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It’s amazing how people can ignore matters of historical record of how people actually performed jazz, based on vibes.
I got nothing against improvisation but the only reason anyone thinks it’s a unique feature of jazz is because tbh they don’t know much about other music.
Everyone improvises with the sole exception of western classical musicians over the past hundred and fifty years or so - but even they seem to be threatening to rediscover it any decade now.
But everyone also plays composed music. Quite a lot of Monk is played note by note. Crepuscule with Nellie is practically a score. Tbh I think lead sheets and the real book give people the wrong idea about how this music was made historically…
Pace Bill Evans, what makes jazz jazz is that it sounds like jazz.
And it not just people on the forum - you get this with big hitter academics in music education theory who should know better. I’m looking at you David ‘jazz has no aesthetic objects’ Elliot.
These people are mostly classical musicians who have replaced one set of cultural assumptions with another.
Sent from my iPhone using TapatalkLast edited by Christian Miller; 03-29-2026 at 06:56 AM.
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03-29-2026 06:37 AM
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Sure, I do it. Everyone does it. Every professional player I know has their bag.
Originally Posted by GuyBoden
Improvisation is not about generating material from whole cloth - except in extreme cases - instead it’s most often about repurposing, recombining, varying and ornamenting material to make music. That is often the case for composers also of course.
Tbh I think the idea of ‘pure improvisation’ is a counterproductive fixation for budding jazzers. It’s a bit different if you have a bag, and want to get away from it. But that’s quite a few stops down the road.
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I know a classical pianist who was trained in Russia - it doesn’t get more academic than that. She says that she improvises with tone colours.
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I mean how could it be? They’d have no way of telling. Originally Posted by RLetson
If you go and hear Handel’s Messiah with a period band you are going to hear improvisation from the continuo section and maybe some extempore ornamentation from the soloists.
There’s a spectrum from exact reproduction of a composition and making something up totally from scratch. Most jazz performances fall somewhere in the middle, with quite a lot of it more on the ‘devised/refined composition’ side of it.
100%As other posts have pointed out, there are other characteristics, particularly rhythm (this is, after all, a music rooted in African-American traditions) and various harmonic adventures, along with improvisation.
Historically, jazz is a way of treating a melody. Listen to the 1927 Roger Wolfe Kahn version of "I Can't Believe that You're in Love with Me"--it's a perky foxtrot and pretty square. Then fast-forward to the late 30s/40s and listen to Billie or Ella or Anita O'Day swingify it--or Django with Eddie South (sounds like some improv going on there--or at least lots of variation). Actually, Armstrong had already jazzed it up in 1930. You can keep going right on, down to Duke Robillard (from whose recording I learned it) or Catherine Russell.
In fact, the phrase "jazzing it up" tells me something about how jazz is received and generated.
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Well also it seems like we’ve drifted into a different question.
Original question: if I compose my solos am I playing jazz.
Answer: consensus is that if you sound like jazz, then sure why not. And that’s supported by loads of anecdotal evidence from the first fifty years of what we think of as jazz.
Second question: if I cant improvise my solos, am I playing jazz.
Answer: it’s a melee. But I would think that’s probably unlikely. Jazz requires a lot of comfort with aural communication and living off the page. But maybe I’m wrong. Dunno.
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Varying dynamics/expression? Originally Posted by docsteve
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Playing the orchestrated/arranged parts in a jazz orchestra is the thing that the band does as a unit. After the theme has been sufficiently massaged by the band, a soloist or two will step forward and are expected to improvise on some element of what has just occurred - the melody, the harmony or the rhythm - preferably all three. This process is inline with the spirit of jazz and has been since the beginning of the genre.
Some of these improvisers were/are more capable than others. For instance, I can’t imagine that Louis Armstrong was writing out his solos.
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at the heart of jazz is improvisation. if you listen to a high level improviser play, what they improvise wouldn’t be different from what they’d write in that moment. jazz is also a conversational music. can you have a conversation if you're reciting a memorized speech? Lol
even when introducing the form/melody while playing the tune, a jazz player is restating it anew and embellished in the moment (more often than not) and the changes are fluid and improvised when a good player comps.
So no. ‘Writing’ and reciting a solo is not playing jazz. It’s mimicking someone playing jazz at best.
Jazz tunes are vehicles for improvisation, harmonically, melodically, rhythmically.
