I can understand their pain: so much searching led to something they love, and then people like me say, “get off my lawn with that horrible noise!” To them, I live in the past and spurn their hard-earned “advances” in music.
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Defining a genre in a forum post is going to end up short changing sub genres or the whole thing itself. For example, I’ve never been into punk rock (I don’t dislike it either), but I’d summarize that as “Music with aggressive vocals/lyrics with most songs at a fast tempo and guitars that mainly play power chords and the bass mainly follows the guitar. Also, raw production is good and doing things are widely popular is bad”. I’m sure if that were broadcast to the entire world I’d have just upset millions of people, while others might shrug and go “yeah, that’s punk rock”.
Jazz to me is music that is based on 7th chords (instead of triads), with frequent chromatic elements (chord subs or secondary dominants) and frequent modulation. There’s heavy emphasis on improvisation. Sometimes this means we’ll hear people make little flubs where we’d less likely hear that in music that’s more “worked out”. Other times what we hear aren’t mistakes at all but highly refined harmonic sense. It’s frequent for the improvisor to “hear” chords that aren’t even being played by the band and weave those into the line. That could be another example of chord substitutions. Speaking of “lines”, that’s a huge part of jazz that we don’t get as much of in other genres (blues/rock) as those are more “lick” based.
@WhammyStarScream I thought I read something you said about it being similar to a baby babbling trying to get out the things that are inside them. I can’t find it anymore to quote you so I could have imagined it lol! At any rate I don’t think jazz improvisation is anything like that. Babies can’t express themselves because they don’t know the language yet. The best jazz improvisors are experts in their language. They’re telling their story like a great public speaker that follows bullet points rather than reading a pre-written verbatim speech. If they gave the same speech again, it would have similar points but it would be told completely differently. Lastly, like most respectable genres, it’s more than a genre → it’s a way of life, to those who master it. It’s a highly expressive and beautifully complex (maybe the most complex???) genre.
I’ve had a complicated relationship with jazz. I’m horrible at it, not for lack of trying. I do really like dense chord melody guitar. I think it’s among the most beautiful sounds I’ve heard. Playing over changes, I suck at it. I know all the scales/modes/arpeggios and theory but I can’t call up stuff to be fresh, in the moment. The more I learn about it, I think I practiced it the wrong way. The greats probably do start with “licks” or maybe “phrases” and grow outward from there. My approach was more "Ok, I’m in this key for these bars and here’s the chords. So I need to target these notes and here’s all that’s available to me etc etc). Fail!
I think I got into it for the wrong reasons in general though lol! I heard so many great musicians talk about it as a genre you should get serious about if you were a serious musician. That was the only reason I ever gave it the time of day, I thought I was supposed to. There was rarely any spark or anything that gripped my heart the way I felt when I heard (insert 50+ classical pieces or 50+ classic rock tunes). So I definitely identify with a few of the posts that are very “meh” (or worse lol) about jazz. I’ve been immersed in it enough that it’s not at all off putting to me. I certainly enjoy but it’s not the first thing I’ll spin when I want to hear music that I like and music that speaks to me.
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I studied for two years at a music college which specialised in jazz. First year was all bebop, 2nd year the slightly later Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane era. Then modal styles, Afro Cuban styles etc etc
To me it’s just like a language. Bebop and fusion are worlds apart. Bebop is it’s own language, it’s own sound, common chord progressions and the very important task of stealing great lines from Charlie Parker.
I can’t think of “Jazz” as one thing. It’s like saying what is “rock”? It’s highly varied with different eras.
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Exactly. The great Charlie Parker said he already knew what he was going to play more or less before playing the tune .
He had lines that worked over the common progressions. You need to learn lines that work, be able to play them in all, or the most common keys.
Those great lines don’t come from nowhere. They are learned, practiced and rehearsed enough so that you hear them in your head, as soon as that chord progression hits.
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Here’s a copy-and-paste of an old Chick Corea article called “The Myth of Improvisation”. Pertinent stuff.
Myths, Part II: The Myth Of Improvisation
I was talking last issue about how the process of learning depends on copying what other people have done. There’s a myth to the effect that you should try to not sound like anybody else, but this can be very destructive because it can keep you from using what you’ve learned. There’s a similar myth about improvising, which is that if you know ahead of time what you’re going to play during a solo, you’re somehow cheating. I’d like to blow this myth, too, because it puts some severe limits on the soloist, limits that aren’t necessary at all.
