Tim Hagans Clinic

Much to my delight, I learned early this week that Tim Hagans was going to be in town in conjunction with the HSPVA spring jazz festival. It's been a fairly busy work week for me, but I lucked out in that I was able to attend the performance on Friday night and the clinic on Saturday at 11:00 AM. 

The performance was fantastic. It was divided into two parts, the first half featured the HSPVA combo and the second half featured the first jazz ensemble. Hagans was featured with both. 

Expressionless Calm

The clinic began with Tim Hagans and Woody Witt playing two tunes with a rhythm section. They began with "All the Things You Are" and followed it up with a fast blues. 

Hagans' playing was full of chromatic ideas and melodies. It's this chromaticism which attracts me to his playing and it was a genuine treat to "see it with my own two eyes". Sometimes it's important to actually SEE someone perform to get the full impact of what they are doing. In this case, what I saw was total relaxation and inner peace (yuck, I hate using that term). No matter what he is playing, be it outside or inside, fast or slow, dramatic or sublime, Tim Hagans has the same look of expressionless calm on his face. 

But his musical ideas were certainly NOT expressionless. There's a great paradox in his ability to explore so many subtle nuances in emotion while not letting a hint of those emotions surface in his facial expressions or body language. If this were the first time I had ever witnessed this paradox, it would have surprised me with it's contrast. But most of the great players have this quality. It's almost as if they shut their physical bodies down in order to communicate via their minds and/or their hearts. 

Trumpet Players

The discussion opened up with Hagans speaking about other trumpet players who influenced his playing. He put a lot of emphasis on Thad Jones. He pointed out that many people think of Thad Jones as only being a composer and a leader when he was also a great trumpet player. Hagans worked with Thad Jones during a two year period while they were both living in Europe. 

First Blue Note Recording

Bob Morgan was in the audience and asked Hagans to talk a little about his first recording with Blue Note. Doc wanted to know if he contacted Blue Note or if they contacted him. His response was that it was one of Blue Note's AR men (Artist and Repertoire) who first approached him. He was playing a big band job with Bob Mintzer when the AR guy gave him his business card. 

The interesting part of this story is that Hagans says that his first CD with Blue Note was on a very low budget. He only got eight hours of recording time and the recording went straight to two tracks - which eliminates the need for later mixing sessions. He went on to describe some more unfortunate aspects of the recording industry but clarified that he has learned to not take those things personally. He said that the recording industry is big business and his trumpet playing is only small business (in comparison). 

Listening List

Next someone asked him which recordings he would recommend, for listening. I can't remember all of the recordings he mentioned, but I do remember that the first two he said were Herbie Hancock's "Empyrean Isles" and "Maiden Voyage". He also listed two Wayne Shorter sides and Sonny Rollins' "Live at the Village Vanguard". Another CD he mentioned was Art Blakey's "Live at Bird Land" with Clifford Brown. He also said that "every household in America should have at least one copy of Miles Davis' 'Bitches Brew'". He followed that by saying that we should all listen to anything that Miles ever did. He also mentioned Freddie Hubbard's, "Ready for Freddie". On a personal note, this was the first time a clinician ever gave a recommended listening list that I owned all of the recordings listed. Usually I don't even have half of what they list. 

Hagans commented that the reason why we should listen to the great jazz players is to help us figure out what we want to sound like. He said that, throughout high school and college, he played in all kinds of ensembles; band, orchestra, brass quintet, etc.. But it was in the jazz ensemble that he felt as if he had the most freedom to express himself, to express his own feelings. Through listening to many different players, we have more examples to chose from in forming our own styles of playing.

How To Practice Improvisation

Now we get to the good stuff. On the break between sets, on Friday night, I told Tim Hagans that I would be at his clinic and his response was, "good, ask lots of questions." I said in return, "believe me, I've got plenty of questions." Tim Hagans is one of only a small hand full of trumpet players who's majority of ideas are chromatic. Most trumpet players use a little chromaticism here and there, maybe totaling one fourth of all of their ideas. But Tim Hagans' solos can sometimes have as much as 90% chromatic content. I LOVE chromatic jazz playing and I've been working on being able to play more chromatically but with only limited, slow results. So yes, I had lots of questions.

But I didn't have to ask any of them. He pretty much covered everything I needed to hear without being asked. The remaining portion of the clinic was spent discussing the subject of how to practice. 

