What is 'guitaristic language'?

[princeplanet]

I'm not sure if the OP is referring to "guitar language" as it applies to Jazz guitar, or just guitar in general, but I was hoping the discussion would offer up some opinions or insights regarding specifically Jazz Language, and the way that different instruments in the wider Jazz idiom speak the language with their own twist... I mean, if we just limit things to Bop - and the way, say, a trumpet player may typically play from the Clifford / Morgan / Hubbard school, whereas the guitar player may speak the lingua franca according to Pass / Wes / Martino etc...

Even if we limited the discussion to Clifford vs Pass - i.e. mainstream bop trumpet vs mainstream bop guitar - how does the language use differ? How much of that is dependant on the limitations of the instrument vs what just became popular or fashionable? (i.e., Wes octaves - guitaristic? Fashion? Both??)

I think that chromatic ornamentation on horns as it applies to bop was such that many players shared common approaches - check Stitt vs Rollins on Oleo, yes you can tell them apart, but much of the ornamentation (enclosures, arps, licks etc) are not too disimilair. However, that sort of playing is not what Raney or Pass were doing. Too hard? Or just different lineage?

Anyone dare to offer an analytical comparison re : typical Bop horn language vs typical Bop guitar language? Some actual examples, excerpts and/or notations would be very enlightening, I think...

[whiskey02]

Go to 4:30 in the this video; I think what he (and Pat) says very simply sums up what "guitaristic" means. Not that it's bad, or always bad.

[John A.]

At the risk of starting WW III, I think guitar is a "first rate, 2nd rate instrument".

Can't play single note lines like a horn...can't do half the harmonic stuff piano can.

It does a bit of both...yes it can bend notes, and has some expressive qualities that other instruments don't have.

But honestly, go listen to any well known jazz tune, and find the trumpet, sax, or piano players who can rip off great extended lines....they will be faster, more fluid, more rhythmically precise and just more "happening" to listen to, at least to my ears.

You'll struggle to find guitarists who can labor to keep up, and make it happen, IMO. Time after time, I'll sit down to listen to jazz guitarists and the heads sound really good but by the 2nd chorus, it's wearing thin for me, a lot of the time.

Chuck Wayne at the top of his game is as good as anyone. Johnny Smith, some of the time, though he even said he didn't consider himself a jazz guy. Joe Pass is pretty reliable...Hank Garland...Bruce Forman. Jimmy Raney is good and later in life was REALLY good.

I still say if I had to go to a desert island and had 100 jazz albums to take with me, I wouldn't be taking a lot of guitar jazz albums, but I can't imagine "listening life" without Dizzy, Lee Morgan, Coltrane, Bird, Stan Getz, George Coleman, Woody Shaw, Wynton, Artie Shaw, Sidney Bechet, Louis A., Earl Hines, Monk, Oscar Peterson, Miles, Dexter G. to name a few, and big bands.

As I say, I don't want to start a war. In the jazz realm, I think guitar is just a bit of an odd duck.

Blues or rock, it is supreme.

You're not the only one who feels this way, and this is a topic that has gotten thrashed here several times, so I won't go to the mattresses. I get what you're saying but I don't feel the same way, nor do/did many major figures in jazz who featured guitarists, or even did career defining work with them. I doubt Getz, or Rollins, or Miles, or Trane, or Mike Brecker, Paul Desmond, or Joe Lovano, or Bill Evans, or Red Norvo, or Jimmy Smith thought of guitar (or any other instrument) as an "odd duck." Rather, they saw the possibility of different combinations of instrumentation, and recognized what particular players offered. I feel like Wes, Barney Kessel, Kenny Burrell, Jim Hall, Scofield, Metheny, Martino, Stern, Benson (to name a few you don't list) have as much going on as anybody on another instrument and have the power to hold my attention through many choruses. There are others I don't dig as much, but I don't think that has anything to do with limitations of an instrument. It's just that subjectively I don't dig them as much. There's nothing wrong or right about that, and there's certainly no rule that we all have to like the same instruments or players; it's just a matter of taste, not some inherent deficiency of one instrument or another. I could make the same sort of claim about violin or flute -- I just don't happen to like much jazz flute (except, of course, Ron Burgundy) or violin, but that's a limitation of my grasp, not someone else's reach.

