Summary
Overall I had an amazing time throughout this project. It was definitely a huge effort from myself in terms of the workload, as I spent hundreds of hours working on my practical skills and my portfolio. Although this sounds like a huge burden, I really enjoyed working on this project and learning lots of new things. A big part of why I love jazz as a genre is the history behind it as well as the lives of the jazz artists and the impact that it has had on the world. Therefore as a future project or maybe an extra one outside of college for example an EPQ as I would love to look into this field in much more detail.
I think contextually, I explained what it is like to be a musician in the current music industry and some of the main challenges musicians face to a good level. I am always looking to learn new skills and improve my current ones and looking at the context behind a project like this allowed me to analyse professionals in order see how I can improve as a musician and potentially what I can become. Learning from one another and analysing past legends on the jazz scene is a major way that current professional jazz musicians have learnt and mastered their trade, therefore I did my best to listen to hundreds of jazz recordings and look at a few in detail in order to understand the main mechanics of jazz as well as specific parts such as improvisation.
Practically, I came on massively throughout this project. With this huge leap in my ability, my confidence also improved and by doing the cafe gigs, I felt ready when my final performance came around. At the beginning I was quite sceptical as to if I could perform in front of a room of people and within a band as I hadn’t done this too much prior to this project. After my final performance, I was delighted with how it went and felt like I had overcome a huge stumbling block. This has given me the confidence and motivation in order to build on this experience and take it forward in the future.
I felt like most of the songs flowed really well and although improvements in my own technique including more advanced improvisation and chord voicing’s, the whole set was performance ready as well as being quite interesting overall. In the future I could cover more sub-genres in jazz including bossa nova style as well as latin jazz. Listening to many different sub-genres has peaked my interest in how different jazz songs are structured, and I would love to look at this more in a mini project in the future. For example, writing a jazz song would be a really great project to do.
My Blues song – Mactaggart’s mood was received brilliantly by the crowd when I played it in my final performance, and for me was one of my favourite parts of this project. Writing songs is something I have struggled to do in the past, therefore when I came up with the idea for this piece and transformed it into a finished Blues piece I was over the moon. I would definitely love to look into songwriting in the future and I think it is a process that should be constantly learned and studied in order to move forward as a composer.
Throughout my project, I was constantly reviewing and evaluating my own actions in order to improve my whole project as well as filling in any gaps I could find. An example of a huge problem I faced was that originally after meeting with the art students, I received no response from them. This was quite stressful as I really needed the artwork in order to promote my performance. However instead of panicking or getting frustrated , I kept a level head and after talking about it with my teacher, set up a second meeting which resulted in the brilliant art work that I used as a flyer for my gig. Another example, is that just before the gig, I had to change my set structure which could’ve resulted in me panicking, however I kept a level head and got on with it. I think this a really important skill to have and luckily I have always been quite good at problem solving.
Another hugely important skill that allowed me to create a successful end product was the communication skills I displayed throughout the project. With the venue, I enquired early and worked well with them to create a great performance space. Luckily everyone that I worked with were incredible and very easy to get along with. Communication skills, along with organisation and punctuality are the like the part of the iceberg that is hidden underwater, in that they are often key to an artists rise to fame, however are not generally seen by people outside of the music industry. Therefore, hopefully by working on these skills I will benefit in the long term.
In terms of working with the venue staff, I felt that I communicated very well and gave them the information they needed in order to put my gig on. A week before the performance, I went with my teacher to check if the piano is tuned which was a major factor in the overall sound of my final performance as when we arrived, it was very out of tune , meaning that the venue arranged for a tuner to come and tune it before the gig.
What I would change if I did this again
Personally, I feel I did an excellent job on this project, however there are still many areas of potential improvement that I can work on for the future and different ways I would of done things if I was to do a similar project again.
Overall I was impressed with how my instagram page looked at the end of this project, however I could improve my promotion in quite a few different areas. Something I noticed when playing my final performance was that the majority of the crowd was made up of people that I knew. Not that there’s anything wrong with this, and I was glad for the support, however in order to make it as a performing artist in the music industry, it is important to always be looking at increasing your fan base and how you can interact with members of the public.
