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Yeah, I think a lot of this is down to the way the music is made - the conditions of what you are doing.
Originally Posted by joe2758
For instance, if you are working with a specified melody. Really there's no procedural difference between the practice of harmonising a chorale melody and reharmonising a jazz standard. You have a given melody and you choose a bassline, then you fill in the middle voices. That's how Bach taught it, according to Derek Remes. The differences are idiomatic. We might care less about parallel fifth for example (although Brad Mehldau avoids them).
OTOH the Partimento stuff is one person (generally) making up a piece on a given bass. Even when you aren't working on a given bass - preluding for example - you are developing the form as you go. And I think there's an expectation to do it in the style of what we think of as baroque or classical music. So we are to some extent thinking about the "rules", or the stylistic expectations based on what we have heard in the pieces of the era we play and listen to. I don't think this is quite like anything I've done in jazz.
Obviously in jazz we are most often blowing on a repeating set of changes in a group with other musicians. This did exist in historic European music (AFAIK) - divisions on a ground (although grounds were usually quite short compared to jazz standards)
One obvious problem with all of this is that we don't have any recordings of what they did. We have some treatises describing what they did, a few transcribed examples and of course, the compositions. There is (as I understand it) reason to believe that the written notes of the compositions may not have exactly resembled the improvisation practice in general, which would have been a bit wilder and less 'well behaved', more like jazz in some respects.
One piece that makes me think of a 'written down improvisation' is this 17th century piece:
You get some interesting stuff going on!
Rob will obviously know much more about this stuff - just reporting things I've heard, or read about.Last edited by Christian Miller; 05-11-2026 at 12:48 PM.
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05-11-2026 12:12 PM
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I definitely think learning jazz can make you a better classical player and vice versa.
For me with classical guitar, it was all about what pieces I was learning. I couldn't see the point in practising scales with anything like the kind of comprehensiveness that I do and have done with jazz. Likewise with transcription - I doubt many classical guitarists feel the need to do as much transcription as jazz players do, although of course classical guitarists might do arrangements, which isn't the same thing.
Essentially jazz requires you to do some composing and acquire skills around that as well as all the technique and chops to play.
Now, what does classical offer a jazz guitarist? Picking hand technique and some novel ways of viewing the fretboard I'd say, a sense of contrapuntal nous and some lovely music to play for etude like purposes.
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But that seems to be saying playing both styles will make you a more rounded musician (which is true).
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Yes... ? Originally Posted by joe2758
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Just answering a different question as I was, I agree though!
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I'm quite not sure what being a rounded musician means in 2026 TBH. But I think having good, open ears, attention to detail and conceptual flexibility would be in there. I think learning about other styles of music can teach you that stuff better. But OTOH, there is a trade off against going deep. Originally Posted by joe2758
Personally, I dabble in a lot of things - or at least have enthusiasms for various random stuff. I'm not a really a deep specialist in one thing. I would say there's a lot of value in being a specialist, more than being amorphously 'versatile.' OTOH eclecticism is quite a creative space.
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I don't like the feeling of disagreeing with people lol.
I'm just saying to play a specific style (specializing if you like, "not well rounded") learning another style won't offer something to lift as a sort of hack to gain an insight into the goal style.
Would Sor write better classical music if he studied Wes? Vice versa? Maybe it would help Wes be more "well rounded" but it wouldn't make him a better jazz player
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Christian, don't you remember when I was trying to imitate Chopin by applying Barry Harris theory? I could force it to work, but you guided me in the right direction
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I think there’s also a difference between a player’s own perception of their improvement and outsiders’ view of their music. Charlie Parker was considering studying classical music in France before he died. Had he lived longer and pursued this interest, it’s likely he would have had a subjective experience of becoming a better musician. Nevertheless, I doubt people who listen to him play after his education would’ve been like, “Yeah, he definitely improved in Paris, God bless his teachers.” I bet they’d be like, “I miss the pre-Stravinsky Parker,” lol. Originally Posted by joe2758
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lol! good point Originally Posted by Tal_175
Edit: fyi I have always preferred not mixing styles, so I think I am biased in this conversation and probably why I have a firmer opinion than i usually do
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How come? I like to think Parker would've improved as he went along, had his personal life/health been more propitious. A greater knowledge of classical music would aid him in that (though IMO not a total necessity for improvement). Originally Posted by Tal_175
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Yes, Parker was an innovator so I guess no one can argue that studying other styles does not help with that
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I don’t think I’m disagreeing with you? Originally Posted by joe2758
I think well rounded is kind of a reflection on the prevailing culture. In some quarters a well rounded guitarist has a comprehensive repertoire of top 40 hits and all the patches dialled into their Quad Cortex.
In others it’s someone who knows all the Villa Lobos etudes.
I do think learning different styles of music works the muscles of being a musician
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Full disclosure, I tick neither of those boxes lol
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I am about equal in classical v. jazz and I think I'd be better at either if I stuck to one style. By studying both I'm more versatile, but because I don't mix the styles that doesn't really mean anything.