Practicing Free

The first part of this discussion was the suggestion that you should do thirty minutes of FREE improvisation each day. This should be done without any sense of harmony, tempo nor meter. He went into this discussion after his comment about the purpose of listening being to help you find what you want to sound like. The question was asked, how do you develop your own style by listening to other players? This is where the free playing comes in. When you do this thirty minutes of free playing, you should do it without any preconceived ideas. Don't try to play ideas, just play what comes out. 

He played free, in this way, as an example for us. The first thing I noticed is that it didn't sound like jazz. It wasn't swung. It actually sounded more like a twentieth century composition for solo trumpet. He confirmed my observation when he stopped playing by commenting that it sounds more like Bartok than it sounds like jazz. 

He said that, if you do this for thirty minutes a day, you won't get results over night, but after a while, you'll notice some huge changes in your playing (along the lines of developing your own personal style). The way he described it, I think the point was that, by playing free like this, you explore different sounds and melodies, many of which you won't like and will soon be forgotten. But then, occasionally, you'll find a few things here and there which you really do like and they will stick with you. Since these ideas came directly from your own creative flow, they will be part of your own growth as a separate jazz personality. 

Add Eighth Notes

In applying this "Free" approach to practicing in the context of other aspects of jazz improvisation, Hagans said that you can add one element to this free playing exercise. For example, one thing he said which goes into distinguishing one jazz player to the next is the way they play eighth notes. Different players play different styles of eighth notes. He said he made a conscious decision to play his eighth notes more like Freddie Hubbard. He mentioned that Hubbard's eighth notes were more legato and smooth as opposed to the way Clifford Brown used to play eighth notes. He said that both ways are good and that his choice was based on his own personal preferences.

Anyway, to apply practicing eighth notes to the Free practice that he mentioned above, you simply play eighth notes (which implies no freedom of tempo) in a free harmonic setting. He played an example of this for a few minutes. This time it did sound like jazz, because of the swing, but he wasn't just playing Parker licks or anything like that. He was clearly playing just whatever came to him in the moment. 

As an extension of the eighth note thing, Hagans mentioned that, in learning how to play fast, you simply do the Free eighth note playing at the fastest tempo you can play it at. He says, to do this right, you should practice at a tempo which is just fast enough to make you sound like your not cutting it. If you practice this fast for long enough, then it doesn't seem so fast anymore. 

Scales

On the subject of practicing scales, Hagans DOES recommend practicing the standard patterns and stuff like that. But he commented that, if you want to keep your gig, you cannot afford to play scale patterns in your solos. So, his solution to that is, after you've learned a scale, practice it in the same Free context as mentioned above. He played two examples for us. The first was on the E Dorian scale and the second was on the F Altered scale. Again, because of the absence of swung eighth notes, these examples did not sound like jazz. But they did sound very cool.

The Emotion of Harmony

At this point, the discussion moved into a more harmonic direction. He began this portion of the clinic by making the comment that, with freedom comes a great responsibility. As a metaphorical comparison, he used the example of governmental laws. He said that we have laws against killing people and that people kill each other anyway. In order for us to live without rules, everyone would have to exercise their responsibility which goes with such freedom. He said that we have not reached that in our society and probably never will. But we have reached that level of freedom in our harmony. He says that any chromatic note can be played over any chord, but with that freedom is the responsibility of expression. 

To demonstrate this concept, he sat at the piano and played a D minor seven chord. Over the top of the  chord, he played different emphasized tones. The first examples were all diatonic. For each note, he played the chord and then repeated the emphasized note a few times. Then he asked us what emotions would we assign to that note over that chord, how does that note make us feel? He did this with the third, the ninth and the eleventh. Each time he asked us to ponder the emotions of those notes.

Then he moved on to the more chromatic notes. The first example was an emphasized F# over a D Minor Seven chord. Again, what emotion does this note portray to us? He also used C# and Eb as examples. While playing the C#, he clarified that he was not playing a D Minor Seven chord with a Major Seventh. The chord still contained the C Natural, but the note he was emphasizing was C#. 

Conclusion

This was a fantastic clinic. He said all the things I needed to hear at this point in my development. He ended by telling us that this was our homework assignment. Next time he sees us, he wants to see that we've been spending some time, every day, playing free. I hope I do get to see him again and I hope I get an A+ on my homework.