John

[goldenwave77]

I don't mean to slight people.

Some of the others I like: early Pat Martino; some George B. (less of the pop stuff, though his album with "This Masquerade" is a GREAT pop album)---he just plays jazz way too rarely.


Wes M. I like in small doses. His technique is so distinct that a little goes a long way...kind of like heavily seasoned ethnic cuisines.

Kenny B. is interesting, because he is always at least good, and sometimes great, and never mediocre. He seems to play in several different styles: the Midnight Blue groove, straight ahead bop, lush chord melody, and the organ groups, etc. He's like an athlete who is "sneaky fast"....doesn't look like he's making an obvious effort but everything just works, and before you know it, he's out in front.

I played guitar for about 4 mos. as a young teenager....put it down before I ever got any good, and started to listen to jazz, and I guess my tastes were just sort of formed that way. I just listened to a lot of big band, and small group players, and guitar was kind of a minor feature for most of that.

Probably in my dreams, I'd want to be a great trumpet player....because there is just something about a great horn player....

Lee Morgan is maybe my favorite player, and Freddie Hubbard was so good he really never settled into a definitive style--he could play everything it seems to me, and that hurt his popularity I think.

Finding 3 or 4 other people to put together a small jazz group is not easy....so like many here, I think I just play for myself....along with records or backing tracks, or working on individual arrangements, and for that guitar is hard to beat. I can't really complain too much.

I keep meaning to look up a girl from my HS who went to Manhattan Sch. of Music for voice (opera), but show stuff is really her prime love....she didn't make a career in music, but she can still sing. Maybe this year's project will be to try to work up a half dozen numbers for open mike night at the golf course I play at.

[pcsanwald]

Saxophone does have a small, but dedicated group of classical practitioners -- you can find plenty of sax players talk rapturously about Marcel Mule's tone, and Coltrane worked religiously out of the old Sigurd Rascher books. And while it's a different instrument, it has enough in common with other woodwinds like clarinet that it could draw from those traditions.

I very briefly met Branford Marsalis once at a gym in downtown brooklyn, and he was preparing for an upcoming classical concert and remarked how great he felt after working on classical repertoire after a while. He said something to the effect of "it forces you out of your comfort zone and you can't just play your same old stuff".

[pcsanwald]

Well, CC was the birth of Bop, Rockabilly, Western Swing, and Rock'n'Roll. The fact that most guitarists playing any of these styles today don't even acknowledge this is a monumental travesty.

I've posted this before, but on this BB King track you can hear him really channeling Charlie's sound and vocabulary:

[pcsanwald]

I still say if I had to go to a desert island and had 100 jazz albums to take with me, I wouldn't be taking a lot of guitar jazz albums, but I can't imagine "listening life" without Dizzy, Lee Morgan, Coltrane, Bird, Stan Getz, George Coleman, Woody Shaw, Wynton, Artie Shaw, Sidney Bechet, Louis A., Earl Hines, Monk, Oscar Peterson, Miles, Dexter G. to name a few, and big bands.

As I say, I don't want to start a war. In the jazz realm, I think guitar is just a bit of an odd duck.

I think guitar and trombone have many similarities with regards to their place in small group jazz. I definitely agree with most of what you wrote. especially the Woody Shaw part, an underrated cat.

[MarkRhodes]

OK, sax is limiting in the sense that solo sax performances don't attract big audiences. But in practical terms I don't think sax players feel that as a limitation in what is fundamentally an ensemble art form. And it's expansive in other ways, which is what I was really trying to get at. There's a broad range of expressive possibilities, responsiveness to breathing, huge dynamic range, conduciveness to great speed, etc. Hearing a great player play by him/herself shows you the degree to which he/she contains him/herself in a ensemble performance. All instruments have possibilities and limitations unique to them. If they didn't we'd only have one instrument.

