Practice This!
April 2009

Hadley Caliman on Tried-and-True Practice Techniques

In the second part of our Practice This! series with master tenor saxophonist and Golden Ear Award winner Hadley Caliman, we will look at the days before an organized jazz education system. When Caliman was “coming up” there were no Aebersold play-alongs, no half-speed transcribing devices, and certainly no computers or looping mechanisms, not to mention an abundance of schools or qualified teachers. Instead, Caliman learned the language of jazz and improvisation from a variety of tried-and-true methods that still yield great rewards in today’s technologically advanced world.

One of the many things Caliman did early on was to learn and understand chords at the piano. “A friend of mine won a piano in a raffle, and after a few months of not seeing him, he came back killin’! I knew I had to learn what he was learning,” he says. Many great horn players have preached the gospel of learning some piano, including Dizzy Gillespie and Kenny Garrett—both solid piano players, like Caliman. Caliman still spends much of his time at the piano to achieve a clearer, quicker understanding of chords and harmony.
Caliman was also inspired by players near his own age: “I loved Dexter Gordon, but I also saw Johnny Griffin with Lionel Hampton’s big band when he was only 16. Eric Dolphy was a few years ahead of me and on the scene, too.”

Additionally, Caliman used whatever resources he could find to hone his knowledge, including flute methods. “I had one flute book that had over one hundred dominant scale passages and patterns.” Classical method books are often overlooked today as a source of material despite generally having clear harmonic implications.

In developing his own, more personal sound, Caliman used composition as a tool to discover his voice. “Whatever kind of idea I was working on in my practicing—a major scale, a pentatonic pattern, a melodic phrase—I would write a tune using that concept and explore all the possibilities that way.” If you have never tried your hand at composing, it is a very useful tool for discovering what you truly hear in your mind’s ear.

So, where to begin? Take some piano lessons, or pick up a copy of Mark Levine’s The Jazz Piano Book for starters. Identify the players in your peer group who inspire you—go hear them play, and try talking to them! Look back at your old instrumental method books (especially the ones that look like a phone book) for improvisation applications. Try writing four measures based on whatever it is that you practiced today. These methods for learning how to improvise generally don’t require anything more than paying attention to your own musical voice and creative instinct. They worked for Hadley Caliman, and they just might work for you.