Keeping your band motivated
By Saul Richardson
Goal setting
Rehearsal cycle
Plenty of music
Plan for a positive experience
Empower the students
Set high standards
Tight rehearsals
Goal Setting
Make band for something. Set achievable goals for the short, mid and long term.
Short term goals might include learning a new chart, and end of term concert, entering an eisteddfod, a workshop with a prominent musician.
Mid term goals might be an annual performance trip away, a major concert perhaps with a famous musician, a jazz festival or a CD recording.
Long term goals can include an regional or overseas tour, participation in a major competition, or to become recognized as a leader in your field.
Every time you rehearse, it really helps if the is something coming up, some reason for the rehearsal even if it is a quite distant long term goal.
The rehearsal cycle
Have a rehearsal cycle. Have periods of weeks, sometimes even a couple of months, when the band can focus exclusively on learning new music. Schedule no concerts, and decline offers of gigs if you can. Let the band spend time working at learning and perfecting new material.
Performances can actually get in the way of learning. Too busy a schedule can force us into the trap of just running over the same pieces again and again. If a concert is immanent, there is always pressure to polish the few pieces you will be playing, rather than setting aside time for something new
Play plenty of music
Play lots of new music throughout the year. This makes it interesting for the musicians and teaches them to sight read at the same time.
Early in the process or with a new band things will usually be very hard going. You may struggle to get through two or three charts in a term, or even longer. However, persistence will pay off. Certainly spend most time working on those charts, but set aside some time every rehearsal for sight reading. It might just be the first eight bars of a new tune. It doesn't matter, so long as the students are sight reading.
The worst thing you can do is what I call the competition method: A band learns only three or four charts in a year and “perfects” them so they can get high grades in various competitions. The students will more or less learn by rote. They will not learn to sight read, and the band will never be able to play more than three or four charts per year. The competitions might be exciting, but the band will be tedious.
We spend most of our time in rehearsals teaching the same things over and over again. The same “tricky” rhythms, the same things about accents, articulations, note lengths, cut-offs, dynamics, listening, intonation. The big band music young bands play typically involves different combinations of the same rhythmic cliches, the same articulations, even the same structure. Sight reading is largely when the students can generalize from one chart to another and recognize the similarities.
One of my bands, at North Sydney Boys' High School, can easily get through fifty charts in a year, playing all of them to a high performance standard. They can do this because the band can sight read. We can spend our precious little rehearsal time working on higher level concepts like ensemble and interpretation, rather than being bogged down by lower order things like notes and rhythms.
The way to start a band on the way to being able to sight read is to give them plenty of music to play. However, it is important that there is variety too.
Variety of music includes a variety of levels of difficulty as well as of style. A band should play music at its own level plus or minus a couple of levels. Most of what you do should be just a bit challenging for the band, but playable with rehearsal. A few pieces should be really tough for them, maybe even so difficult that you won't ever perform them. Your students will benefit from, and enjoy, playing this music.
Every band should also have a set of easy music, things the band can more or less sight read and that stay in the folders permanently. These charts sound great every time the band plays them. They also mean that you don't need to waste rehearsal time rehashing old music every time an ordinary gig comes along, disrupting the learning cycle.
Plan for a positive experience
It is vital that band is a fun, positive experience. When you band plays in public they and their parents should come away feeling good about what they have achieved. In concerts, program music so that most of it is comfortably playable by the band. Intersperse this with a few challenging party pieces, but only if they are properly prepared. If the party piece doesn't sound amazing, it isn't ready yet.
A word of caution too: it often seems like a good idea to end a gig with your biggest, showiest number. But what shape are young players “chops” likely to be in by the end of a gig? The average school band seems to be burnt out after about fifteen minutes of playing. End the concert with something solidly impressive, but not too demanding. Don't risk a train wreck during the closing number, because that will leave a poor impression and will leave the students feeling disappointed. Audiences will remember the last thing you played more than what happened in the middle of the set.
The same goes for rehearsals. Try to end with a strong piece so the kids can go away feeling good and motivated. When rehearsing new music play the section or sections of the piece you want to work on and then stop. Don't let it peter out and end in disaster. Tidy up whatever it is you want to focus on that day and then say “that's all I wanted to do with that one today”, and move on.
Empower the students
Teach your students about jazz and how to play it, including improvisation and rhythm section techniques. This helps put them more in control of the music and makes it a whole lot more fun.
One of the things that makes jazz fun to play is its interactivity. This is especially true for the rhythm section. There are times, for instance during improvised solos, when the musicians are (or should be) improvising collectively, making something exciting and musical out of a few vague chord symbols or suggested drum rhythms. Teach your rhythm section and soloists to do this and you band will be transformed. If you don't feel confident teaching this side of things, get someone to come in and work with them a few times.
Encouraging the students to organize and run their own sectional rehearsals is a powerful way for them to develop leadership, independence and responsibility, and ownership of the music. The extra practice also helps the band sound better. Many students only play their instrument once per week, in rehearsal. If they do sectionals, they will play twice each week.
Set high standards
Set very high standards. Make it clear that you, and the band, demand quality. Build a culture that values quality through persistent effort.
Give realistic feedback to students, both praise and criticism. When something is praiseworthy explain why, and likewise if it is not. We do our students no favours by telling them they are good when they aren't. The Count Basie band is good. The Jazzgroove Mothership Orchestra is good. Does your band sound just the same as them? If not, why not? What are the differences between them and your band? Believe it or not, there are student bands that come close to a professional standard. If your students aren't there yet, let them know! Praise improvement, praise effort, let them know they are on the way or they are better than before, but don't give them delusions of being something they are not. That just builds arrogance, complacency, laziness, and mediocrity.
Tight rehearsals
Rehearsals should be disciplined, but fun. They should be planned, logical and have purpose that the students can see. A good rehearsal has a sense of urgency about it, and a feeling that everything is being done for a reason, and that it is important work.
As director one of your jobs is to control the mood. Make jokes and allow others to make jokes, but stay focused. Sometimes you need to be very serious, othertimes light hearted. Vary the pacing of the session too. Don't always do the same thing. Predictability will become boring, so avoid it.
Insist on punctuality, start on time, and end on time. Try to set a good example yourself. But if you are running late, the rehearsal should begin without you. They can still play music without you there. It is the job of section leaders and senior players to make this happen.
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