John

I think "ensemble" is key. Horns need rhythm sections, while a guitar or piano alone can be a rhythm section and then some.
The expressive qualities of a horn, esp an alto or tenor sax, are not lost on me. I love that. It's why I still listen to Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Parker, Coltrane. (Not Diz so much, except the record he made with Sonny Rollins and Sonny Stitt. I don't think much of his tone---though obviously he was a master player. I love Clifford Brown's tone, and Miles'.)

Of course, with the advent of electric guitars and effects, the guitar's range of expressiveness is much increased, and greater than that of the saxophone. (Mind you, I don't play with effects and don't care for a "processed" sound for jazz guitar---such as is common among contemporary players known for their speedy legato playing---but the variety of sounds an electric guitar can produce is practically endless.)

I was thinking about post-bop developments in jazz, and other than hard-bop proper, the only one that means a lot to me is the organ trio. (Jimmy Smith, Jack MacDuff, that sort of thing.) Most of my favorite jazz is from the era when horns were central (swing, bebop, hard bop). I want to make clear, I am in no way anti-horn. Once upon a time I thought, "If I had known how much I would love jazz, I would have taken up the sax instead of the guitar." But now I never think like that. I have no horn-envy at all. Some piano-envy, yes.... ;o)

And I really do think that, over the long haul, the piano has been the more central instrument to jazz.

[goldenwave77]

I think guitar and trombone have many similarities with regards to their place in small group jazz. I definitely agree with most of what you wrote. especially the Woody Shaw part, an underrated cat.

When I was 16, I spent a summer at the IU campus in Bloomington writing computer programs on a DEC mini-computer. I didn't play an instrument then, but listened to a lot of jazz. Woody Shaw came to town, and a trumpet player friend of mine from the program said "Gotta see this guy".

We weren't allowed in...as we were too young (they were serving alcohol)....so we climbed up on the roof and heard the show through the skylight vent. Serious....serious player.

And I ditto your comment on trombone. Check out Michael Dease, though, who plays with the "Professors of Jazz" the faculty jazz group from Michigan State. Saw them at Detroit last summer....very, very nimble in his phrasing. Extremely good straight ahead jazz.

Maybe newcomers to jazz should pay attention to guys like Gerry Mulligan, JJ Johnson, and vibes players as soloist models, instead of speed merchant trumpet and sax players.

[John A.]

I think "ensemble" is key. Horns need rhythm sections, while a guitar or piano alone can be a rhythm section and then some.

Can be, but mostly aren't. Most players, most of the time perform in ensembles, not solo. Solo piano or guitar jazz is a niche. Everybody does a little. A few do a lot (many of whom wish the gig paid enough for a group). A very few do it it almost exclusively. So if we're saying "the difference between instrument x and instrument y is that x excels in solo performance," there's a risk of overstating the importance of that. Not quite sure how we got down this particular rabbit-hole (likely my fault, as usual ...).

John

[whiskey02]

If you go outside the jazz genre, there's lots of ways to use a guitar where you barely have to know how to play it, let alone theory. Three chord rock, cowboy chords, strumming, box patterns for soloing. Play loud & distorted, people think you're a genius.

I find this comment quite snobbish, arrogant and ill informed.

[MarkRhodes]

I think the three basic elements of music are melody, harmony, and rhythm and that instruments which can produce all three are less limited than those which cannot.

I think the primary instrument of most great jazz innovators has been the piano, not the horn. (This may be part of the reason non-pianists are encouraged to become familiar with the piano but piano players are not so commonly encouraged to take up a horn, though Joey Defranceso--great organ player--took up the trumpet after doing a stint with Miles Davis and got quite good at it. Of course, he was a world-class musician when he started...)

