I'm often asked by musicians about the learning process.

They want to
develop a style of their own; find their own creative path. There's a myth to
the effect that it's not good to copy other artists, because supposedly if you
do that you're not being yourself. But I would like to blow that myth,
because it puts a block in the way of the learning process. The basis of
learning your own style is learning how to copy other people. When you
have learned to duplicate something exactly, you begin to get a feeling of
how to apply it in the different contexts.

Before you can reach a creative goal, you have to evolve a way to do it. What
usually happens is that you learn a bit of technique, because you hear
something that you like and want to copy. When you knowingly gather bits
and pieces of technique and learn how to apply them, you immediately have
an ability to express something that's your own.

Theoretically, you could develop your technique out of the clear blue sky.
But that's not the way it works in real life. If you are a pianist, you're
dealing with an instrument that has a relatively long history. There’s a body
of knowledge that has been developed by many, many pianists and
composers, that is documented in written music and on recordings. If you
try to learn to play the piano disregarding that body of knowledge, you're
going to have to go through a very long, slow process. You're likely to
stumble down a lot of blind alleys before you reach the goal of being able to
express yourself.

But if you start by copying what other people have done, you can get the
idea of how piano technique has been developed and applied. You’ll reach
the point where you can begin to evolve technique from your own
viewpoint. And your personal approach as it evolves will stem from a good
basic framework, which takes the history of piano technique into account.

The myth is that you mustn't ever copy anybody; that you have to be an
individual. But in fact, every musician goes through an apprenticeship. It
might be formal study with an established teacher, or it might be informally
picking up ideas from other musicians. In either case, the student learns by
copying what the more experienced player is doing. As he goes on, he will
recognize this process, and he will be drawn to the musicians whose playing
he likes. He will seek to study with them, or at least to listen to the
recordings they have made and learn to duplicate their music. This is a very
natural process.
You have to find the right gradient; find the music that offers the proper
level of challenge and difficulty for the abilities that you have. Some of the
first music that I was drawn to was the music of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie
Parker. But at the beginning, I didn't have the desire to copy it, because it
was too difficult for me. Instead, my father showed me some popular songs
that he’d written out on music paper, that where at a gradient that I could
play.

When I started being able to move my fingers around, I got into copying
Horace Silver's music. I got all the records Horace had out at the time, and
first I copied the melody lines, because they were clear and simple, and they
were repeated. I gradually got to where I could copy whole four- and eight-
bar phrases after hearing them once.

When I was able to copy melody lines, I started on Horace’s solos, which
were a bit more difficult. But I started with easy ones and worked up to the
harder ones, until I had copied virtually a whole album of notes—horn riffs,
solos, bass lines, everything. And that led to a point where I confronted
copying Charlie Parker tunes, and then Charlie Parker solos, and then John
Coltrane tunes and John Coltrane solos. By that time I had done so much
copying of this stuff, and applying it in a little trio that I had, that I was able
to express my own ideas a lot better.

Later on I started believing the myth, and I fell into the trap of trying not to
use any of what I had learned through copying, because it always reminded
me of where I learned it from. I tried to play things that I didn't know
about, so that I would be original. That was one of the craziest things I have
ever gotten into. It was good in that it forced me into an area of discovering
new things, but it was bad in that I wasn't allowing myself to make use of
the abilities I had developed by copying.

There are only 12 notes in the scale, and people tend to like similar things;
so some of what you play is bound to sound similar, unless you have fallen
into the trap of trying to avoid that. Some musicians develop a style of their
own by taking one device and using it over and over in a lot of different
ways, until it becomes identified with them. When McCoy Tyner was
playing with Coltrane, he developed a harmonic approach that involved
building chords on the interval of a fourth. It had a sound that was new to
jazz, although Bartok had been doing the same thing in classical music. But
McCoy made fourth-chords his own, and after a while, if you played a
fourth-chord in jazz, you sounded like McCoy Tyner.

But who owns a fourth-chord? Nobody. Once you have learned McCoy’s
technique, you're in a position to evolve your own approach, to work toward
your own creative goals. It's not so important what kind of melody or
harmony or rhythm you use, or what its historical background might be.
What's important is what you do with it, how you communicate your
feelings to the people that you are playing to. Trying to avoid sounding like
anybody else is like a shoemaker trying to make a shoe that has nothing to
do with the shape of the foot. All music comes from the same basic
melodies and harmonies and rhythms, and you have to learn what those
materials are before you can use them to create anything new.

Next issue I will be talking about the myth of improvisation, and how trying
to do something new every time you play a solo can get you into the same
kind of trap as trying not to use what you have learned. You will find that
copying is important in improvisation, too, because in order to evolve your
own style, you have to be able to duplicate yourself. You have to have
developed the skills to understand what you just played, in order to play it
again.