[Dixielandjazz] How to get started improvising

[John Farrell]

As a teenager I became totally obsessed with jazz and allowed nothing to
interfere with my pursuit of it. I resigned from more jobs than I can
remember because I could not get the time off to attend a favourite band's
gig.  I had taught myself to play a few of the most shopworn tunes but
eventually I yearned to progress from that to playing with a band, however
without some sort of track record it proved to be an almost impossible
ambition. These were the days of the trad boom, there were plenty of bands
around, vacancies occurred quite frequently. I would call the numbers given
in the the various advertisements, the first question I was asked was always
"Which bands have you played with?" to which I was obliged to reply, "None".
That was as far as my band job applications ever got.

Around this time I was living in Chadwell Heath, Essex, where there is a pub
called The Greyhound. I wandered into this place one Thursday night and to
my delight there was Kenny Ball and his Chicagoans (as his band was known
then) playing the most heavenly music. During the interval I got chatting to
his piano player (Pat something-or-other, who used to run a sports shop in
Woodford) and told him that I played a little piano too - and to my delight
he asked me to sit in for a couple of numbers. That experience spurred me to
improve my playing and learn more tunes. From that moment on I became a
fixture at the Greyhound on Thursday nights, always being invited to sit in,
I gradually got to understand how the interplay between the various
instruments worked and heeded the advice of the band's experienced musicians
as to what I should or shouldn't be doing.

I couldn't have been much of a pianist in those days but nobody in Kenny's
band ever criticised my playing (at least not in my presence!). I never used
any books or music-minus-one recordings to learn how to play jazz, I found
that the best teaching aid for me was playing with a band and listening
carefully to what was happening around me - and a lot of luck.

John Farrell
stridepiano@tesco.net
http://homepages.tesco.net/~stridepiano/midifiles.htm