I see improvisation as a decision by the improviser to not know what he or she is going to play. There’s always the possibility of a fresh idea occurring, even in a piece that the artist knows well; but if you interpret your own decision (to not know) too rigidly, you can get trapped by the myth. Trying too hard to be spontaneous, to always be creating something new, can hang up your ability to build an effective solo.
There’s a mysteriousness that surrounds improvisation. There seems to be some element present in the playing of the music that isn’t known about. But it’s really very simple. A musician learns his instrument and his art form, learns about melody and harmony and rhythm, and this gives him a certain knowledge of music. But for him to be able to control his music, he has to be able to imagine a piece: he has to be able to conceive how it will sound before he ever plays it. This is the only way he can make that piece of music be that piece of music, and not some other piece of music.
So with improvisation, he conceives of and controls some of the aspects of what he’s going to play before he starts, but other aspects he decides to not know about. In bebop, for example, there is a chord progression which follows, say, a 32-bar form. The chords are very predictable, so that’s not improvised; and the player knows that there are certain notes that fit into certain chords, and he knows he’ll use those notes, so that’s not improvised. What happens is that he takes certain fragments of melodic phrases and strings them together. And they’re usually fragments that he already knows. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be able to execute them on his instrument. Obviously, those fragments are what people started referring to as licks.
The thing I’ve discovered is that the better the improviser gets at what he’s doing, the more he’s able to predict the shape of the longer phrase. He can predict whole four or eight or sixteen bar units before he plays them. He just decides before he starts a particular chorus that he’s going to do such-and-such.
I’ve heard a story about trumpeter Fats Navarro that illustrates this. I’m not sure the story is true, but I could conceive of its being true, because I do this myself, and I see other musicians doing it. Navarro would write out a whole chorus of improvisation on, say, “I Got Rhythm.” He’d write it down, note for note. And then he would take that chorus of solo and improvise on it. He would string out five or ten choruses based not on the original melody but on the chorus he’d written out. It would be like writing his own tune. And that process put him very much in control of his art form.
Another way of looking at it is that the more capable a musician is, and the more logical he is about what he’s creating, the harder it is for him to not know what he’s going to
play. It starts to become an effort to improvise, unless he’s willing to admit to himself that improvising is a game he’s playing. He’ll get a strained expression on his face, and con*tort his body in all sorts of weird ways, because he’s trying to be spontaneous.
In Return To Forever, we find that as we perfect each piece, as we perfect the improvisation within it, the improvisation becomes more stable and predictable, and even more lyrical. It’s a thing that we acknowledge to be a good thingit’s not harmful. The myth is that you always have to play something different for it to be spontaneous. But that’s not true. What’s important is how ‘there’ you are when you’re playing; that’s really the point. Good music is just good music, whether it’s composed, or improvised, or whatever.
When a musician decides to not know what he’s going to play, it can still be very unspontaneous, for the same reasons That composed music is not always spontaneous. It simply has to do with whether the person who is playing has his whole attention and control of what he’s doing there, at the moment that he’s doing it. That’s what makes something spontaneous. How different it might be from the last rendition has nothing to do with it. There’s a myth that spontaneity has something to do with the musical phrase being different from anything that has come before. But newness is just viewing something from now, from the present moment. It doesn’t matter if the tree you’re looking at today is the same tree you looked at yesterday. If you’re looking at the tree right now, it’s a new experience. That’s what life is about.
It’s a constant problem for a classical pianist to make a piece come to life, when all the notes and all the expression marks are set in advance. The way it’s made to come to life, of course, is by the performer’s being right where he is at the moment that he’s there, playing the piece as though it had never been done before.
There are various decisions that the performer could make about how to improvise. Certain things can be set up in advance, while others are left open. You could have only a set rhythm, or a set chord pattern. You could also have to a large degree a set melody, which you would leave open to minor alterations. Or any or all of these things could be left open. The thing is, the less you decide in advance, the more effort it’s going to be to put a piece of music together. The more you decide to not know, the further away you put yourself from the truth, which is that on some level you really do know what you’re going to play.
When a musician really doesn’t know what he’s going to do next, the improvisation tends to be very erratic. You’ve got to go along a path once or twice or a hundred times before what you’re doing comes out as a flow. When a piece comes out as a flow, it’s because it’s being controlled by the musician. He knows about it. He’s done it before. It’s a question of relative degrees of composing. From a present moment, you can decide to compose the next note, or the next five notes, or the next phrase, or the next two phrases, or the whole piece. What makes a good improvisation isn’t lack of advance knowledge about the solo; it’s the way you put it all together at the moment you’re playing, no matter how often you might have played those notes before, that makes the difference.
