THIS WILL HELP THOSE THAT WANT TO BE HELPED:
body movement is an integral part of feeling and playing in rhythm. dancing on a dance floor is not required, but having some part or parts of your body "dance" to the music is. It's something i just can't help doing when listening or playing something rhythmic..but it isn't necessarily natural to everyone, whether it's due to lacking a rhythmic sensibility or being inhibited or cultural I don't know. In any case it will help one's rhythmic feel if they loosen up and employ any part of the body in the process.

"Time" is another thing. Many pianists that have great "feel" or "swing" still lose their sense of "time" when they work a lot of steady solo cocktail piano gigs, and they don't realize it's happening to them..but when they try to play with others it is a mess. The best remedy for this is to practice with drum and/or drum/bass kbd trax. Since I started using arranger kbds 6 yrs ago, my time when I go out to sit in and just sing or play sax, with no practice, is light years better than when I used to practice and gig a lot. My natural time has become integrated with the akb
time, yet there is nothing "mechanical" or "robotic" in it,
which many mistakenly feel will happen when you play
with "machines".

Conversely, I have found that musicians who are uncomfortable when sitting in with me when i'm solo on the akb, and can't find the groove, blame it on "having to play with a machine" when the truth is, the "machine" just exposes their inherent time problems. with a band the other players are always adjusting so they don't realize this. The musicians I know who have great time or want to improve their time always enjoy sitting in with me on akb, and even though they may sometimes waver
from the perfect time of the akb, their open ears bring
them back.

"hearing yourself" is something that sounds easy and
self-evident,but is one of the hardest things to master, and is the hallmark of the best musicians. But when you really learn to do it, it will change your life, if you can
survive the depression of the realization of what you
sounded like before you developed that skill.

One helpful hint to achieve self-hearing that is magic, not only for time, for phrasing ,for coherent ideas, but for timbre and pitch is this: While you play and/or sing, imagine yourself playing and/or singing the next phrase
before you actually execute it. Of course you will overlap, and you will lose concentration until you get it down. Try
this to prove it to yourself: Record yourself playing and/or
singing a familiar tune, and improvise on it for a chorus
or two. Do this in you usual intuitive fashion. Then record
the same tune while pre-imagining yourself playing
and/or singing each phrase as you play.

Take 2 aspirin and call me in the morning



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Miami Mo