The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #26

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    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    The text of psalms is biblical, the tunes to which they are sung are not. The practical difference is that while psalms are of course sung by both choir and congregation, they tend to be choir-led, as their melodies are less than catchy. Hymns, however, are generally intended to be sing-along-able, like popular song - almost everyone in England including the atheists would be able to belt out a hymn or two from memory, few would be able to do the same with a psalm. Perhaps 19th-century American psalms had more of a beat to them.
    I'm not sure why you point out that the music of psalms don't come from the bible - if you'd read what I wrote you would see that I said that their "text" came from the bible. There is no music from the bible and modern music writing wouldn't even begin for 1000 years. (The Greeks had a system but little of it survives.)

    I'm not sure where your getting those characteristics of psalms and hymns. Psalms were quite well known and were more popular in colonial America. (You keep talking about England, but as I said, these things meant different things to different people at different times.) I read through several diaries from the time and they talk a lot about psalms and little of hymns. Many of the psalms were rendered metrical so that different psalm texts could be applied to different people. Many psalmody schools sprang up and great debates arose about how the psalms should be sung. Wandering psalmody teachers brought it to remote places - anyone who has read Last of the Mohicans may remember the strange character of David Gamut, the itinerant psalmody teacher. I don't know what kind of history of colonial music you get in England in Spain, but I suggest that it might be a bit off. Hymnody did become more prominent as time went on, but I think that you are off in the characteristics that you try to imbue it with. But African-American would have heard both.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    We discrep. You are giving classical music an umbrella position I don't feel it is entitled to. By this token, you could say the musical language of the Rolling Stones is taken from classical music, which is evidently a nonsense. Even if ultimately true, it does not further understanding in any way.
    Sure it does. In the same way, linguists trace most European languages back to a common Indo-European root. It may not be important for a butcher trying to talk to his customers, but it is useful for a linguist trying to understand language. You are right, seeing that that I IV and V chord have roots that ultimately go back to the European classical music tradition - that may not be of interest to a kid in a garage band. But as a musicologist, it is important to me.

    Similarly, it is important that the harmony of jazz is an extension of the harmonic language of classical, directly or indirectly. Without that language, jazz would have no chords or chord progressions.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    Hey, mind the language. I may be pendantic, but I am not amateur. When I'm wrong about language, I'm wrong in my capacity as a professional.
    Sorry, I didn't mean it as an insult. I consider myself an amateur linguist. I didn't realize that it was your occupation.


    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    You're always making this assumption as well. Just because a tune is modal doesn't mean it lacks functional harmony.
    That is the distinction that is made my modern music theory between modal and tonal. If you have some magical source that trumps that definition, please let me know. But I will stick with the definition given to me by every professor I've ever had, every theory text, every history text, and Grove's Dictionary of Music (the OED of music.) The only people whom I hear not using the definitions that way are people without a strong (or any) background in music. (With the exception that tonal is sometimes qualified to have the broader meaning that you wanted it to have.)

    This is not a definition I come to etymologically, but based of definition and usage by scholars and that are widely accepted in the academic community.

    You go into an explanation of how some tones in modes can act kinda like a dominant. But it is not a dominant, it is just a tone that pulls to the tonic. In functional harmony, dominant function is defined by the leading tone because that defines the V-I relationship, the cornerstone of tonal music.

    Peace,
    Kevin

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  3. #27

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    There used to be this guy in NYC named Leonard Bernstein, who knew a little bit about classical music, piano, conducting, and composing. He was also an important music lecturer. At one time he had an educational presentation recorded onto an LP, called "What is jazz?". Speaking for the academic community, he explained that jazz could not exist without the blues, and that the main elements of the blues consisted of it's form, cadences, rhythms, and the existence of "blue notes" which resided somewhere BETWEEN the b3 and 3, and the b5 and 5. He said these elements were straight from Africa.

    He said these African blue notes could be accurately done with the voice, brass, strings, etc., but not on the piano, because it was too western tempered. Blues pianists found they could approximate these blue notes by playing a 2 note dissonance, because the blue note was "in between" the 2 notes. Now you are creating new language. This is where the foundation of jazz harmony came into play. Now the blues pianists start adding a New Orleans rhythm and expanding on the blues form and you have ragtime. Then, small brass bands said, hey, we can play that stuff in a group format, and away things went. A bit of a simplification, but Bernstein made a convincing argument.