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That’s all very well said. I know it’s thought by many that these players are just “pulling notes out of thin air”. That’s clearly not what’s happening (well maybe in some of the free jazz lol!) but that’s definitely what I was attempting to do, and failing quite badly at.
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Jazz has always felt just out of reach for me. As a listener and most definitely as a player. I wanted to learn to do it, and I tried my ass off, but I just couldn’t quite figure out how to make it work. I made the initial mistake of jumping right into it instead of working towards it. Part of that was because what I wanted to do was [BLANK] Jazz or Jazz [BLANK]. I loved Scofield and Scott Henderson and players like that. I always knew that the horn greats were far too much for me, so I had no ambition to do that, but I thought I could at least get a loose grip on what the guitar players did. Then there’s the Zappa style, which to me is still untouchable for my ear.
When I first got into Dream Theater, Petrucci would say that they started as a combination of Yes or Rush and Metallica. I wasn’t that into Yes and was completely over Metallica by that point. As much as I loved the playing in DT, I could never quite get into the vocals and a lot of times the keys. But the idea of that kind of combination was always intriguing. So, what I wanted to do was take that same concept but go further on both sides. Dream Theater likes Yes and Metallica?
How about Zappa and Pantera???
That to me was the perfect combination of my favorite things and what I ultimately wanted to do in music. The Pantera part was always there, but as much as I studied Zappa and attempted to learn to play jazz, there were far too many ingredients missing for me to do it.
Luckily, I found a band was close, while being entirely themselves. Even luckier was that I ended up joining that band for awhile, but it was after they were far beyond the self-indulgent of their earlier work, which to me, is absolute perfection. This song starts with a purely jazz intro, then morphs into something completely different.
And then there’s this kind of stuff, which eventually I realized was far more up my alley. I wasn’t looking for the combinations so much as I loved the free form assembly and flow of the ideas.
If I ever do make any new music, Ken (drummer) and McIvor (bassist) will be the rhythm section! They’ve both already agreed, lol
If you buy the special edition of “giant steps” by John Coltrane, you get to hear multiple takes of giant steps. His iconic solo, for the most part, is very similar in each take. It’s not identical of course, but it’s close enough that it shows a lot of it was worked out.
It’s still all improv, but it’s certainly not a case of something coming from nothing. Many people’s understanding of what improv means tends to be… misunderstood.
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By all means, they should pursue their muse……
….preferably out of earshot.
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In the infamous Quincy Jones interview with Vulture a few years back, Jones is even more direct about Giant Steps coming from somewhere in particular:
(in reference to Nicolas Slonimsky’s “Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns”):
Everything that Coltrane ever played was in that thesaurus. In fact, right near the front of that book, there’s a 12-tone example — it’s “Giant Steps.” Everyone thinks Coltrane wrote that, he didn’t. It’s Slonimsky. That book started all the jazz guys improvising in 12-tone. Coltrane carried that book around till the pages fell off.
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I like what Slonimsky himself, who seemed like quite a character, said about that book:
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Improv still requires some kind of guideline or constrains to work within.
It’s why the second Viennese’s school went from free atonality to Schoenberg’s 12 tone method in short order it was nearly impossible to create completely atonal music with out some kind of constraint. Humans always seek some kind of guiding principal or “center” to navigate back to and that ended up with atonal pieces trending toward some kind of key center.
Ironically in about 2 decades this atonality that was going to free the composer descended into some of the most rule bound music to the point a computer could compose these pieces as everything was serialized.
I’m of the opinion that sounds that are “foreign” to a listener come off as exciting and what is especially going to draw them in are going to be the most exotic elements of the music to that particular listener. This is why jazz constantly evolved styles, bebop, modal, post bop, fusion, smooth, etc. Anytime a style becomes too familiar aka people figure out the pattern and it becomes predictable (the inverse of blues which is almost built on the predictability of its harmonic and chordal progressions).
Someone who doesn’t listen to extreme metal is going to be wide eyed the first time they hear the drumming or the harsh vocals.
