If it makes you laugh, GOOD! (with Jeffrey Agrell)

We’re joined by Jeffrey Agrell, a returning guest on the show, and one of our absolute favourite music educators. Jeffrey has authored half a dozen books providing “games” which serve as a gateway into creativity and improvisation – even for the most buttoned-up, perfectionist classical players!

In this short conversation before his Musical U masterclass on Rhythm Improv Games, Jeffrey shares:

• Why one of his best character traits is… having a very high tolerance for looking foolish!
• An elegantly simple definition of Creativity: “it just means ‘do something different’.”
• And why something you play seeming silly or making you laugh is actually a GOOD thing.

Watch the episode:

Links and Resources

• Jeffrey Agrell online
• Musicality Now – Making Improv a Game, with Jeffrey Agrell

Transcript

Christopher: Today I’m here with you to share a mini interview with one of my favorite people in music education, someone I know a lot of you know already. And if he’s new to you, I’m excited that you get to meet him today.

Heads up, this is going to be shorter than the interview episodes we’ve done in the past because what’s been going on is over the last 18 months or so, we’ve had a new series of monthly masterclasses at Musical U. We’ve had a series of amazing guest experts come in where they do our monthly masterclass, and then they also do coaching for all our Next Level members. They have a couple of long group coaching sessions, and it’s, it’s a really cool way to bring outside expertise into the Musical U world and open our members’ eyes and ears and abilities to whole new perspectives.

And so what I’ve been doing is I’ve just been nabbing our guest experts, like, 20 minutes before they give their masterclass to do a quick interview with them so that you can get a quick peek into who they are, what they do. And they’ve been really fascinating conversations. So they may not be the long form interviews those longtime podcast listeners and viewers among you would be used to, but they are, they are really well worth checking out.

And I’m excited to share the first one with you today. So just to set the scene for today’s one, yesterday I shared our four pillar beliefs here at Musical U. And one of those is “enjoying the journey”, meaning: learning music takes effort. It is work, in a sense, to learn, but that doesn’t mean it can’t also be fun.

And we’re really big believers that that entire journey of becoming the musician you want to be should be an enjoyable one. And that’s something we weave throughout all of our material, all of our support, all of our interactions at Musical U to really help remind us all that learning can be enjoyable.

And in fact, one of our mottos at Musical U is that “fun is not the opposite of learning”, something that adult learners are often very, very reluctant to agree to. But when you experience it, you realize, oh, no, that state of having fun and enjoying yourself is very much your brain’s most receptive learning mode.

What we found also is that creativity is a massive accelerator for learning. So we do a lot at Musical U with fun, creative improv activities to help musicians tap into their inner instinct for music and to add variety and exciting new twists and turns to what could otherwise become very repetitive, dry practice like I know a lot of us are all too familiar with.

So in our Expansive Creativity framework, for example, the way we teach improv at Musical U, we have a part of the framework called playgrounds, literally playgrounds, because it’s all about playing and having fun and experimenting.

Now, there is nobody better known for making improv into a fun game than my guest today, Jeffrey Agrell. I’ll introduce him a bit in the interview, so I won’t do it here. We’ll jump straight in, and then I’ll be back again at the end.

A couple of things to say, though. Jeffrey’s books are amazing. You’ll hear a little bit about them in the interview. And I’m going to put a link in the live chat now, and I’ll put it in the show notes, too, so that you can learn more about him and check out those books. They are highly recommended.

And the other thing I wanted to say is just Jeffrey has this lovely, low-key, laid-back manner, and I wouldn’t want that to make you miss the fact that he says some really profound stuff in this interview.

So, so don’t let his demeanor diminish the impact of what he says. If you pay attention and you really listen to what he’s saying, it could have a really significant impact on the way you approach music, learning, improv, creativity going forwards. So I hope you’ll enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Here we go.

