The Doug Largent Trio

I’m sorry to see The Standard restaurant in Chapel Hill close their doors- we enjoyed playing there tremendously! Good luck in the future, Nick Williams.

For a few weeks, I have been stuck between two different practicing concepts. One philosophy is that you should practice one thing until you can play it quickly and flawlessly.

The other way of doing it is to practice a wide variety of things, without necessarily having the specific goal of mastering each thing.

I believe both ideas have their benefits, so I am alternating weeks between speed week and general week.

Right now, speed week is kicking my butt but I can definitely tell that practicing one particular thing until I can play it very fast is hoping my playing overall.

I played a 5-hour duo gig last night with Ben Palmer. Just me on organ and Ben on guitar. It turned out to be a great time, and I learned a lot about the psychology of gigging.

It was amazing to me what was going through my mind at first!
1. Stress about driving to the gig.
2. Was I going to be hungry?
3. People were complaining about our music.
4. How were we going to get through a 5-hour gig with just guitar and organ? Do I know enough songs?
5. Is my timing terrible today/are my fingers clumsy?
6. Is it going to be okay playing with Ben and no drummer?

For about the first three hours, my mind was full of worries. Then suddenly, as if on cue, I calmed down. I stopped worrying and got into the music. My hands were warmed up, and I started to play to the best of my ability.

It’s nice to know that it takes 3 hours to fully settle into playing music. Too bad most of my gigs are only three hours long!

My goal is to work on decreasing my worry/warm up time.

When someone gave me a copy of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I expected a book version of a cheesy TV late-night infomercial. I was very wrong, and the book ended up changing the way I think about several things.

The most important lesson I took from the book is the idea of the Abundance Mindset. Very roughly, it is the idea that there is plenty (jobs, food, etc.) for everyone. In fact, we should be thankful for the abundance we already have.

I like to relate this mindset to finding musical gigs. Truth is, there are plenty of gigs to go around for every musician– at least the ones who are serious about finding them.

Let’s take my jazz organ trio for example. Let’s assume that I am willing to drive anywhere in NC to play a gig. Also, let’s assume that for every wealthy person in the top 1% income bracket, there will be at least one occasion a year where they want to throw a formal party and hire a decent jazz group (which would pay, let’s say, $1200 for a trio).

Now, let’s postulate that there are 500 different jazz groups who look and sound professional across the state who want to share these gigs. Let’s do the math:

The population of NC (9.752million) * the top 1% (.01) / the number of professional jazz groups pursuing gigs (500) = 195 GIGS A YEAR for each of these jazz groups.

Multiply by $1200, and divide by the number of musicians in my group (3), and each musician would earn $78,000 a year playing jazz.

Are these calculations realistic? I have no idea. It could be that there are only 25 jazz groups willing to do the work to find these gigs. It could be that many of the potential gigs would fall on the same day, so we couldn’t do them all at once. But I like how the math helps me think in terms of abundance rather than scarcity.

Jazz educator Steve Nixon wrote this excellent article on how to play fast tempos. I stumbled across his excellent website as I was trying to research practice methods for how to play faster.

In point #7, Steve says that he learned that to be able to play fast, your fingers need to be used to the feeling of playing fast. That was a light bulb moment for me! I have been practicing entire songs, pushing the tempo to my limit, but still that limit is kinda slow for gigging.

For the past couple of days, I have been breaking down the elements of my practice routine, and making sure I can play each 1- or 2- measure exercise at full tempo before I move on.

Progress has been slow so far; I might spend half an hour or 45 minutes on a single arpeggio or turn. But it’s fun to finally see my fingers move fast!

I recently met alto saxophonist John Palowitch at the Blue Note Grill Jam Session in Durham.

He’s a great young saxophonist who leads a parallel life as a PhD student in mathematics at UNC. I feel like John and I have a lot in common in terms of musical interest. Hanging out and playing with him is inspiring to me- rarely have I ever met someone with such intelligence and discipline.

John substitutes on some Doug Largent Trio gigs when Brad is unavailable. He will be playing on 11/21 and 11/22 with me and Dan Davis at the West End Wine Bar this week. Come check him out!

My friend Ralph DeMasi sent me this short video of me, Brad Maiani and Tyler Leak from our first gig at West End Wine Bar of Chapel Hill.

It’s a lot of fun being a full-time musician! I make a living doing what I love.

A huge part of being successful in music is to make a commitment to practicing music every day. For me, it seems very effective to practice for three hours a day- ideally broken up into 30-minute chunks with about 10 minutes rest between each.

My jazz professor Dr. Ira Wiggins had a saying that “Skip one day of practicing, and only you will know. Skip two days, and other musicians will know. Skip three days, and the whole audience will know.” With that in mind, I’m loathe to skip a day of practicing because I always want to play my best.

One of the catches of being your own boss is that you must be self-motivated. Even on rough days when you haven’t had much sleep, it’s still necessary to sit and practice for three hours. Sometimes that’s very painful!

And yet I feel like practicing on those tough days builds character and self-esteem. I tend to get more out of a practice session when I have to work through the fog, because I’m exercising my sense of determination.

Have you ever woken up in the morning feeling joyful, only to find that a few seconds later your mind is flooded with dreaded thoughts such as “Oh yeah, I have an appointment for a root canal at 9am!” or “Oh yeah, my car blew up last night.” It’s as if your natural state is happiness and then thoughts, which are created by your mind, swoop in and ruin everything. Why do our hearts have to be filled with dread, when we could just enjoy the moment? (If we insist on dreading something, why not just dread it for the very short time that it actually hurts?)

Similarly, when I’m playing music, the first few moments of a show are so fun and feel wonderful! Then quickly my mind starts to come up with reasons why the gig is not ideal- maybe because I play a wrong note. If a wrong note lasts only for a second or two, why does it cast a pallor over an entire gig? Why isn’t it possible to just say “Darn!” and forget about it and move on?

If I come home from a gig and Nancy asks me how it went, I usually judge the gig on how well I performed- if I played some wrong notes, then everything seems ruined.

But that doesn’t make sense: does it really matter whether one musician messed up a few notes? Didn’t people still have a great time? As a human, don’t I deserve the right to be imperfect and be forgiven for it? Why can’t the happiness of those first few notes last forever?