Someone who doesn’t listen to rap is going to have a hard time keeping up with the flurry of lyrics and the subtle intricacies of rhythm at play and how fast things are being said (I think this is a primary complaint of older audiences when it comes to rap) Conversely someone who primarily listens to rap may have a hard time with music that is harmonically or melodically complex. I think this is why you see a lot of diametrical opposition between the prog crowd and the rap crowd.
RIP DOOM
Someone who doesn’t listen to jazz isn’t going to be used to some of the extended harmonies that are used. (some of these used to be not so uncommon in pop/rock music in the post vocal jazz age but as we have drifted further from that era have become less common)
Someone who doesn’t listen to shoegaze/ambient/minimalist music isn’t going to be used to listening to music primarily for timbral and textural aspects.
A personal anecdote would be the first time I heard the solo in King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” is was jarring and frightening because it’s atonal it’s not what a listener accustomed to the pentatonic, major/minor, modal sound of rock guitar leads is expecting. It smacks you in the side of the head.
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He seemed to be really funny—and he had perfect pitch as well!
Here is his book, I had no idea that the jazz cats read it… although hundreds of pages seem to be missing. Actually, somebody surely loaded this entire book into notation software to play the examples, etc.?
https://www.amazon.com/Thesaurus-Melodic-Patterns-Nicolas-Slonimsky/dp/1258454165
So @WhammyStarScream I concluded that if I hit my head and wanted to be a jazz cat, I’d go down the microtonal path, as I could argue, twelve tones are not enough!
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Thats what I was thinking and outloud wondering about it, perhaps it’s just finding that new hit of interestingness, so it gives you that listening pleasure when you’re quite dulled to classical harmony. Very much like various drugs or experiences, people have to go more extreame to get a high. Some things people do to feel alive, I’m like, naa… I’m alright, like wingsuit flying. I’m sure it’s great when you get into it, but I’m content to listen to a bit of hard rock, you know, safe music where only a few people die, drummer exploding randomly etc… you can keep that hardcore Jazz with a high deathrate and have fun.
I typically think most music if not all can be related to our voice and language.
Call n response for example, or a scale having a set alphabet to talk with.
A lot of language gets modified over time, lets take Ya’ll for example, I don’t think it’s classic English, but it’s an interpretation that works, could that be classed as Jazz? Yo mann, hey bro, sup ma G LOL Some people HATE that type of non classical talk, but it becomes it’s own thing. To the point of not acually understanding what someone’s saying. Isn’t that the base concept of Jazz? A freedom in communication. And it will sound like nonsense to some people.
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Wouldn’t that mean you can’t play Jazz unless you know exactly what you’re going to say?
I always felt it was like kind of shredding away with what you do know, to get out something you’ve never truly expressed before, tho of course whole reason I posted this is cus idk what it truly is. I for whether reason don’t think Jazz is a set thing tho, it’s not 1 + 1 = 2, and you can learn that, it’s 1 + 1 = 3, and lets hear your interpretation of that concept. So it’s like trying to catch a fly with chopsticks, the second you clamp down the fly has, flied.
Our dog’s name is Jasper, or, Jazz, he’ll bark at the most random times, and I know he’s doing it for a reason, but I’m often thinking wtf are you barking at. He drives me insane, just like some Jazz music.
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You’re missing one of the fundamental aspects of jazz. Which is that it swings.
No swing, no jazz.
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From Britannica:
jazz, musical form, often improvisational, developed by African Americans and influenced by both European harmonic structure and African rhythms. It was developed partially from ragtime and blues and is often characterized by syncopated rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, varying degrees of improvisation, often deliberate deviations of pitch, and the use of original timbres.
Any attempt to arrive at a precise, all-encompassing definition of jazz is probably futile.
The last sentence says it all.
With Jazz considered the one, true American musical art form - the fact that it can be pretty much anything it wants seems rather appropriate.
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Do you know of any good videos on swing I can watch?
Lets say Vinnie added some swing to his playing, would he be Jazz?
The most hardcore Jazz player of all time with no swing.
I really love his playing. He’s going for it, speed or not, just going for it. Got that energy. And ofcourse knew how to compose. If he posted on here like that I’m sure there would be a lot of love, serious ability.
I’ve not heard a song by him without guitar. But this is something
Coming up with this stuff isn’t easy. I think there is genuine stuff in there that is musical. The whole thing is musical. Just not highlighted in the right way. You can turn that into a proper solo if you vibe with it. I love it. It’s overtaking the background. It’s so aggressive relative to the background chords.