    The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra recently went to Cuba and Wynton gave a demonstration about how Afro Cuban clave patterns synchronized perfectly over traditional New Orleans jazz rhythms, because they both came from Africa. I wonder what Wynton's whole take on the classical angle would be, since Wynton is an award winning classical performer, and a jazz historian, I am sure he has an educated perspective that would be interesting to research.

  4. #28

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    Quote Originally Posted by cosmic gumbo
    There used to be this guy in NYC named Leonard Bernstein, who knew a little bit about classical music ...
    And people think that my tone is condescending...

    So many problems with your statements.

    First of all Lenny was not addressing musicologists, he was aiming at the general public. Also, Lenny - while a great conductor, composer and ambassador for music - was not a musicologist. A composer and a musicologist are not the same thing. It would be like saying that an author is automatically an expert on the history of literature.

    Next, your assertion (through Lenny's mouth) that microtonal blue notes are a necessity for jazz or blues is ridiculous at face value - if that were true, neither would be playable on the piano. Is Bill Evans an incomplete jazz player because he can't play microtonal blue notes? Is Otis Spann an incomplete blues piano player because he can't? Plenty of blues and jazz gets played without microtonal blues notes. The crushed m2s that you refer to are not an approximation but just a jarring dissonance that doesn't even come close to the original. They are a colorful feature, but they are not required. Evans would soloing on a monophonic keyboard would not sound like less authentic jazz, and Spann would not sound less bluesy. There are plenty of jazz guitarists who don't use microtonal blues notes - are they not authentic jazz players? No, it is a nice color but it is far from a structural requirement.

    The first two elements that you mention, "form" and "cadences" are clearly European in origin. The forms of jazz are exact copies of common forms in classical. And cadences? Are we joking? These are from the European tradition - West African music doesn't even have chords in the sense that we do. As to rhythms, with a few stylistic exceptions, the rhythms of jazz closely resemble European music - fixed meters (the exact same ones that white music was using), standard subdivisions, etc. There are some important elements of African music (swing, loose rhythmic alignment - "heterogeneous sound ideal", etc.) True, these are very important for the feel of jazz. But to lump that all as "the rhythm comes from Africa" is just plain silly - either you misheard Lenny, or he was overgeneralizing for an audience that knows little about music. Perhaps he is trying to overemphasize the African elements just out of race-guilt, but I would hope that we were past that by now.

    But this is exactly the kind of overgeneralizing that I am talking about. You guys keep telling me that there is no bias towards overstating the African contributions, and then in the process you provide me more examples.

    As to the Wynton thing, as I mentioned he comes from a strong Afro-centric chauvinism. I'm not aware that he is a "jazz historian" as you say. He is a respected performer, but that is not the same thing. Jazz historians publish books, submit articles to peer-reviewed journals, and present at conferences. Just being a respected performer that likes to shoot of his mouth about the slanted view of jazz history that his father taught him - that does not make him a jazz historian. That requires intensive research, not an ego that makes him think that he knows everything. (Don't get me started on Wynton - hell of a player, but thinks that confidence and knowledge are the same thing.)

    Yes the clave seems to have began in Africa. Yes, a dumbed down version of the clave is used in certain New Orleans grooves, like the boogaloo. But New Orleans didn't get it from Africa - it got it from the Caribbean, well after jazz was born. Check out Peter Navaez' article "The Influences of Hispanic Music Cultures on African-American Blues Musicians" in the Black Music Research Journal, Vol 14, no 2, Autumn 1994. Someone had previously mentioned the Caribbean influence, and it is important. When I lived in New Orleans, I even heard some of the old guys talk about Mexican influences. But these are mostly surface elements that are not in the core structure of the music. And Wynton's point is moot since the NOLA grooves he is talking about are mainly played in NOLA (like the boogaloo, originally "bugalú" in Spanish) and in a few R&B grooves (Bo Didley beat, etc.) The clave is not an element of 99.99% of jazz, so it really isn't relevant to this conversation. Having come from New Orleans, I used to try to get the guys in the band to do 2nd line groves, etc, after I came here. Too many blank stares broke me of the habit.

    But it's Wynton being light a loose with the facts again. Anything that makes the black heritage of jazz look good at the the expense of the white heritage of jazz is OK with him. But even if he could prove that they both trace back to Africa (instead of one to another) all that proves is that that one element came from Africa, not everything. I have never said that no elements came from Africa. My point was the tendency to downplay European contribution and oversell the African contribution.