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Myself and most people on this forum are passionate Hobby Jazz players, so I'd guess that most of us are very happy to play a solo with whatever means is available. Originally Posted by Chris236
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and you are welcome to do so! Enjoy in fact! Originally Posted by GuyBoden
Myself and most people on this forum are passionate Hobby Jazz players, so I'd guess that most of us are very happy to play a solo with whatever means is available.
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Just for fun imagine this extreme case:
definitely musicians playing in the pit
the show's set in the American 1930s
the show tunes/incidental music; jazz
instructed - play the show score, firm
the score includes written out soloing
the show is scheduled for 100 nights
How is asserting that this is not jazz so
much different than calling a recording
of an improvised performance not jazz?
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If it swings and sounds good within the context of basically a jazz setting to me, it is jazz. I don't get to hung up about it because really some of it is simply muscle memory and what we know works. If someone calls the Rhythm Changes and high speed, I probably could not play an exact solo I have in the past, but I tell you I would easily be playing the same lines as I have many times before.
Jazz to me is music but also an atmosphere and mindset. Did Duke Ellington play jazz with his big band played Satin Doll and no one took a solo it was all written arrangement...........me thinks so.
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And yet many of the greats did precisely that. Lee Konitz identifies for example James Moody as doing this. Another well known example of course was George Coleman, who lost the gig. Miles being perhaps a tiny bit of hypocrite. Originally Posted by Chris236
So unless you think the Tristano school represents ‘real’ jazz and James Moody and other more compositional soloists do not, freewheeling improvisation is not a key aspect of jazz performance.
But the problem may lie in an overly narrow idea of improvisation maybe encouraged by the current chord scale approach to teaching it. Most jazz improvisers do not make up their solos purely in the moment ex nihilo.
OTOH most jazz players do not write out their solos, so mostly it falls in between the Tristano school idealised idea of improv on one hand and a fully scored out solo on the other.
Bear in mind Konitz was quite happy by his own admission to sacrifice swing for improvisation. Ethan Iverson also seems to feel the two things are in tension, he comes down on the side of swing, mostly.
For a quartet or a trio, sure. Less so the more instruments you add. A blue note style sextet is already more arranged and composed.even when introducing the form/melody while playing the tune, a jazz player is restating it anew and embellished in the moment (more often than not) and the changes are fluid and improvised when a good player comps.
Good. I think mimicking jazz is underrated, especially for students.So no. ‘Writing’ and reciting a solo is not playing jazz. It’s mimicking someone playing jazz at best.
I mean I’ve never written out a solo myself but Chick Corea and Barry Harris both separately recommended you write out the first chorus of your solo.
maybe they weren’t real jazzers either. Who knows?
Actually arguably less so than standards (which are of course, not really jazz tunes, but rather popular tunes transformed by jazz musicians.)Jazz tunes are vehicles for improvisation, harmonically, melodically, rhythmically.
Take Monk or Ellington’s ouvre for example. Or Teen Town by weather report which is a set piece.
Since the days of jelly Roll Morton jazz has always had a tradition of composition that actually predates the Louis Armstrong model of soloing on a popular tune which became the template for the next few decades.
But composers still flourished in parallel to the standards tradition.
Jazz ultimately characterised by its musical language, feel and traditions like all other genres of music. I struggle to see how improvisation is defining feature of the music when it is present in pretty much all musical cultures outside modern classical. I think a lot of this has to do with classical musicians hang ups that we’ve internalised. I blame the academy.
Certainly it makes musicians a bit preoccupied with their process. The audience isn’t really privy to any of this.
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"at the heart of jazz is improvisation." Originally Posted by Chris236
Nope!
I am under 50. And lived far away from where jazz happened. And still know that this statement is just wrong
No offence.
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Good luck with your studies, fellas.
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OK - what do you call a guitarist who does NOT improvise but plays the melody (with maybe a little embellishment) to songs that are considered to be of the 'jazz' genre......Georgia, The Nearness of You, Moonlight In Vermont, Stars Fell On Alabama, Misty,......?
Since they're not improvising, what are they? Been trying to figure this out for years. I much prefer the commercial albums that Wes did to his straight ahead jazz and the Henry Mancini Peter Gunn stuff was my introduction to 'cool' back in the early sixties and it's still on my playlist whenever I'm in the car. I'm still of the opinion that the audience would rather, unless it's a 'jazz' concert of some sort, hear a melody that they're familiar with and can whistle or hum when leaving the club. Do 'listening' clubs even exist any more? They certainly don't in my little backwoods corner of the world - we are blessed with 'sports' bars with innumerable televisions and no jukebox.
