If I write out my solo, am I playing jazz?

[kris]

You can often find musicians inspiring each other and exchanging short phrases on masters' recordings.
Miles often did this - he made contact with the musician... And then the musician played solo.
I can't imagine a musician from Miles' band playing a previously written solo... it's a live art.

[DawgBone]

I tend to disagree - I can't play for myself. If I'm not gigging or getting ready for a gig, I don't play. I listen to a lot of fingerstyle acoustic players (some extremely good) who are content to sit at home and play to the walls (or dog or whatever) and never think of going out and playing for an audience - it's just not on their radar and never will be. To me, playing for oneself is a selfish endeavor - this kinda describes jazz, in a way - it's music for the player and if an audience shows up, that's fine, but not necessarily a requirement. I prefer playing to adoring crowds - getting ready to play pedal steel in a 6 week run of a theater production this summer - my happy place!

Being able to play well for others is what motivates me to play intensively at home. I do get a certain joy from ripping licks on the couch but if it's just "for fun" all the time then it loses any purpose to me and I'd start selling all my gear save for maybe one guitar and amp.

Glad to see you are getting back to the steel, I know you've been wanting to get back out playing. If I was in FL I'd come down for the production and I say that as someone who hates plays and theatre but my love for the steel guitar would offset that. Good luck Skip!

Psalm 33:2
Praise the Lord with the harp;
make music to him on the ten-stringed lyre.

[princeplanet]

No one ever declared that Jazz is improvised music.

But they should have!

[AllanAllen]

Johnny Smith?

You misunderstood what Johnny Smith said. He said he has an idea of solos for recording sessions so he can get them done quickly and have a product he’s proud of. Not that he only performs arranged works.

We can’t all be Miles Davis flubbing Bye Bye Blackbird and getting called genius.

[Stringswinger]

To me, solos are like playing tunes. You only have enough hard drive space in your head to memorize so many tunes or so many worked out solos. I can play hundreds of tunes, and I can solo over all of them in the moment. If I can hear it, I can play it. Will my solos always be great? Probably not, but that is the risk. And the reward of a great solo justifies the risk.

I think the key to playing jazz well is developing your ears and having a connection from your ears to your fingers. If you can play what you hear and you can hear what to play, you can do jazz. If you are letting your fingers "do the walking" or playing a memorized, worked out solo, that isn't jazz, though it can be very satisfying to both the player and listener.

Jazz takes a LOT of work to do well and some lack the innate skill to ever do it. Some are gifted (I wish I was one of them, but alas, I am not) and they can do jazz at a high level without putting in too much work, but even these folks have to pay their dues.

And with all of that said, jazz is a language and we all have licks (or whatever you might want to call them) that we use over and over, often every time we play a particular tune. And IMO, that is still "Jazz".

[John A.]

I tend to disagree - I can't play for myself. If I'm not gigging or getting ready for a gig, I don't play. I listen to a lot of fingerstyle acoustic players (some extremely good) who are content to sit at home and play to the walls (or dog or whatever) and never think of going out and playing for an audience - it's just not on their radar and never will be. To me, playing for oneself is a selfish endeavor

I can't argue with what you feel subjectively, but characterizing taking pleasure in what you play (either alone or in front of an audience) as selfish (which is a pejorative term that connotes withholding something from others for malign reasons) strikes as a pretty weird way of looking at things. Most musicians I know, whether they are amateurs or full-time mercenary pros who'll play anything for a buck or somewhere in between, play music because they like playing music. Most will often play without an audience purely for the personal interest/enjoyment of it. This holds across every genre and it's not in any way "selfish". I do think that music is a social phenomenon/relationship between musicians and listeners, and a musician who does not experience that relationship is missing something important. But it doesn't have to be a vast adoring audience for that relationship to occur.

- this kinda describes jazz, in a way - it's music for the player and if an audience shows up, that's fine, but not necessarily a requirement. I prefer playing to adoring crowds - getting ready to play pedal steel in a 6 week run of a theater production this summer - my happy place![/I]

There are _people_ who don't care about playing something an audience will appreciate and/or who don't seek audiences, but this is not a genre thing in general thing or a jazz thing in particular. Jazz as a genre and jazz musicians in general are trying to communicate with an audience AND please themselves. The potential size of the audience may vary geographically (and typically be smaller than for some other styles of music), but those two aims are not in tension and receptive audiences exist for even the most "challenging" music.

[kris]

Sometimes brilliant jazz musicians play very long solos.... I don"t think they wrote them down before.

[Strat-itis]

Yep. Only writing out solos is not jazz. Improv is required in jazz. While there's nothing wrong with composing a lot of solo material. That's probably ideal. Writing a lot and being able to hack it with improv would be jazz.

[Strat-itis]

We can’t all be Miles Davis flubbing Bye Bye Blackbird and getting called genius.

Miles being dubbed the preeminent jazz musician is a mystery to me. Behind the beat, weak or no rhythmic momentum, harmonically vague, often flubs around melodically like you said.

I can play like that.

[John A.]