[princeplanet]

If you go outside the jazz genre, there's lots of ways to use a guitar where you barely have to know how to play it, let alone theory. Three chord rock, cowboy chords, strumming, box patterns for soloing. Play loud & distorted, people think you're a genius.

I find this comment quite snobbish, arrogant and ill informed.

Really? Sounds pretty fair to me....

[John A.]

I think the primary instrument of most great jazz innovators has been the piano, not the horn.

My final comment: Yes, Louis Armstrong sure was a helluva a piano player. And that Charlie Parker, why oh why did he waste his time and talent on the saxophone? The saxophone. As if a real jazz musician ever played the saxophone.

Oy gevalt.

John

[pauln]

My thought... "Guitaristic Language" of Jazz (and other forms) is Blues.

This means you hear a song and you think to yourself, "That sounds right / appropriate / perfect / wonderful / authentic because it is a guitar rather than something else".

Jazz, and Country, and Rock, and some other forms had their origins in the Blues, and the guitar was "instrumental" in the foundation of the Blues... the guitar was a primary Blues development instrument.

Jazz, et al, to the degree that they are spin-off perspectives or interpretations of the Blues, found that the guitar, whether slow to be included or quick to be the primary instrument, did so by boot-strapping its way up through the Blues connection to Jazz's and the others' origins.

[christianm77]

I think the three basic elements of music are melody, harmony, and rhythm and that instruments which can produce all three are less limited than those which cannot.

I think the primary instrument of most great jazz innovators has been the piano, not the horn. (This may be part of the reason non-pianists are encouraged to become familiar with the piano but piano players are not so commonly encouraged to take up a horn, though Joey Defranceso--great organ player--took up the trumpet after doing a stint with Miles Davis and got quite good at it. Of course, he was a world-class musician when he started...)

Well this is obviously not true literally, but there is a massive amount of truth here.

Dizzy Gillespie played piano (Sadik Hakim) but mostly as a way of working out harmony and teaching. Charlie Parker listened to Art Tatum every night (he washed dishes where he was playing) and much of Parker's harmonic innovation can be traced to what Tatum did years earlier.

The horn player mindset is different to the pianist's. I know we all study the same theory etc these days, but back then horns were about melody and piano was about harmony and you still see that to some extent.

Pianists tend to be the scientists of jazz.... Horn players are different kind of people....

[Jonah]

by the way I remember Miles used to say he tried to imitate specific guitar attack and decay... I think he meant that 'dying sound' thing that all the plucked instruments have (as ooposed to horns or bows) and that the guitarists often try to overcome (more sustain! more sustain!))))
I believe in earlier days of guitar and lute they cared less about sustain and more about overall resonance... (though the question of sustain comes up sometimes in reference to basso continuo playing and specifically bass notes)


It's interesting that I always thought that guitar was very jazzy instrument...
I never analyzed it but I remember the image of Wes with an archtop I saw once as a kid and it seemed to me that the archtop was no less symbolic for jazz than sax... because it seemed to be connected to jazz culturally... you can find trumpet and piano in many styles... but archtop and sax are mostly associated with jazz...
Maybe it's wrong historically.. but I believe if you open a club and put an archtop pic above entrance... most of the people will think it's a jazz place.

That also led me to some thoughts... that actually there are many different guitars that are used as different instruments in different styles... folk, classical, flamenco, archtop... though jazz is much more universal language that any folk musc and can be performed on any guitar (which is not always possible to do vice versa).. archtop is associated to jazz so much..
recently I was told by the owner that he would prefer that I do not not use strat because the audience expects to see an archtop...

[Stuart Elliott]

Dizzy Gillespie played piano (Sadik Hakim) but mostly as a way of working out harmony and teaching.

True, Dizzy played piano. However, Sadik Hakim was not a DG pseudonym. Both played piano on the same CP recording session which has created some confusion.