Playing delta blues helped me pick up classical faster, but it would have been even better if I just played the classical. I wouldn't say "learn delta blues before classical to learn it faster"
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Oh, I don't know, apparently slide guitar technique can be useful for playing Bartok - see the piece that starts at 2.10 in this video. Originally Posted by joe2758
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Dont really agree with this one. Theres a real art to rubato and a lot of players are sticklers for this. The John Williams generation had a lot of rebellion against Segovia’s style of playing largely because it was (in their eyes) messy and imprecise. Pedagogy has corrected a lot from the metronomic time thing, but still that’s pretty important. Originally Posted by Tal_175
Eh … not sure about this one, but maybe. Usually performance practice for guitar is to play from memory on stage unless in an accompanying or ensemble role. Memorizing Bach is not to be taken lightly.• Learning tunes. Classical musicians can rely on the manuscript and get away with not truly knowing their repertoire in the internalized, functional sense that jazz players are expected to (well except for those who are glued to their ipads on the band stand).
Interesting this is the one I agree with. You really can actually play classical music (in the way folks practice it over the last century and a half) without any real abstract understanding of the mechanisms in play (which is fine) and without any real ability to go off-pattern and really navigate the instrument on the fly outside the traditional grips and stuff.• Fretboard harmony. This was the most surprising one to me. His explanation wandered a bit: positional systems, hearing intervals, identifying chord progressions in Bach (which I can confirm from the few Bach pieces I’ve learned). Jazz musicians typically start with a progression, chord symbols, and some numeric analysis. You can practically feed a family with shell voicings and guide tones alone after that (or at least provide clean water). More harmonically sophisticated players can then reverse-engineer these abstractions into moving bass lines, inner voices, and melodic top lines, creating something less vertical and more orchestral.
In a lot of ways jazz musicians can short change the musicianship of classical musicians but I probably knew more sort of fretboard mechanics — ways to play triads and scales and arpeggios and comfort getting around them — as a high school senior than your average college classical performance major.
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I was not expecting to like this, but it is well done! Maybe he started with delta blues also lol! Originally Posted by Mick-7
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What I don't like is when jazz and rock players play a classical piece, while thinking they must play exactly what is written perfectly and in time.
What else I don't like is that when classical players (usually young social-media-savy types) say Segovia couldn't play in time. He played in Romantic Time, and did so perfectly. There was a rebellion against that when I was a student, and the likes of David Russell were aiming to play straighter, and also helped develop guitars with a piano-like timbre. Interestingly I heard David Russell say recently that he feels he got it wrong, and Romantic-era music should be played with indulgence with respect to timing and phrasing. Time for a reappraisal of Segovia and his contemporaries.
There are still not enough - for my liking - classical guitarists exploring improvisation (preludes, cadences, complete pieces) as was common in the 19th century. I'm not convinced jazz would help there, as it is far too easy to fall into playing something anachronistic. That would be OK only if you were deliberately uniting old music and modern practices.
There's a lot to be said for learning, say, Barney Kessel style by first learning what he studied in his formative years: Charlie Christian and the Blues. Always go a generation back, then come forward. No need to study modal playing first, quartile harmony, etc. Same with Fernando Sor - start with Federico Morreti https://robmackillop.net/wp-content/...nd-moretti.pdf
But, I drift...apologies.
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En route to my MA in Music I had clashes with all three of my CG teachers over JG and CG.
The first one was an ex-jazz guitar player who referred contemptuously to jazz guitar as "the other guitar".
He suffered from "Red Light Fever" in the studios, so he switched to teaching CG in colleges.
For my Jury I was forced to play these terrible Renaissance pieces consisting of whole notes and half notes, which were a joke to a jazzer like me, so I transcribed Charlie Byrd's arrangement of "Jitterbug Blues", and played it to the packed room at my jury.
My CG yelled out "NO!!! I did not give him that piece to play!!!" and ran up the aisle to protest my selection.
The whole room was in a state of confusion as I tried to explain my reason for the last minute 'substitution', and he just said to me , "Let us not wash our dirty linen in public!"
They switched me to the other CG teacher at the college.
This guy was also an ex-jazz guitarist, who still loved playing jazz, and after a feeble attempt at forcing me to play Villa-Lobos, our lessons degenerated into "Alright, "Night and Day" in Eb".
He wound up packing up and moving his family to Colorado to teach for Johnny Smith.
My last teacher in Grad school was a strict CG man, and one time I tried turning him on to Johnny Smith, and he said to me, "Just don't give me any Joe Pass albums to listen to-I never heard such sloppy disgusting playing in my life! I threw those albums at the student who gave me them to listen to, and told him to get that garbage out of here!"
I decided to reconsider my JS offer.....
We had to participate in a guitar ensemble, and I dished up my solo arr. of Stolen Moments for five guitars, and both my teacher and the students loved it. The students kept getting better and better at improvising on it, and by the time we gave our concert, they all blew me away on their solos! My teacher asked me for a copy of my solo arr. of it, and I managed to put him off till I graduated. No one gets that from me.
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