Practice This! is an educational project of Earshot Jazz with sponsorship from The Seattle Drum School. Each month in Earshot Jazz a new lesson by a different local jazz artist will appear for students to learn from and for non-musician readers to gain insight into the craft of improvising.

Practice This!
August 2007
Marc Seales on Playing in an Ensemble

Click here to listen to Marc's Practice This! audio clip.

When you play in a band, regardless of what type of music you are playing, the main objective is to play together. That objective seems simple, but a lot of musicians don’t really understand that they all have to be on the same page, musically.

Surrounding that core objective is a goal that a band might try to accomplish. Maybe a band is trying to put out a certain kind of vibe, play with a particular type of precision, or maybe just give off a certain entertainment value. It could be a combination of all of those things or none of them. Whatever a band is trying to do, all the members have to work together to achieve that specific goal.

The music is the most important thing. You do whatever you have to do to make the music work. The music is the highest priority.  Sometimes, in order to make the music happen a certain way, it requires you to keep your ego back a little bit. Sometimes you have to play more egotistically in order to serve the goal of the music. The music is always the end result of what you do. Lots of musicians make the performance about a lot of other things, rather than the music.

If the music is the result of a particular person’s persona, because they wrote the song the band is playing, that’s okay. The other musicians are then responsible for propping that up. If the band decides they are going to play a specific tune in a specific way, than that is the goal above all other goals.

A noted pianist and composer, Marc Seales has performed with a veritable “who’s who” of jazz music, including the likes of Benny Carter, Joe Henderson, Larry Coryell, Bobby Hutcherson, Slide Hampton, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, Art Farmer, Jackie McLean, Clark Terry, Art Pepper, and Ernie Watts.

Marc was a longtime mainstay in the bands of the late Don Lanphere. He appeared on many of Lanphere’s albums as well as toured Europe with him.

Marc leads his own band and is co-leader of the trio New Stories. He is listed in the 1999 edition of Ira Gitler’s Encyclopedia of Jazz, and he was voted Northwest Instrumentalist of the Year 1999 in Earshot Jazz’s Golden Ear awards.