Music, Creativity and Mental Health

Short-cuts to Learning and Improvisation on a Musical Instrument

As well as being a part-time writer of mental health articles, I am also an occasional jazz and rock musician, and I sometimes play in a band of friends calling ourselves Bezoomy. Our band Bezoomy use different styles of music, and everything we play is simply improvised and recorded. There's a connection between the two interests and passions, as creative innovation and the experience of creativity, have made me think about how creativity operates and how this relates to literature, psychology, and mental health.

In the literary or spoken style of stream-of-consciousness, the way the topic chops and changes, is also a bit like my lead and bass guitar playing (if you replace topic with scale of notes or melody pattern). I often chop and change a lot when I am trying to improvise more, or have lost a single flow of notes. Sometimes this creates a new flow or stream, and at other times it remains a sort of series of spliced pieces put together, at awkward but interesting angles, and which eventually fall into place and fit.

Whilst some technical ability from practice is obviously required to improvise and play effectively, cutting, splicing, and rejoining, are certainly a quick method of improvisation that jazz musicians use, and of course are used in another way by rap and hip-hop artists with scratching, cutting, and splicing.

I started off playing guitar in my early teens, wanting to learn heavy rock lead-guitar solo playing and chord strumming. After listening to punk rock, and then modern jazz, I progressed onto teaching myself some jazz bass guitar playing, and then some jazz lead guitar playing.

I haven't technically been very much influenced by jazz, as technically I am a rock musician, but creatively I have very much been influenced by the experience of listening to, learning from, and playing jazz. I've also been influenced by listening to some modern hardcore-metal and electronic or techno music, especially by trying to recreate and imitate electronic bass-lines or keyboard tunes, rhythms, and sound-effects on my bass and lead guitar playing.

My main influences for lead guitar playing are basically Hendrix and the saxophonists Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, although I am also very fond of saxophonists Gerry Mulligan, Paul Desmond, and UK saxophonist Courtney Pine. Listening to jazz and some classical music (especially Wagner), makes me aware of the humanism inherent in Wagner's compositions, and aware of the vast range of emotions inherent in human beings, but which are only very partially realised, experienced, or expressed. This also makes ones perceptions and experiences of others more appreciative and enlightening.

One or two friends have asked me how to develop on their guitar playing, as they have found that practising has become either too laborious or has not led them onto any level of progress. Although I know where most notes are on my instruments by ear, I very rarely, if ever, practise. I do however listen to a lot of music in my free time, and I study it by ear and psychologically and creatively learn from it.

The approach I use, gives what I play a special kind of freshness and enables me to connect directly to my subconscious and unconscious mind, as the music and playing comes much more from my creative imagination than from rationally worked-out and structured scale patterns. Even the scales I play mostly come from my creative imagination, and as such are not real scales in the sense of the word, but more modal or arpeggio patterns. The scales that I do know, and which are basically variations of blues, major, and minor, are used occasionally, and are more than anything things to fall back onto if my visualisation and splicing at all fails me.

Whilst a certain basic level of technical ability needs to be achieved to play skilfully and directly, there are definite short-cuts to both innovation and creativity that can be achieved and accomplished. The first, as I've already mentioned, are through splicing and splitting tunes and putting them back together in a different order. This also involves taking very different tunes and putting them together in different ways, and it is basically the way that most modern jazz musicians learn to improvise, and is a kind of trade secret.

The second method and shortcut to improvisation that I use is creative visualisation. This involves imagined patterns, rhythms, or imagined shapes of rhythms. Synaesthesia basically means the mixing or muddling of the senses, but in context to listening to music, it means visualisations such as shapes, patterns, and colours produced by the experience and perception of the music. Whereas synaesthesia involves experiencing shapes and colours as a by-product of the music, with creative visualisation, the music comes from the shapes, patterns, and colours, and so therefore operates the other way round. For me, these are mostly angular shapes, but they can also be curved.

These imagined shapes and patterns are immediately experienced, and as well as being unconscious or instinctual, can also be thoughts or emotions, again experienced directly. Mostly though, these are simply imagined and rhythmic shapes, as the transference of emotional feelings expresses itself through the physical directness and contact with what is actually played on the instrument.

The imagined shapes and patterns are either an inspiration for what I actually play, or they are literally duplicated and played on the fret-board of the guitar or bass. Being able to visualise in this way, creates an enormous short-cut of an intimacy with the instrument which otherwise comes from long and laborious practise.

The stream-of-consciousness style jazz saxophonist John Coltrane was once interviewed. The interviewer begins by saying to John Coltane that he has got to be abrupt with him, and say that his sax playing has been termed untenor-like, un-beautiful, un-just-about everything you can think of, and that since the playing mirrors the personality, he guess's that John Coltrane has some personal thoughts of that kind to say. John Coltrane replies that the critics - or at least some of them - seem to think that his playing is an angry sort of thing as well.

The Interviewer then asks John Coltrane if he feels angry, to which replies that he doesn't feel angry. John Coltrane goes onto say that he was talking to someone the other day, and that he told him that the reason he plays so many sounds that maybe sound angry, are because he is trying to play so many things in one time - that he hasn't sorted them out - and that he has a whole bag of things that he's trying to work through and get the one essential.

The interviewer then asks him if he is trying to play everything he hears, at one time, or something like that. John Coltrane replies that there are some set things that he knows - some harmonic devices that he knows - that will take him out of the ordinary path if he uses them, but that he hasn't played them enough, and that he's not familiar with them enough yet - to take the one single line through them - so he plays all of them, trying to activate his ear so he can hear.

John Coltrane concludes by saying that tone wise he'd like to produce a more beautiful sound, but that he's primarily interested in trying to work with what he has - what he knows - down into a more lyrical line. He says that this is what he means by beautiful - more lyrical - so that it will be listenable and easily understood.

What John Coltrane says here, may have some creative, psychological, and mental health implications for how we understand some things which can be misunderstood as anger, such as so-called mania or creative ability and thinking, and that the aesthetic or more rational quality of tone and a more lyrical line, can be otherwise understood as reciprocated clarification, thematic or elemental thinking, and articulation, and are what enables a person to be more listenable and easily understood.