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Christopher: Welcome back to the show. I’m joined today by Jeffrey Agrell, author of “Improvisation games for classical musicians”, as well as a whole host of other books to help musicians learn to improvise in a fun and easy way.

Jeffrey, welcome to the show.

Jeffrey: I’m delighted to be back. Always a pleasure.

Christopher: I’d love to begin with a question that’s near and dear to my heart, which is: what does musicality mean to you?

Jeffrey: Musicality, I think that is when you start getting beyond the mechanical, maybe beyond the printed page. Musicality is when you get to put some “you” into it. What traditional music has us do in the process of learning from books, so to say, is we do, it’s very easy to fall into being mechanical about things and saying, there’s no wiggle room. It has to be exactly this way, no other way. And it kind of squeezes out you or what you might bring to it.

I’m a little weird, as you know, and that I think that it would be a much better idea to have players be the partners of the composers rather than the slaves of the composers, and that the composers would loosen up their egos a little bit and say, yeah, treat what I write as a beginning, not as an end.

We’ve really kind of fallen into that, uh, lately, lately being the last 150 years. So musicality, to me, would be when you have a little more freedom to make the best piece you can of any piece of music. And that could be with notation, without notation, but make something that has some heart in it, that has some heart and soul and breathes a little bit, lets you breathe musically and, and really the way music is supposed to be, which is enjoy the process of making music.

Christopher: I love it. And I’m sure our audience is wondering, how did you find this perspective on musicality? How did you come to be the man known for improv games? What’s your own background in music?

Jeffrey: I asked somebody once how they were so good at fixing up their house, they did the plumbing and electricity. I said, how did you learn to do that? So while she answered, I did everything wrong once or more.

I often introduce myself as a “recovering classical musician”. That’s the way I start and the way I was for a very long time. I came to it very late.

I wish I would have discovered Musical U when I was very young, but I I did classical, classical, classical for a long time. I think what saved me or what finally made, gave me an out was the fact that I also played guitar and dabbled with, you know, banjo and bass and mandolin and other things. I did all these things that were outside of the classical tradition as well.

And they kind of ran like two rivers. Have you ever seen that two rivers join and they don’t mix for a long time downstream. It’s kind of what happened.

I kind of had the classical thing. Of course, I was in a professional orchestra for 25 years, and that’s all you do. You do what they tell you to do.

And outside of that, I did all kinds of things. Jazz, guitar and singing and lots of writing and just everything that wasn’t all the things I taught myself and learned with other people and that were not written down.

And then finally, after so long doing only the classical part, only the same thing every day, I got so incredibly bored and that I finally decided to mix the two rivers, mix the classical and the oral, creative side. Terrifying!

At first, I was scared to death, but I was so bored, I just had to try. Well, one of my best character traits is I have a high tolerance for looking foolish. So I thought, well, give it a shot. What the hell? See what happens.

And so it was kind of a lifesaver in my musical life, in a way, I kept going, the classical is always there. You don’t give anything up. The literature is there. But now I could add to it this fact that I could, at a very late age in stage, have something to say myself. And that was, that changed everything.

Christopher: And you became known for a particular approach, which is to use games as the basis for learning to improvise and exploring things musically. Tell us a bit about that, because it’s not something many musicians are familiar with. It’s not like the standard approach to learning to improvise, but it’s a fascinating one.

Jeffrey: Well, I had to decide, what am I going to, what am I going to call this? Because at the time I had to make it up. I didn’t know what anybody else was doing, tried stuff and gave it a name. It was going to be improvising, but not jazz.

I played jazz and guitar, but I didn’t want to do that in horn, and I wanted to be able to bring that to classical musicians who haven’t been able to do that. Well, if you want to have any respect in the classical hierarchy and academia, where I was, you certainly don’t call anything games and you don’t describe anything as fun. That’s the f-word in classical music, is “fun”.

Do not say that. It’s serious. This has got to be serious.

Sorry, I’m old. I get to be sarcastic sometimes!

