good at anything without having been the worst at it at some point and found a way out of it and up to the next level. Getting ready for everything and anything is the aim. And so even at the level of the Miles Davis quintet, someone dared to ask him during a recording session what the next tune been played was, and he answered: "I´ll play it first, and I´ll tell you what it is later".