[Dixielandjazz] DEFRANCO ON FUNDAMENTALS

[Robert Newman]

Here's what Buddy DeFranco says on playing and practicing.    This is on page 266 of the his wonderful recent coffee table biography by Zammarchi and Mas:

"I studied Klose' basically; in fact, for decades I carried around the first forty pages of Klose' that my teacher gave me and used it faithfully.   It got so tattered that I keep it at home now.  I still play it.  For instance I practice all the basic scales and arpeggios from Klose' regularly.  In fact I call it 'cleaning out', because my experience is that if you play jazz every night, whithout practicing legit fundamentals, you'll erode your technique.  But if you stay with those basics, those scales and thirds and chromatics and tonguing exercises, your jazz will be better and easier to play."

"I spend about five months of the year traveling -- mostly overseas.  When I go home, if I have three weeks at home, I will not practice the first week I'm there.  I just forget I own a clarinet.  And two weeks before I begin a tour again, I'll start woodshedding.   And even then, the first week I won't play jazz, absolutely not.  I'll play all the scales, all the arpeggios, and then, devise some of my own scale techniques, and then I'll play some standard works, Mozart or something.  Or I'll use the Paganini Caprices.  But then maybe three or four days before I go out, I'll put on Jamey Aebersold's background records and play jazz."

Many, many years ago I attended a clinic conducted by Buddy here at Sacramento State University.    He said and did a lot of interesting things, but the one thing that stuck in my memory was "if you want your improvisation to sound and feel newer and different, just listen and listen to modernists until you can recognize and hear where seventh chords should be and are substituted by augmented chords.    Practice augmented scales and use augmented intervals where and when they sound that they really belong."

I've noticed that any improvisation by any player that doesn't use substituted augmented chords and intervals sounds like vanilla.   No matter how technical.