You misunderstood what Johnny Smith said. He said he has an idea of solos for recording sessions so he can get them done quickly and have a product he’s proud of. Not that he only performs arranged works.

We can’t all be Miles Davis flubbing Bye Bye Blackbird and getting called genius.

No, I did not misunderstand. I made a joke.

[Aiq]

Just watched Wayne Shorter Zero Gravity three part documentary.

Part one deals largely with Blakey and Davis.

All the evidence is there.

This reminds me of Lucy telling Schroeder “Beethoven wasn’t so great”.

[kris]

Yep. Only writing out solos is not jazz. Improv is required in jazz. While there's nothing wrong with composing a lot of solo material. That's probably ideal. Writing a lot and being able to hack it with improv would be jazz.

A jazz musician practices a lot so as not to write down his solos.
This is a waste of time.

[Strat-itis]

^ I know, but I'm just qualifying that if you work out a lot of solo material, it will only help you provided that you can improv.

[kris]

Miles being dubbed the preeminent jazz musician is a mystery to me. Behind the beat, weak or no rhythmic momentum, harmonically vague, often flubs around melodically like you said.

I can play like that.

A weak joke.

[Strat-itis]

^ Ur mad!

Just watched Wayne Shorter Zero Gravity three part documentary. Part one deals largely with Blakey and Davis. All the evidence is there. This reminds me of Lucy telling Schroeder “Beethoven wasn’t so great”.

He was great, I'm disputing his status as preeminent jazz musician.

[kris]

^ I know, but I'm just qualifying that if you work out a lot of solo material, it will only help you provided that you can improv.

I don"t understand what you mean by working on solo material.
Is this about the backing track exercise?

[kris]

^ Ur mad!

He was great, I'm disputing his status as preeminent jazz musician.

Miles was one of the most outstanding jazz musicians.

[Strat-itis]

I don"t understand what you mean by working on solo material.

That's how you improve your language to wanking ratio - you work out cells and lines. You don't know about this?

[kris]

Here we are talking about writing solos, not about practicing.

[Strat-itis]

Right. Only writing solos is not jazz. I already said that if you didn't disregard my posts.

[kris]

OK.

[Skip Ellis]

"... mercenary pros who'll play anything for a buck or somewhere in between....... "

Yep! Musical whore here - done it all: country , theater, oldies rock, folk, standards, bluegrass, even a little jazz on occasion and played tenor banjo in a dixieland band and bass for a trio lounge act. As long as I can pull it off, the customer is happy and I get paid, I'm good to go. I used to get satisfaction from my theater gigs but anymore, not so much. Was contacted last week for a 6 week pedal steel theater thing in May-July - told them I'd do it but may change my mind - I'm just getting too old, tired, and sore to deal with it ....but they offered me a boatload of money..so there is that.......

" Most will often play without an audience purely for the personal interest/enjoyment of it."

Sorry - not in my playbook - I've got other things I enjoy doing. Maybe unfortunate, but back about 1970 when I got good enough to get paid, it became a job, especially after I opened a full line retail music store in '75, it really became a job; running the store during the day and playing 5 nights a week was work. If I got a day off, I slept or went fishing.

[charlieparker]

My take is that we stigmatize licks and memorized solos too much.

If you can play a memorized solo well with a band at tempo and it sounds great that is better than a bad improvisation.

Supposedly guys like Montgomery got started playing professionally playing Christian solos note for note.

Now eventually you should move beyond that and I think any professional should be able to create new solos spontaneously.

Lots of great suggestions on how to get from A to B, compose multiple solos. Vary the melody and rhythm of your solos. Intersperse measures of improvised bits with composed parts.

I think someone was saying that Ponpon Chen started out playing memorized solos of players like Chet Baker before composing her own to where she is at now.

Bottom line is that playing a memorized/composed solo is a valid approach for live performances and jam sessions when you are starting out.

[RLetson]

I guess I have a bunch of questions.

Does it sound like "jazz" to a discerning audience? Does it still sound like "jazz" the second time they hear it? (Another way of asking whether "jazz" is a vocabulary and family of styles recognized by an audience or an internal practice of spontaneous production.)

For that matter, were both performances actually the same?

Is "improvisation" creation-from-scratch/complete invention or getting-off-the-page or being-in-the-moment, or what? How far from the supposed set text does one have to go for it to count as improvisation? (And will it "sound like jazz" to the audience?)

Might "elasticity" be a form of improvisation? And what elements of an elasticized composition qualify most strongly as improvisatory? Reharmonizing? Rephrasing? Syncopating?

I never sing a tune exactly the same way twice. Am I improvising? If it's a standard, am I jazzing it up?

In a big-band chart, is it only jazz when the soloists take their breaks?

I do have an assertion, or at least an opinion: Phrases like "comfort zone" and "taking chances" have to my ear a dash of the Romantic aesthetic that values risk and sees the artist as a kind of hero or trailbreaker.

[Mick-7]

So what do you call a guitarist who plays arrangements - a bad musician?

The same way every time? = Boring.