    Thank you for providing some more examples of the subtle reverse racism that amateur jazz historians push on the unsuspecting public.

    Sorry, if I got a little heated. I found your tone at the beginning very condescending.

    Peace,
    Kevin
    Last edited by ksjazzguitar; 01-30-2011 at 03:41 AM.

  5. #29

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    Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information.

  6. #30

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    Quote Originally Posted by Dark Star
    Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information.
    The problem is the word "anyone." Good sources are reviewed by scholars. Granted Wikipedia is doing it's best to control certain content to try and ameliorate the problem, but they can only do so much. I've found personally (and has been found in studies) that it is pretty good on general subjects, but the more technical and the more controversial it gets, the more likely you are to run into misinformation. I personally have found and tried to correct several pieces of misinformation, sometimes garnering a hue and cry from the peanut gallery in protest. Many of these have been facts that are easily checkable in any good reference book. But that is the problem with Wikipedia (and information on the internet in general) - it is driven by a bunch of people who half know the subject and think that facts are up for a popularity vote.

    Yes, Wikipedia is awesome. But like anything else, you have to know it's limitations. If you look up "Wikipedia" on Wikipedia, you will see several of these concerns mentioned. I think that Wikipedia is a good place to start research, and as long as things don't get too technical (or controversial) then you are probably OK. But research should never end with Wikipedia - it is just too unreliable on very specific things and it is unverifiable because you have no idea who is writing it and what their standing is. And ultimately it is only one source and real research should never rely on one source (especially an anonymous one.) Of course, once you get beyond high school, no encyclopedia should be used as a research source, but at least regular encyclopedias are written reviewed by experts in their fields.

    But it is great. If I can't go to sleep until I can remember the name of Elizabeth Taylor's 3rd husband, or if I'm dying to remember how many days the Alamo lasted before it fell - Wikipedia is the first place I go. But if I'm doing research into Levy-Straussian structuralism and its application of mediator triangles to Native American trickster folklore for a research paper - Wikipedia just isn't going to be good or reliable enough - not if I want confidence in the information.

    Peace,
    Kevin
    Last edited by ksjazzguitar; 01-30-2011 at 12:50 PM.

  7. #31

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    Sorry, I should have attributed that as a quote:

  8. #32

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    IC

    Now I feel bad. I love The Office.

    Peace,
    Kevin

  9. #33

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    Quote Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar
    And people think that my tone is condescending...

    Peace,
    Kevin
    That was addressing the whole forum, which is what this place is, it's not private. Probably anyone under the age of 40 doesn't have any idea who Bernstein is, unfortunately. Or perhaps fortunately, because you kind of portray him as a hack, to those who might not know him. I didn't realize he had an agenda, or was so ignorant about jazz. He was using African, blues, jazz, and classical music in his presentation that made a convincing lie.

    Perhaps many of us who have studied the origins and evolution of jazz have been misled by educators with an agenda. We think we are somewhat informed, but actually we are still ignorant. I really try to avoid dispensing inaccurate information.

