Now this is another exercise that I got from my teacher, Hal Crook. Jazz is a tradition and it’s a long tradition at this point, over a hundred years. And everything builds on everything else. You must study as much of the tradition as possible. You want to learn the progression of the music, the development of the music, and how the different concepts and approaches and the fundamentals of music originated and developed over the years.

The most creative people in the world are those who spend most of their time studying and listening in addition to creating. They’re the most steeped in the tradition. They have the most resources to draw from and the deepest creative well spring. They’ve fed their creativity and that’s where a history play list comes in. Basically, you’re going to put together a play list of great recordings, great players from all the major periods of jazz. And you could break that up into a number of ways, ten-year or twenty-year increments, something along those lines.

You want to choose a recording from each, starting perhaps with the twenties. And when I did this, I did it with ten-year increments. You want to have a topic going into this. You could start with the twenties, thirties, forties, fifties etc. But you want to have a topic going into this that’s a part of your own practice routine or what you are working on currently, for example, swing feel. You want to choose a bunch of great recordings with swinging bands, swinging band leaders, drummers, rhythm sections, swinging soloists. And choose a recording from each of the ten-year increments and create a play list or a CD or a tape.

I’m going to date myself here a little bit because when I first did it, I used cassette tapes and then I moved on to CD’s and now I would do it with play lists on my computer or with an iPod. When you create this list, this recording, then you want to listen to it everyday. Focusing in on swing feel, that is your topic or whatever other topic –articulation, dynamics, thematic development etc. And you want to listen with the objective of understanding and hearing more detail about the topic you chose. And you want to listen to and watch the evolution and continuation of this topic through the years.

If you are working on swing feel, you want to really focus in on that. Say you picked Louis Armstrong and the Hot Fives back in the twenties, which was your first recording in your play list. So you want to listen to that and listen to the swing feel, the quality of the interaction, the quality of the lockup between the rhythm section and the soloist and how the different players used swing feel. Then you move on perhaps to the ‘30’s and Count Basie, and then in the ‘40’s to a Charlie Parker recording, and in the ‘50’s to a Miles Davis recording, and then the ‘60’s with perhaps John Coltrane and so on up to today. And you want to try to hear this development. What’s different as you move from Louis Armstrong to Count Basie? What’s different in the swing feel, what’s the same? What’s still part of that tradition, what is carried over? And I think that what you will find is quite amazing (it was to me), as a lot of the fundamentals, like swing feel, carry on.

I had this realization one day listening to Elvin Jones on drums—this this was the tune I had chosen for the ‘60’s. And there was a Count Basie recording that I had chosen for the ‘30’s with Papa Jo Jones on drums. I realized that what Elvin was playing was not far off. It was conceptually more developed and rhythmically more sophisticated and abstract. But the swing feel itself was basically carrying on part of that tradition, pulling things out of that tradition.

You want to learn to get this perspective on the tradition. This will teach you much about the development of jazz and give you a broader perspective on the art form. And the effect it had for me—it blew the doors open for the whole genre of jazz. At that point in my development I was really into the ‘60’s and late ‘50’s. I was really into that music and hadn’t really dug into the past too much. But this had the effect of blowing it open for me.

So now I enjoy the entire genre of music and things don’t really sound dated to me anymore, old or anything like that. I just enjoy listening to Louis Armstrong as much as I enjoy listening to Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman or John Coltrane. It blew the doors open for me for the entire tradition. This history play list idea is an extremely powerful tool and method to focus your listening and study the tradition as well.

Chris Punis is an active jazz musician in the northeast, an accomplished jazz educator and author of "The Monster Jazz Formula." For more information about his teaching methods and to receive your free lessons, "21 Great Ways To Become a Monster Jazz Musician," visit www.learnjazzfaster.com.