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Was in the library the other day and borrowed '5 for Freddie: Bucky Pizzarelli's Tribute to Freddie Green'. Had never heard of it. I wouldn't put it quite up there with 'Rhythm Willie' but it does swing. It's definitely an homage, not a recreation.
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03-06-2017 07:08 PM
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Had never heard of that record. Found this cut on YouTube.
Originally Posted by deselby
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Great article by Jonathan:
Jonathan Stout and his Campus Five, featuring Hilary Alexander - Swing Guitar Blog - The realities of playing Acoustic Swing Rhythm Guitar
Covers the same territory as a lot of his posts here re: live sound (suffice to say I can't get his rig to work for me in my playing situations!) but also some specific points re: Freddie and Allan Reuss's playing.
And yes I too get annoyed by the straight 4 comping = 'Freddie Green style'. No. This invokes the NERD RAGE.
Reading the blog, Jonathan would probably say Dutchbopper's article does not in fact cover Freddie Green style at all. It covers George Van Eps/Allan Reuss rhythm guitar.
It's a bit like single note swing guitar = Django. Basically, you use those players name's because they are iconic (i.e. they are the ones you have heard of!) Accurate information on pre-war jazz guitar is thin on the ground, and Jonathan's blog has always been a goldmine when I was studying these styles of playing.
Anyway, when I listen to things like , one of the 40's studio recordings where you can hear Freddie clearly, I STILL hear one note a string voicings. Am I going mental? What do you guys hear?Last edited by christianm77; 04-03-2017 at 05:23 AM.
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It's a lot easier to say 'Freddie Green' than 'George Van Eps/Allan Reuss' whenever I raise this hot topic at dinner parties.
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Ha! Well it's either that or tonewoods, no? Originally Posted by grahambop
What's wrong with 'straight 4's' or 'swing rhythm guitar'?
Also I might add that the style of 'Freddie Green style' smooth, light, legato straight 4's played on electric archtops, has in fact nothing to do with what FG did in the Basie band, but it remains a thing, and a nice sounding thing too.
Apparently Belgian Waffles don't really have anything to Belgium and Creme Brulee was invented in Britain.
Anyway Freddie Green is pretty much the most mysterious jazz guitarist in that he is hard to hear and didn't talk about his playing.
I believe FG's guitar playing may not have sounded pleasant tonally out of context although it would certainly have swung.
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He was a sort of musical equivalent of Samuel Beckett: Beckett began as an amazing but verbose word virtuoso, then, as he matured, pared down to increasing sparseness. He was writing 15-minute plays toward the end of his output. Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
Green was similar: he even soloed in the band at first. Sweets Edison or someone else said he was a good soloist, but the bottom dropped out of the band when he wasn't playing rhythm, so he just stuck to that. But we tend to pare down and simplify as we mature, and I think he did that.
When I was studying with Barry Galbraith (the Freddie Green of the Thornhill band---among MANY other wonderful things) he had me play 3-note voicings on the lower strings in that tradition and gave me his book along those lines. Someone mentioned James Chirillo's saying Freddie voicing rhythm chords with 1 note. He told me recently that Green was trying to create a counter tenor line in doing this.
Veddy interesting...
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04-03-2017, 08:27 AM #82Dutchbopper Guest
For your convenience, here are the two videos embedded. The first one is a tutorial. The second one you will hear that exact comping part applied in a drummerless trio recording.
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Jonathan's blog is a goldmine, alright. And his playing reveals a deep understanding of those styles. Originally Posted by christianm77
As for "Freddie Green style" I think we as jazz guitarists have to appreciate the broad sense of the term (-chunky four to the bar comping) and the narrower sense, of say, the website devoted to Freddie's playing. Neither is wrong. When guitarists talk about Charlie Parker's style we usually aren't thinking about the mechanics of the alto sax. (Thomas Owens goes into that in his excellent book, "Bebop: The Music and Its Players." Well worth reading, esp. the chapter on Parker's style.) One of the great things about Freddie's playing is that his time was solid and swinging without sounding choppy or mechanical. Much easier said than done.
One of the interesting things about Freddie's playing---this comes out in "Rhythm Is My Beat," the bio Freddie's son wrote---is that people who played with him did not always agree on what he was doing. Some insist he gave a slight accent to beats two and four while others insist he did not. That's a fundamental disagreement among pros who played with Freddie and not only heard him play but could watch him doing it.
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I've mentioned this book already but here's a link so you can see more about it yourself.
It's a bio of Freddie, so there's lots of personal stuff. (I did not know about Freddie and Billie Holiday.) But there's also a lot about Freddie's guitar playing. Lots of quotes from guitarists about Freddie's playing. Lots of material from the Freddie Green website.
One tidbit: Freddie never endorsed a guitar pick of any kind but after his death, in the case of his 'road' guita,r a Gibson Medium pick was found. There's also a bit about the Carnegie Hall concert where Benny Goodman asked Freddie to solo and Freddie's bandmates felt awful because they knew his extraordinarily high action made playing single notes murderously hard.
