David S. Ware – HuffPost 8.29.11

Mike Ragogna: Do you have any advice for those people who have the ability to improvise and create in their heads, but don’t quite have the aptitude to play those sounds on their instruments?

David S. Ware: There’s really only one thing to do, and that’s practice. I had students like that who were hearing things in their heads that they just couldn’t play. I’m not saying that everyone is gonna be great at it, but I know it happens. The way I explained it to my students is that they were “ahead of themselves” musically, because you have to learn the instrument first. When you pick up your instrument every day, you have to do a little bit of technical practice and you need to practice creating. You have to be practicing both. Because it takes a lifetime, and even then you’re still not through learning. For example, after the first couple of years of me playing saxophone, everybody saw that I was serious about it, so I started taking private lessons. In those lessons, I was going through loads of classical saxophone books where every week I was getting a new lesson and practicing for an entire week. And right away, he knew whether I had practiced or not. You need to go through that, sort of, meticulous work because that’s the way your brain learns how to play. At the same time, you have to take the time each day to practice improvisation – listening to records or reading books. You learn how the music flows through you.

MR: Would that also be the advice that you would give to new artists pursuing this as a career?

DSW: Absolutely. Particularly, now. We now live in a time where there are so many distractions for the younger generation. We have all these iPods and iPhones and everything to distract us, that when young people take up a musical instrument, they need to realize that studying an instrument takes a lot of focus and grounding – they need to know how much work and focus is takes to make real progress. You’ll find pretty quickly that the ones who don’t want to be full time musicians will lose focus and interest fairly quickly.

MR: Yeah. But what kind of advice would you give to those artists who know that they would like to do this professionally, but find the landscape of the music business to be very confusing right now?

DSW: I can only speak from my experience, but I would say that you have to let music be your focus and guide you. Granted, it was a very different industry when I started in the ’60s. Music focused me. It focused me to the point that it was all I could do. I didn’t do anything else. That’s how much I loved it and wanted to do it.