  10. #34

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    Quote Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar
    Sure it does. In the same way, linguists trace most European languages back to a common Indo-European root. It may not be important for a butcher trying to talk to his customers, but it is useful for a linguist trying to understand language.
    Even a musicologist should know when to stop, though. If you are trying to understand a relatively modern linguistic development like, say, the emergence of Catalan, you look at Romance languages, perhaps Germanic dialects, vernacular Latin, maybe even classical Latin, you aren't likely to go as far back as Indo-European stuff because it would cease to be helpful. If you wanted to examine the Rolling Stones from a musicological stance, you would probably look at how British musicians were absorbing black American music at the time, tracing the latter back to your (still disputed) European classical music tradition wouldn't shed much light.
    Similarly, it is important that the harmony of jazz is an extension of the harmonic language of classical, directly or indirectly. Without that language, jazz would have no chords or chord progressions.
    And "directly or indirectly" seems a very important distinction to me, because I don't accept your "everything stems from classical music" position. Classical music is not the father and mother of everything else, secular music came first (and continued), then church music, then classical music. The codification of things like harmonic progressions doesn't mean they originated with classical music. Chopin did not invent the mazurka, for example, he used something extant.
    In the same way, linguists trace most European languages back to a common Indo-European root. It may not be important for a butcher trying to talk to his customers, but it is useful for a linguist trying to understand language.
    Even a musicologist should know when to stop, though. If you are trying to understand a relatively modern linguistic development like, say, the emergence of Catalan, you look at Romance languages, perhaps Germanic dialects, vernacular Latin, maybe even classical Latin, you aren't likely to go back to Indo-European stuff because it ceases to be helpful. If you wanted to explain the Rolling Stones musicologically, you would probably look at how British musicians were absorbing black American music at the time, tracing the latter back to your (still disputed) European classical music tradition wouldn't shed much light.
    Quote Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar
    First of all Lenny was not addressing musicologists, he was aiming at the general public. Also, Lenny... was not a musicologist.
    But he was a respected educator, and you're going to have to be more convincing than that to disqualify him. And the theory Cosmic describes so nicely pretty well fits my memories of what Marshall Stearns says in The Story of Jazz. I know it's decades out of date (so am I), but I understand that it is usually criticized for not being pro-negro enough. And that was the orthodox position of the time, that the minor pentatonic scale met the major diatonic scale and a kind of compromise was reached, the blues scale. Of course, Bernstein/Stearns didn't know as much about African music as is known now.
    your assertion (through Lenny's mouth) that microtonal blue notes are a necessity for jazz or blues is ridiculous at face value - if that were true, neither would be playable on the piano... The crushed m2s that you refer to are not an approximation but just a jarring dissonance that doesn't even come close to the original.
    Or essential to jazz. Isn't dissonance an essential part of jazz? Not the dissonant tension resolving to harmony of classical music, but dissonance for its own sake. Come to that, who would you choose as the epitome of jazz pianists, someone technically brilliant, maybe verging on classical virtuosity, like Bill Evans or Oscar Peterson, or someone down and dirty like Jelly Roll Morton or Fats Waller? Doesn't jazz sound better on an upright than a grand piano (and if slightly out of tune, so much the better)?
    They are a colorful feature, but they are not required.
    There's that 'color' trivialization again, your disqualifications are getting repetitive.
    There are plenty of jazz guitarists who don't use microtonal blues notes - are they not authentic jazz players?
    Just to establish a common ground for debate, who? If jazz guitar playing hasn't got actual bends, it tends to have a heap of vibrato to obfuscate the pitch (plus, if it sounds like classical music, maybe that's because no, it isn't jazz).
    No, it is a nice color but it is far from a structural requirement.
    Again. Just saying.
    The first two elements that you mention, "form" and "cadences" are clearly European in origin.
    Of course, we all know the well known "12-bar sonata" form. Not to mention the "first-movement rag," preferred by Salieri.
    either you misheard Lenny, or he was overgeneralizing for an audience that knows little about music.
    Or that was the generally believed idea (and still is) - that African music, transposed to North America, met European harmony (I'll accept that, it's the 'classical harmony' I won't) and they begat the blues which begat jazz. As we're coolish about Wikipedia lately, I'll point you at this page (Understanding Jazz: The Roots of Jazz) from the Kennedy Centre. I'm not suggesting you read it, it's highly simplified, but just count: 30-something lines about the African roots of jazz, and 6 on its European influences. So, rather than that Bernstein was overgeneralizing, it would seem that yours is a rogue opinion.
    Wynton's point is moot since the NOLA grooves he is talking about are mainly played in NOLA...
    And New Orleans has no part in a conversation about the origins of jazz, now?
    The clave is not an element of 99.99% of jazz, so it really isn't relevant to this conversation.
    Anything that addresses the mystery of swing sounds relevant to me.

  11. #35

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    Quote Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar



    Next, your assertion (through Lenny's mouth) that microtonal blue notes are a necessity for jazz or blues is ridiculous at face value - if that were true, neither would be playable on the piano. Is Bill Evans an incomplete jazz player because he can't play microtonal blue notes? Is Otis Spann an incomplete blues piano player because he can't? Plenty of blues and jazz gets played without microtonal blues notes. The crushed m2s that you refer to are not an approximation but just a jarring dissonance that doesn't even come close to the original. They are a colorful feature, but they are not required. Evans would soloing on a monophonic keyboard would not sound like less authentic jazz, and Spann would not sound less bluesy. There are plenty of jazz guitarists who don't use microtonal blues notes - are they not authentic jazz players? No, it is a nice color but it is far from a structural requirement.