So I decided to forfeit all academic respect and call it something that was, for want of a better word, fun, something you want to do. The thing is that if it’s fun, I mean, what classical music thinks of is the opposite of fun is serious. And serious means just gritting your teeth and enduring the endless boring exercises and everything else and not questioning tradition, not questioning, why are we doing this? And it’s just, God, I hate this.

This same thing every day. And I thought, okay, I’m just not going to worry about that because it’s being paid to teach horn in the classical way so I could do this.

It was all on the side, so I was free to be as crazy as I wanted to be, which was nice. So I said, let’s. Because if it’s a game, it’s going to be fun.

If it’s fun, you want to do more of it. It’s motivating. And if you do more of it, you get better at it.

And that’s the amazing thing. I mean, you don’t have to grit your teeth anymore and you get to use your own imagination and your own ideas. All of these games can be changed or tweaked or you can use them again.

They’re all just starting points from which you can build your own music. And so I guess that’s why I went straight to “games” instead of calling it drills, long boring drills or, you know, the usual exercises.

Sorry, sarcasm again. But there you are.

Christopher: Wonderful. And you’ve been incredibly prolific creating these games. And I know that some people hearing about this will be a little bit confused because improv is so often treated as a jazz thing or a blues thing or it’s taught in a very instrument specific way. Like here are your fretboard patterns for improvising on guitar.

Obviously, the vast majority of what you’ve done is available for any instrument, any style, and obviously particularly appealing to the classical world where it’s otherwise completely absent a lot of the time. But I wonder if you could give people a taste of what one or two of these games might be so that they can understand what we’re talking about here.

Jeffrey: Well, you can take any element of what we do in classical, you can break it down. In the book. I divide the book into different approaches. There are many ways you could do it.

There are rhythm games and melody games, harmony games, depiction games. In volume two, I put in even movement games. So I just wanted to give everybody a chance without notation, no notation in there, to create something and feel like they have permission, feel like they have the latitude to create.

All of us are worried that we don’t have permission to make something new. We’ve been discouraged in that, or not told about it, not trained about it at all from the very beginning.

And a simple game might be what we’re doing today in the masterclass, going to be on rhythm.

So I’m going to do a bunch of rhythm games. And they’re. A simple rhythm game would be take a piece you already know, you can read it and change all the rhythms.

All you’re doing is… Creativity is simply do something different. Change one thing. You don’t have to change everything.

Take a tune that’s already there. Try and take “Mary had a little lamb”, or any tune you know, play it as a swing tune, play it as… Play your favorite concerto as a theme from a horror movie. Just do something different to it.

And you know, you can start small. It’s terrifying if you say “I don’t know what to play”. Well, just do one thing different, put a different meter on it.

And of course you’re going to get a lot of things that sound silly or make you laugh or something else. Good! Because fear and laughter can’t exist at the same time.

One thing I found out with improv is that I had a very pronounced performance anxiety when I do classical, because you got to be perfect. I was associate first horn. You’re supposed to be perfect all the time, and the horn is not a perfect instrument, but you’re supposed to be perfect anyway all the time.

It’s very nervous work, very stressful. But I am. When I do, I do a one or two hour improv concert where I have no idea what I’m going to play, I am… I’m not only calm, I’m just laughing and having fun the whole time. I’m not worried at all.

So I love the feel. I could just do it all night. In classical, I do a recital, I go, boy, I’m glad that’s over.

Survived some more high dose of perfection. And it’s not like we’re trying to make mistakes, but we’re allowing ourselves to investigate and experiment and see what happens.

And when you do that, you discover new things. Your heart opens up, your musical world opens up. And, I mean, if traditional music education did what they were supposed to, which is allowing us entrance into this magic world of creation, there would be no need for me or for Musical U or anything else.

But thank goodness Musical U is there. And I got something to say, finally. And then we can give other people this access to this wonderful feeling that you can do something, and it could be any kind of simple game. Take “Mary had a little lamb”, see how many different times you can play it differently.