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If you have a solo written down on paper and you do a rehearsal with a band, you play the same solo over and over again.
This is not jazz.
Often on the albums of jazz masters there are so-called takes.It is easy to notice that apart from playing the theme of the composition, the solos are different.
This is the greatness of those musicians who play jazz.
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The audience would rather hear the same couple dozen classic rock tunes or bro country anthems than anything resembling jazz at this stage so I think it's good to be careful about resorting to audience appeal as a measure for anything. The collective grasp of harmonic and melodic understanding in society is weaker than it's ever been and lowest common denominator stuff has basically destroyed the chances of hearing anything unique whether original or cover in the average live music venue. Originally Posted by Skip Ellis
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Devil's advocate: So big band arrangements are not jazz and only the person improvising in the moment is playing jazz? All those SuperSax soli are not jazz? If you're playing the head to Donna Lee, you're not playing jazz, but when you take a solo you are playing jazz?
I don't have a strong need to come down on one side or the other of this argument, just wanted to throw that into the ring.
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And is the steering wheel of a car as a part of a car a car? Originally Posted by starjasmine
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In real life sometimes you improvise solos in gigs, and sometimes you don’t get to solo at all. Originally Posted by starjasmine
Realising chord symbols is done improvisationally. The amount of freedom you have in that is dictated by the style. For Basie charts you are mostly playing four to the bar. Other styles allow much more rhythmic and harmonic freedom.
This is analogous to continuo playing in a baroque orchestra for example. I’ve heard a lot of baroque players make the connection.
In terms of soloing, a lot of the time you come up against unfamiliar songs and sometimes you need to take a solo on them. Pure-ish Improvisation becomes necessary.
On tunes I’ve played a lot there’s an element of having a worked out bag over them. Rhythm tunes being an obvious example. I wouldn’t say what people play on those tunes is fully worked out, but there are strong elements of it. A players version of a tune tends to crystallise and if know that players style you’ll hear material reused.
But some players are more ‘set’ and play the same or a similar solo each night. It’s even possible some end up doing this without realising. I see this as much like a comedian refining their telling of a joke over consecutive nights. I don’t have a problem with it.
(Of course you get pure improvisational comedy too, but it’s kind of a different thing ime.)
Original projects vary.
Not every “jazz” gig is playing standards in a quartet. Depending on what you end up getting calls for the course. At the moment I seem to getting more big band reading calls than I did which is nice - it’s not the same skill set at all.
I feel sight reading is another specific type of improvisation. In fact, you have to know the vocabulary… it’s more aligned with soloing than I used to think.
Tbh I try to have the skills to play the gig. If writing stuff out helps you get there… but the ultimate decider of what you need to learn is the bandstand not a bunch of opinionated JGO members.
There’s no cheating in music. Bring a pencil and prepare however you can.
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I played in several jazz orchestras, the so-called jazz big-bands.
Not all big-band musicians are great jazz musicians.
Some simply read music excellently, and others play excellent solos.
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But, the audience IS the important part of the equation because they're paying me and that's the whole reason for my being there. I don't care about being creative - I want to perform music that pleases the folks in attendance so they go home in a happier frame of mind, whether that be sitting and reading 70 pages of a theater production the same way 8 shows a week for 8 weeks or honoring the third request for Freebird in the local redneck bar at 2 am. I once played a very nice chord melody version of Moonlight in Vermont at an assisted living gig some years back to absolute silence and they just looked at me but go in and do You Are My Sunshine or an Elvis tune and you're a star. That may be why jazz is not more popular - maybe it's too self indulgent. Originally Posted by DawgBone
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Timbre, timing… Originally Posted by brent.h
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Exactly. This reminds me of something the contemporary composer & improviser Richard Barrett has said - that, if he finds himself wondering whether and what aspects of some music is improvised and what aspects are precomposed, then it's usually a sign for him that the music itself is less than engaging, because as a listener he is much more interested in the 'what' than the 'how'. Which isn't of course to deny the differences between the two approaches, but I guess reflective of a way of listening... (and reflective of his music). Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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