    Peace,
    Kevin


    when I was in Jazz history class back in 1976 we were taught that blue notes came to be as a result of the clash of the western major scale with the different pentatonic style scales that made up the music of the various tribes whose member were kidnaped and brought to the west.

    Most of those scale did not contain either the 3rd or 5th so a lot of the African slaves approximated the 3rd and 5th and wound up sliding into then.
    Hence the blue note

    I'm no expert nor am I a historian. But I'm pretty sure this explanation has been published before.

    I remember those Bernstein lectures. They were great for music appreciation. He wrote the score to West side Story. I wouldn't be dissin' him

  12. #36

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    Quote Originally Posted by cosmic gumbo
    ...Perhaps many of us who have studied the origins and evolution of jazz have been misled by educators with an agenda. We think we are somewhat informed, but actually we are still ignorant. I really try to avoid dispensing inaccurate information.
    I don't think that there is a conscious agenda, just an unconscious tendency. Probably a lot of it comes from race-guilt and the tendency to emphasize what was different - the elements that come from the European tradition seem "invisible" to someone steeped in the European tradition.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    Even a musicologist should know when to stop, though. ...
    Uhhh, so linguists can go back over 5000 year to reconstruct PIE, but I can't go back 100 years to reconstruct the origins of jazz? At least I'm working from written records. And reconstructing the African origins of jazz require going just as far back as looking for the European ones. It's just not taboo.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    If you wanted to examine the Rolling Stones from a musicological stance, you would probably look at how British musicians were absorbing black American music at the time, tracing the latter back to your (still disputed) European classical music tradition wouldn't shed much light.
    It depends on the scale. If your goal is to see direct influences, then no. If you're goal is to look at the ultimate origins of the language, then you need to look back further than 10 years. You are trying to force and arbitrarily narrow scope. I'm saying that there is value in looking back further.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    ...Classical music is not the father and mother of everything else, secular music came first (and continued), then church music, then classical music. The codification of things like harmonic progressions doesn't mean they originated with classical music. Chopin did not invent the mazurka, for example, he used something extant.
    First of all, we know next to nothing about early secular music. Secondly, for much of western music history, classical and church music were synonymous. Even so, since then all three have had an interwoven relationship. Classical music has informed sacred music (mostly leading.) Classical and folk music fed each other to a great extent. Classical borrowed ideas from folk and folk followed trends in classical (although often watered down.) But classical theory has been the standard by which the others have been understood.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    ...But he [Lenny] was a respected educator, and you're going to have to be more convincing than that to disqualify him....
    "Scholar" and "educator" are no the same thing. Bill Nye the Science Guy is "respected as an educator" - that does not make him a scholar. Lenny had a great ability to connect with the public. But he was not a musicologist.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    And the theory Cosmic describes so nicely pretty well fits my memories of what Marshall Stearns says in The Story of Jazz.
    I'm not saying that it is not widely taught. But it is less commonly taught nowadays (in academia at least.) When Miles went to Julliard he was taught that "black people sang the blues because they had to pick cotton and they were sad." (Forgive me if I mixed up the quote.) Back then, blues and jazz were still "n-word music." It seems that for a while we swung the opposite direction - a sort of reverse-race-bias. I'm suggesting that we swing back to the middle.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    Isn't dissonance an essential part of jazz? Not the dissonant tension resolving to harmony of classical music, but dissonance for its own sake.
    Yes. But my point is that micotonal blue notes clearly aren't a requirement since great jazz can be made without it.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    There's that 'color' trivialization again, your disqualifications are getting repetitive.
    You seem to think that "color" is an insult. To me it isn't. Color is very important. It gives music its flavor. I was just trying to distinguish between things that are structural. I'm not saying that the skeleton is more important than the skin, just that it has a different function. Again, as I said before, one could argue that those kind of surface elements are the most important - they are the ones that people most readily recognize.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    Of course, we all know the well known "12-bar sonata" form. Not to mention the "first-movement rag," preferred by Salieri.
    That argument would be really compelling if you could show that these forms have African origin. They don't they have much more in common with the regular forms of European music. Again, there is no harmonic form in African music - it is the harmonic movement that defines blues best, not the number of bars. If it is just the number of bars, then there are plenty of examples in the European tradition. And I'm not aware that there are 12-bar forms in African music - indeed, words like "bar" and "form" don't mean the same thing in that music.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    ...As we're coolish about Wikipedia lately, I'll point you at this page (Understanding Jazz: The Roots of Jazz) from the Kennedy Centre. I'm not suggesting you read it, it's highly simplified, but just count: 30-something lines about the African roots of jazz, and 6 on its European influences. So, rather than that Bernstein was overgeneralizing, it would seem that yours is a rogue opinion.
    My argument isn't with Wikipedia, but with non-scolarly, non-peer-reviewed sources replacing scholarship. Notice that there are no sources and it doesn't even tell us who wrote it. For all we know, it was just written by some intern, base on what he read on Wikipedia, and something he remembers from a lecture he once hear given by Lenny. These types of things are usually just derivative of the popular sentiment of the time. It of course goes to great pains to accent African influences but gives short shrift to European ones. They casually mention "harmony" as if it is not one of the most important elements. It ignores form and temperement. It ignores that scales have as much to do with the European version as the African ones.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    And New Orleans has no part in a conversation about the origins of jazz, now?
    Of course it does. But my point is that if it [jazz clave] wasn't part of jazz when it formed, and it never really made it into jazz beyond NOLA, then how can it be defined as "important"? If the vast majority doesn't have it, then it cannot be described as a defining characteristic.