Rhythm Is My Beat: Jazz Guitar Great Freddie Green and the Count Basie Sound (Studies in Jazz): Alfred Green: 9781442242463: Amazon.com: Books
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Just a theory, but I wonder if Freddie's use of a high action evolved as a way to get more control over which notes of the chord would be sounded? With a high action the 'default' will tend to be for the notes not to be fretted until quite a lot of pressure is applied, I can imagine this would allow you to pick out one or two notes as needed even though the whole chord shape is being fingered upon the strings. Plus it means you can hit the strings harder to get the percussive element of the sound.
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Quite possibly. Originally Posted by grahambop
Also drums and bass got louder in the 40s and 50s.
Jonathon also mentions this in his article, as well as his suspicion that Freddie's action was lower in the 30s and 40s...
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The high action evolved. It helped with volume. It also helped with what you are suggesting here: it is possible to finger strings without pressing them against the frets. (This is why it is easy to look at film of Freddie playing and see him fretting a full chord but you can only tease out the sound of one or two notes----"How does he do that?") Also, Freddie could grip one chord for a few beats but apply pressure to various notes on different beats, so if you were listening to the recording (without seeing him play it) you might think he was moving his left hand more than he actually was. And yes, it helped with the percussive quality----Freddie strummed all six strings, no matter how many he was fretting notes on. His "chunk" was smooth and even. Originally Posted by grahambop
His comping stroke might appear exaggerated but I think that was in part of his role as "Keeper of the Quarter Note." Bandmates could see his arm moving and know where the beat was. He was like a conductor in that sense.
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I always love to see a thread about "4 to a bar rhythm guitar".
This is what I try to play in 99% of the time. I only stop when I improvise. xD
Thanks for it DB. Great vid here.
Here is a rehearsal that we recorded some months ago and I'm trying to swing a 4 to the bar there.
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This is a small point and I think far from universally true, but I think of "comping" as the more common, post bop kind of jab and sustain style of playing like what most pianists and guitarist do in small group settings. I don't usually think of the 4 to the bar style as "comping". The term comping has a stylist component, or at least it used to when I was coming up and learning about such things. The band leader might say " don't comp on this section, play Freddie Greene style " or something like that. In my own silly mind I think of what is often called Freddie Green style as "Shoopin" its onomatopoetic for the sound shoop shoop shoop shoop that a good guitar and the right technique will achieve. (it is this very sound that is almost always missing when done on an electric guitar.)
I also want to remind the good folks in this forum of George Van Eps, Allen Reuss, Allen Hanlon, Steve Jordan, and many other great rhythm players that go mostly unheralded.
all the best
tim
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I agree with the nomenclature-- Freddie didn't comp, he played RHYTHM.
Although if anybody told me to "comp like Freddie" I'd know exactly what they wanted.
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Whenever I feel like I am getting to be too much of a jazz nerd, I run across a thread like this, and I feel right at home
. There's some great info on Reuss, etc courtesy Steve Jordan on freddiegreen.org:
Steve Jordan Autobiography Excerpts about Freddie Green
I have yet to hear Jordan, but have always wanted to.
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For what it's worth, as many chart reading big band rhythm gutarists can attest to, it's not unusual for many of the guitar charts to actually have "a la Freddie Green" printed on the chart by the publisher, as stylistic nomenclature/direction.
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I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. Charlton Johnson (who played rhythm in the Basie band after Freddie) says in his book on Swing & Big Band Guitar that they don't call it harmonic guitar or chordal guitar but RHYTHM guitar. That rhythm is the main thing. (Groups that played without drummers--the Nat Cole trio with Oscar Moore, the Oscar Peterson trio with Herb Ellis or with Barney Kessel---called for a lot of this.) John Pizzarelli is a contemporary player who plays in this style and does great work. Ranger Doug is another one. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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Freddie Green himself talked about his "ABCs" being a gig with stride pianist Willie Gant at Tillie's Chicken Shack in Manhattan. (I wonder if this is the chicken shack Jimmy Smith had in mind when he wrote "Back at the Chicken Shack.")
It was just Willie Gant and Freddie. They played for singers and dancers. Freddie said, "I had to be the drummer." That gig taught him a lot about how to fit in with a piano player and also how to, well, be a drummer. ;o) (It also taught him about laying out because Gant was known for having a large, eclectic "playbook" and Freddie didn't know all those tunes. For some, he would just come in while Gant began to stride.)
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I think people sometimes don't realize how challenging it is to play like this. There's no laying out!
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Where is the sweet spot in this kind of playing? You have the choice of putting the root or the fifth on the E string, and I occasionally will put the third or seventh there if it makes sense, so you are always making a choice. The chord pattern will often dictate your inversion. Some chords will almost always be played in a particular spot (you are unlikely, I think, to play the root on the E string for Eb chords).
But all other things being equal, and you have your choice, would you choose a voicing around the 3-5th frets, or around the 6-8th frets? Would your choice be different comping for a vocalist vs. in a big band setting?
I am referring to the E string note just to describe the position; I understand why the note is typically omitted.
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