Getting Through Your First Jazz Guitar Performance

Recently, a visitor to my site asked me the following question:

“My Instructor wants me to sit in with a group of guys at small gig. I don’t think i’m ready for this because I still make too many mistakes.  I respect your wisdom so what do you think?”

I’ve decided to answer this question publicly for the benefit of everyone here.

So here’s the deal.

Every player goes through this at some point . It’s a typical scenario. You’ve just gotten to the point where you can play a few songs and licks.  Mostly you’ve been playing and practicing at home or with a couple friends that are about at your level. Maybe you jam for little while with your guitar teacher. But for the most part you’re playing and practicing at home with jam tracks.

Now someone asks you to sit in at a gig or a jam session even though you’re not feeling really comfortable with the quality of your playing.  So what do you do?

The answer is simple.  You sit in at the gig or jam session anyway. Even though you feel that you’re not ready.  How? Why?  Keep reading:

1. Pushing past the Fear and Getting out of Your Comfort Zone is Essential to Your Development as a Jazz Guitarist

I remember one of the first times I made the decision to go to a jam session.  I had been practicing one or two songs for a while and thought I was pretty comfortable with the songs but I hadn’t performed them in front of anybody.  It was pretty much Jamey Aebersold CDs and me at home. I was pretty sure I knew the songs.  Yet, I still hesitated to go to the session.  Why was I hesitating?

So, I decided to sit down and take some time to really think about what was holding me back and I realized the following: I was worried that 1) I was going to make embarrassing mistakes at the session and 2) because of that people would think that I was a poor guitar player.  The bottom line was that fear was holding me back.

Then, I remembered an excellent book that I had purchased a long time ago called: “Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway” by Susan Jeffers.  In chapter 2 of the book she talks about certain truths about fear. I’ll summarize what she says about it:

Fear of an unfamiliar situation will never totally go away as long as your growing and challenging yourself.

And the only real way to reduce the fear, nervousness, anxiety or whatever you want to call it….is to get out there and DO IT ANYWAY.

You have to push through the fear because that’s a whole lot better than continuing to live with a feeling of helplessness….

So for us jazz guitar players this means preparing as much as we can but after a reasonable amount of preparation, we participate in jam sessions, gigs, and other opportunities to play even when we feel that we aren’t “ready” because we know that these experiences will help us to grow and learn. We even play sometimes when we don’t even fully know certain songs because we are improvisers and sometimes the situation calls for us to do this.

We believe that every time we make a conscious decision to push forward despite being 100% comfortable or not knowing exactly what’s going to happen, we are building a track record of success so that when we face similar challenging situations in the future we can always look back and say, “Hey this gig might be a little more challenging than the last one but I’ve done challenging gigs before so I believe that I can make through this one successfully.” We understand that pushing through the fear is much better than the alternative which is to avoid gigs and playing situations because deep down inside were worried about what others will think about how we play.

So, to continue the story, after I read a few pages of the book and really thought about what what my goals were, the decision was easy.  Nothing was going to stop me. I indeed went to that jam session and played the one or two songs that I knew.  Everything went pretty smoothly.   But there was more of a challenge in store for me because when I finished playing one of the songs I knew, the leader of the band asked me to stay on and play a tune called, “My Romance”.

I had never even heard of this song before. I said, “I don’t know this tune”. He said, “That’s ok, just play anyway”. Well, I didn’t really have much time to worry about what was going to happen. I mean what was I going to do?  Get off the stage and say no I can’t do it!???  So, I just looked at the chart over the piano player’s shoulder to see what key the song was in and when it came time for my solo, I just played from the heart and relied on my ear.  And I tell  you what, the people in the audience clapped when I was done!

Did I play some wrong notes and make mistakes? YES. But so what, I accomplished my goal. I faced the fear and played the songs I knew and even a song that I had never heard before. And I made out alive. I didn’t have a heart attack or pass out or anything like that.  And what a great feeling that was!

That experience taught me a lot about what you can really accomplish by pushing through all the fear by following your heart and just doing it anyway.  This takes me to the next point which is that:

2. Music is Meant to be Shared

It really is.  I mean, if we are calling ourselves jazz guitarists, then we need to do what we do which is play jazz guitar and share that music with other people to the greatest extent that we can.  Think about why you decided to learn to play guitar in the first place.  Did you have the goal of being the best jazz guitar player who plays at home or with his teacher? Of course not!  For most of us, our goal was to get to the point where we can play gigs…not for the money or to prove that we’re better than somebody else, but to SHARE our love and passion for this music with other people.

Playing jazz guitar from the standpoint of what the audience is thinking about you or what the other musicians think about your playing is selfish and misguided.

We should be focusing on and constantly asking ourselves the following question: What music do I have to share with these people and how can touch them with my music in some way? This should be the focus.  Now realistically, it’s not always easy to forget about what other people think but that should not be your focus.

When you let go of the ego and instead focus on sharing and communicating the music that you have in you, believe me you will really surprise yourself and play better than you ever expected.

3. Learn how to make Lemonade out of Lemons

Like I said before, you can expect to make some mistakes when performing. Even the pros make mistakes.  But it’s how you handle these mistakes in real-time, that determines how the listener perceives them.  So, for example say for instance you hit some wrong notes when performing.  Here are the some possible reactions…

…you can stop playing and smash your guitar to pieces

…you can whine and moan about how much you suck at playing guitar

…you can make some comment like, “Whoops” or “Sorry” or “Aahh”.

…you can say nothing but instead react by making some ugly face or any combination of the above…

All these reactions tell everybody that 1) you made a mistake and 2) you can’t handle the fact that you made a mistake which 3) makes the experience for everyone else less enjoyable.

So, it’s not necessarily bad that you made the mistake but it’s much worse to make such a big deal about it. After all, if you keep telling people how much you suck or keep saying “sorry” or keep making faces every time, they WILL believe that you suck and are a sorry player or that you’re really good at making ugly faces… And they’ll believe these things a lot sooner than if you had never reacted to the mistake at all.

So, here’s what I try to do when I make a mistake or a “lemon” when performing.  I try to make lemonade out of the that lemon by combining 3 techniques:

First, you must not make a face or react in anyway that makes it obvious to others that you made a mistake. Understand that you can have no way of knowing whether people noticed your mistake. It’s most likely that they did not. Especially when it comes to just regular non-musician audience members. The vast majority of audience members will have no clue that you made a mistake unless you let them know in some way.

Second, you must keep playing and maintain whatever flow that have going. You should make sure that the mistake does not break your momentum.  Just remember to keep going and if you were improvising and playing a melodic idea just try to stay with that idea until another idea comes along.

Finally, if the mistake would be obvious to everybody who heard it, then you can try to act like you intended to make the mistake. For example, you can keep repeating the wrong note but in a rhythmically hip way so that it sounds like you’re making a little lick or phrase out of the wrong note or set of wrong notes.  The key is to make it sound like you’re doing all of this on purpose.  Believe me, depending on how you execute this, most of the audience members and even your fellow musicians will think that you are doing this on purpose because after all why would someone keep on repeating a set of wrong notes if he or she weren’t doing it on purpose!

So, in closing, just try to focus on the music and communicating that music to your audience.  Just remembering that take you a long way.  I hope these tips help open some things up for you and help you take you playing to the next level!

Until next time,

Leon