A way I could have improved my physical promotion would have been to hand out more flyers as well as putting up posters around Bradford. Originally, I was planning to put a few posters up around the college in my final week, however I was quite Ill for most of the last week meaning that sadly, I couldn’t go through with this idea. In the future, I will look at creating a website in order to promote myself as an artist which would be really exciting to do and it should really help my reputation on the music scene if I make a professional website.
Another criticism I had with myself was that I played a minor part when setting up the equipment with the concert. In all 3 of my tutors helped set up the gig and although I volunteered to do as much work as I could, there were parts where I was unsure what to do. Therefore I would love to look at what is needed to set up a professional gig in the future and practice this, so as the next time I will be able to do it all myself.
Finally, it was suggested that we could keep a practice diary in order to reflect upon our work and demonstrate what we did in the project. I had a go at doing this for a week, however it didn’t really compliment the way I work as an individual meaning that I dropped the idea and generally evaluated my work every week instead of every day. I talk about this a bit in my viva voce below, as personally I feel much better setting myself small goals and working to accomplish these instead of planning and evaluating for individual days.
Viva voce
Here is a short video of me answering some questions about how my project went overall.
Areas I can improve upon in the future
There are a few areas that I feel that I can improve upon in the future that I haven’t mentioned already.
The first one follows on the criticism of my inexperience with dealing with live sound, in that the technological side of music is one I’m very inexperienced in generally and is something I really want to work on in the future. For example, although we did some recording and mixing practice earlier this year, I don’t yet feel confident enough to use these skills.
A really cool thing to have done in this project is that I could have recorded Mactaggart’s mood and either mixed it myself or asked someone else to produce it for me. This would have been a nice bonus product for my final project, however I felt that I didn’t have the time to do this with my limited knowledge in recording which was a shame. A project I could see myself doing next year, is getting a jazz band together and recording a few tracks in the studio in order to increase my knowledge and confidence in this field.
The other major area of improvement is my jazz piano technique. Although I have come a long way since the start of this project, there is till a long way to go before I can consider myself on a professional level. In order to do this I will have to study jazz theory and other jazz artists for a huge amount of time as well as putting many more hundreds of hours into personal practice. Examples of new jazz techniques I have yet to really take advantage of and learn are extended chords as well as utilising the left hand in a much stronger and more interesting way than block chords. There are hundreds of avenues you can take when learning jazz and there are so many different styles I’m yet to try out or explore. Hand balance and independence is something I have talked about quite a lot in my portfolio for this project and is a major working point for the future.
Future projects and goals
Academically, I am looking to do my Grade 8 piano in early 2018 and I will have to put a lot of work in for this, but it is a very rewarding milestone overall. Similarly, I am hoping to complete my grade 5 theory test by Autumn this year. I am probably going to do ABRSM for Grade 8 piano and I am aware that this is very classical which I have no problem with as I enjoy most classical music and it should hugely increase my playing standard.
However, I would still love to focus mainly on jazz in the future and have a few ideas for projects that I could take on in the future. Although I really enjoyed playing within the trio for my final performance, I would love to put a permanent jazz band together in the future and see myself working best within either a quartet or quintet. The main reasoning I have behind increasing the band size, is that I really enjoy playing with a singer, therefore instead of welcoming singers on to the stage in the future as guests, it would be nice to play with a singer full time. However saying this I would be very open to playing with different musicians in different sizes of bands.
After putting so much work into this final project, I would either like to maintain this level of work or increase it. I think that if I put the effort that I put into this project into the whole of next year I will improve massively and be in a very strong position next year. I have spoken about areas I would particularly like to look into in this evaluation, the main two being the technological side of the music world and the other being songwriting. Improving my own level is something I will have to work on constantly, therefore these two sections are more specific extras that interest me.
I would love to write and arrange a few jazz pieces with a band and potentially a singer in which I could then record and produce these to create either an E.P or an album. Another avenue is creating jazz covers of popular songs like post modern jukebox and so many other have done. I would love to look at doing alternative and Indie songs in this way such as the smiths or the cure for example.
A little side project my teacher suggested to me was to look at something I have been interested in a while which is Bach’s chorales, I could potentially look at writing some of these out and applying them in different musical situations.
Finally I would love to use this project as a springboard to increase the amount of gigging I do. I will look into doing this as a band member and as an individual in situations such as actual gigs to playing cocktail piano. Overall I am very excited for what the future could contain and hopefully I will be able to look at some of the areas I have stated over the summer and next year.