I believe very strongly in your approach, bruno...

I think that getting ‘into’ anything is best achieved by osmosis, not book learning. Sure, you can read transcription after transcription of different Bird solos, or read the scores of Beatles arrangements, and yes, with diligence you can play them note for note.

But to capture the ‘soul’ of what you’re trying to achieve, nothing beats immersion, up to your eyeballs, for as long as it takes! Throw away the books, forget about analyzing anything, just close your eyes and let it wash over you for hours, days, weeks. What your mind is doing while you do this is it is building a filter... Instinctively you know whether what you play is idiomatic, is a good representation of the ‘soul’ of what you are trying to do. And that is SO much more useful than to be able to trot out a perfect reproduction of Giant Steps or whatever, but without any true understanding of the reason WHY you are playing the notes..!

I use this method for so much stuff, from getting my head around a novel musical style, say zydeco, or township, or enka, or trying to play more like a guitarist, or an oboist or a cuica player! If you let it wash over you long enough, you build an internal sense for when you get it right, and much more importantly when you get it WRONG! After all, there’s only so much you can do with a keyboard to nail a style or instrument that isn’t a keyboard. But there are a million things you can do wrong, and if your internal filter isn’t set yet, you don’t know it....

Chord voicings no guitarist could play, lines longer than a flautist could breathe through, notes well outside the range of a tenor sax, rhythms no Cuban conga player would play, playing the bass on the ‘one’ in a one drop reggae tune... These are all realism killing things, but you don’t learn them from a book or transcription.

Let that warm bath of musical knowledge wash over you, sink into your skin, permeate your soul, and soon enough you’ll recognize them the minute you play them and note to NEVER play them again! After all, perhaps that’s the goal... Not to learn what to play - but to know instinctively what NOT to play!