I did that with a bunch of horn players once, and we’re up there 60 or 70 different ways of doing it. Everything counts. You know, do it again in minor. Okay, do it again as a tango. Do it again in the Phrygian scale. Do it again, you know, twice as fast. Or, you know, just do something different.

And when you get used to it, the only, the biggest danger about starting to be creative in there is you like it so much you say, “I don’t know if I can go back and play this classical stuff the same way 400 more times”!

But anyway, on your own, at least you can get back to the joy that music originally had before we got locked into this system of everything has to be only one way, that sort of thing.

Christopher: Tremendous. And I love your books, in part because I think they strike that perfect balance between providing a bit of structure that gives people kind of a safe zone to play in, while also just providing endless prompts for that creativity and making it very easy for people to dip their toe in and even get involved.

You have a book all about partner games, right, where you’re going back and forth with another musician, something that I know would be terrifying to people who’ve never explored this kind of approach, but is very natural, I think, when it’s framed as a game.

Jeffrey: Yeah, that’s the idea. That’s the whole idea, yeah.

Christopher: Wonderful. Well, we’re clearly huge fans of your approach here at Musical U, Jeffrey, and you were in with our Next Level members this week, giving them one to one coaching, and I’ve just heard glowing reports. It really has had a major impact in them, and many of them are already au fait with improv and comfortable with that. So that was really wonderful to see.

We’re here today, as you mentioned, for our members masterclass, and I can already see people knocking on the door waiting to get in, so we’ll wrap things up there.

But thank you very much for joining us on the show today, and I’m excited to hear from you shortly in our members masterclass.

Jeffrey: All right. Can’t wait.

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Christopher: Awesome. Wasn’t that a really wonderful take on improv and creativity and what it’s really all about? I love when he talked at the end there about opening up access to that wonderful world of creative music making. Definitely made me laugh when he said, “one of my best character traits is I have a very high tolerance for looking foolish”.

I think that’s something we could all learn to do a bit more of. And his creativity definition, he said, “creativity just means do something different”. How beautifully simple is that? Wow.

I think of all of it, though, my favourite line was, “if it makes you laugh, good, because fear and laughter can’t exist at the same time”. That is a wonderful guiding principle for anything to do with improv and creativity and collaboration in music, I think.

I really like that he shared a few ideas for what you could try right now to experience this kind of game based improv, even without seeing the masterclass or getting his books yet.

That idea of taking something you know, and just experimenting with all kinds of different variations on how to play it. You know, the masterclass was focused on rhythm games in particular, and that can be a great gateway in where you’re playing the same note pitches, but you’re playing all kinds of combinations and variations with the rhythm.

What we’ve found is that not only is that great for improvisation practice, but it’s actually a really powerful tool in the superlearning toolkit too.

So if you’ve studied any of our superlearning material here at Musical U, just know that adding that kind of creative variation in amongst your contextual interference can be huge. It really accelerates both how quickly you learn new music and how deeply you get to know it.

So if you’re a member of Musical U, you’ll find that full masterclass replay waiting for you inside the members site now, which is exciting.

And if not, I’m going to be back tomorrow with a little excerpt from that masterclass, which I think you’re going to really enjoy.

Also coming up this week, we’ll have our first Coaches Corner episode, which is where I get together with our Next Level coaches, and I basically just pick their brains on what’s been interesting or useful coming out in their coaching each week.

And I had this really fascinating question over on our YouTube channel recently that I thought was worth digging into. So I think I’m going to do an episode tackling that one. It was improv related, in fact, but also just ear training, like really fundamental ear training, almost philosophy, I guess. Anyway, we’ll be digging into that later this week.

And we’ll also have our first live guest on the show, which is exciting, and I will leave that a surprise as to who it’s going to be.

All that coming up live this week. Thank you for joining me for this one, especially all of you who’ve been here live with me today. I’ll see you back again tomorrow!