    The point that Wynton was trying to make was that NOLA music has clave and so does Afro-Cuban music, therefore they both come from Africa. First of all, it is of limited application to this discussion, since the vast majority of jazz doesn't have it. The other problem with Wynton's argument is that he is ignoring the fact that NOLA music didn't get the clave from Africa, but from the Carribbean influence, after jazz and blues developed. Again, the man is not a scholar, and his Afro-centrist view of music history is well known. People seem to think that someone being a musical celebrity automatically makes them a scholar.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    Anything that addresses the mystery of swing sounds relevant to me.
    I'm not sure that the clave tells us anything about swing. Swing is one of the few things that can clearly be traced to African music, along with a general looseness in phrasing (again, not an insult, it's just an aesthetic choice.) But I'm not sure what it has to do with clave.

    Peace,
    Kevin
    Last edited by ksjazzguitar; 01-31-2011 at 06:07 PM.

  13. #37

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    I was hoping this forum was a little more mature and informed. This debate is still going on in 2011? Jazz is American, not European, not African. Informed by both. This is what happens in a country that does not require art and culture to be taught to all in a public education. It's called ignorance. BTW, Wynton Marsalis is the highest paid jazz scholar in the world.
    Last edited by max chill; 01-31-2011 at 06:20 PM.

  14. #38

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    Thanks Max, but we know that. The point is what elements come from what cultures (assuming that the American music culture was so close to the European one that they were effectively the same for the scale of this discussion) and is there an unconscious tendency to emphasize the African ones and underemphasize the European/American ones.

    Peace,
    Kevin

  15. #39

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    Quote Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar
    You are trying to force and arbitrarily narrow scope. I'm saying that there is value in looking back further.
    I'm not trying to force anything, that isn't my style.
    First of all, we know next to nothing about early secular music.
    We know that it was, that's all I said. And was first.
    Secondly, for much of western music history, classical and church music were synonymous.
    Nuts. You're now saying that composed music = classical.
    But classical theory has been the standard by which the others have been understood.
    Yes, this is what evangelists do. There you are with a perfectly good ritual to welcome in the spring and they come along and call it Easter. No, I'm not having it.
    Bill Nye the Science Guy is "respected as an educator" - that does not make him a scholar.
    No idea who you are talking about. But if he is really respected, that means he doesn't just make it up and present it to the public. Neither did Bernstein, I feel.
    Lenny had a great ability to connect with the public. But he was not a musicologist.
    You asked our opinion not as musicologists but as members of this forum. We aren't musicologists, most of us, at least. Neither are you, as I understand, excuse me if I'm mistaken and not that I want to make anything of it, but if you're doing a Master's in music after coming from somewhere else, you're at most a fledgling musicologist. I didn't call myself a physiologist when I was an undergrad and, never having worked in the field, I never have done. You get the right to call yourself an "-ogist" when you are paid to do it or have exercised for some time, not when you're attending classes. Leonard Bernstein wasn't a musicologist? Bah.
    I'm not saying that it is not widely taught. But it is less commonly taught nowadays (in academia at least.)
    If it is already being taught that European music is more important than was previously thought, where's your thesis?
    When Miles went to Julliard...
    You can respect Miles as much as you like (I can take him or leave him, myself), but he didn't have anything at all to do with the origins of jazz.
    Yes. But my point is that micotonal blue notes clearly aren't a requirement since great jazz can be made without it.
    Jazz is not what it was, more's the pity. Some of us would rather like to have a time machine to be able to go back and assassinate a few key figures in the creation of modern jazz. But, again, that isn't relevant to your thesis. Jazz as it began could not, ever, under any circumstances, be played without blue notes (the 'microtonal' is an irrelevancy, who cares if the correct terminology is ' microtonal'? They're just blue notes).
    I was just trying to distinguish between things that are structural.
    Scales are about as structural as it comes in music, in this case especially so as melody is always superior to harmony, in any musical system. To say that the scale is only 'colour,' or "surface elements... the ones that people most readily recognize" is really missing the point.
    That argument would be really compelling if you could show that these forms have African origin.
    It was just a joke, Kevin. You really do need to get out more.
    Again, there is no harmonic form in African music
    I'll just mention that I'd like to talk about this another day.
    I'm not sure that the clave tells us anything about swing.
    Tells me something. One of the advantages of living in Spain nowadays is the easy access to Latin American music, and it is totally obvious to me that the umph that good salsa has is pretty much the same as swing. And "clave" is really no more than the pulse transmitted in a way that tells the dancer what to do. Bossa, for example, is clave, reggaeton is clave, they're just instructions as to what to do with your hips and so forth, and the pulse that gives you the urge to get up and move. I've always believed that the rightful place of jazz was first and foremost as a dance music.

