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!
October 2007
Hans Teuber on Space

Click here to listen to Hans' Practice This! audio clip.

Many people use the term “space” in music to refer to anything that is not the music or not the notes being played. But in actuality, space is music. It’s what creates the vibe and the musical environment.

In a conversation, it’s considered polite to listen and make a comment and see what other people say in response. In music that listening and thinking is the space.

More often than not, everyone in an ensemble has something to say and they all really want to say it. Music often ends up being a contest of who can bully the most, or dominate the conversation by playing more notes or by playing louder. It’s like a lot of people interrupting each other and nothing ever really gets said.

Then, there’s no way the human ear can follow everyone, so the listener has to decide what to follow.

But in really good music, someone is telling a story in the music. And in jazz – this is one of the beautiful things about it – everyone gets a chance to tell their story.

Given the weight of the virtuosic history of jazz, however, it becomes harder and harder to do that. We have listened to all the great jazz where great players have told their stories, and have played their things, and we have started to think we have to play in certain ways. We bring a lot of baggage to the music in the form of preconceived ideas, and then we actually start to play without our own story, any more.

So, it’s a good idea to put preconceived notions out of your head, because those set up unrealistic expectations for you. If you fix on what other people have said, you’re already distracting yourself from telling a story or conversing with your fellow musicians.

And, when everyone brings preconceived ideas to the music and plays them, that’s when it sounds like a lot of people interrupting.

Right now, I am trying to practice not playing – which is to say, I’m practicing using space. Often, we need to combat the expectation that we should play, play, play, and go, go go – that something or someone will be let down if we don’t fill up all the space.

It’s hard to overcome that expectation. We all hear a lot of things in our minds when we go to play. Well, one way to practice using space is to try to play things that you don’t already hear in your head, that is not already lodged in your mind. Then, you can make each of your musical collaborations a conversation, fresh and new.

Saxophonist Hans Teuber is one of the most prolific improvisers on the Seattle music scene. He is at home in a variety of musical situations – he has performed with artists as varied as Jovino Santos Neto, Paul Rucker, Jeff Johnson, Clay Giberson, Ani DeFranco, Santi Debriano, and scores of others. He can be heard on numerous local and nationally acclaimed recordings and teaches at Cornish College of the Arts. He can be heard every Thursday evening at May Thai Restaurant in Wallingford along with Geoff Harper and Byron Vannoy.