  16. #40

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    Quote Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar
    T there an unconscious tendency to emphasize the African ones and underemphasize the European/American ones.

    I've read the whole thread. Since jazz was a new music created by blacks in America, studying the origins raises some logical order to pursuing answers. The basic question is usually, "what makes jazz different from European classical music"? The answer would describe the African elements. You seem to propose a similar question, which is, "what makes jazz different from African music"? Then the answer would be the western classical elements.

    Jazz has evolved to be so much more than it was, but the original jazz needed the African elements to be considered jazz. Scott Joplin's ragtime was not jazz, but Jellyroll Morton's ragtime was, even though they were both black. Joplin chose to let classical be the stronger influence, while Morton did not. It is not unusual to focus on what creators did that made things different. The earliest blues were much closer in melody and form to African music than western music. However, jazz as we know it today has become more complex and evolved because of the application of western harmonic theory.

    Before the blues you would have had field hollers or maybe this...African American or European American?

    Last edited by max chill; 01-31-2011 at 09:58 PM.

  17. #41

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    Hesitant to weigh in here... But, I must say, that the argument the OP advances is disturbing. I couldn't disagree more with you, Kevin.

    Your argument seems to be premised on an underlying sense of white victimhood, that white jazz musicians and Western aristocratic and bourgeois traditions of "classical music" have been done an injustice by overzealous African American nationalists and pseudo-scholars. While I do not have much use for Bernstein, and regard W Marsalis as in fact deeply conservative, the idea that we would dismiss non-academically-affiliated intellectuals because they do not submit to peer review, etc. is extremely limiting. I spend a lot of time reading peer reviewed academic literature, and I have not found scholarly writing to have half as much profundity and wisdom as the words of Louis Armstrong, Monk, Duke Ellington, Sun Ra, etc. The Italian radical Antonio Gramsci had a term for folks like the giants of bebop-- "organic intellectuals." To my mind, in both words and music, jazz musicians number among the most important social philosophers of the 20th century. (And the academic establishment sure lets a lot of nonsense through the peer-review filter...)

    The argument that jazz's true history has been traduced by overzealous Afro-centric interpreters is all over the recent literature on white jazz (see, e.g. "Lost Chords"), and it is not persuasive, connected as it is historically to the neoconservative attacks of the 1980s and 1990s on efforts to expand the literary canon, offer courses in ethnic studies, etc. In fact, most mainstream jazz thinkers, like Marsalis and Giddens and the Ken Burns Jazz series, offer a highly individualistic story of jazz based on a few remarkable geniuses, and almost always pegged to an American exceptionalist narrative that blunts the sharp edges of jazz's challenge to American self-celebration.

    To return to your argument. I think that the problem of your argument lies in the reification of the score or transcription. This is a "useful fiction" in musicology, but we should recall that jazz is a living form that includes both scores and improvisation, live performance and studio recordings, educational practices as well as social criticism. Noting that certain cadences "come from" classical music, and that syncopation and hemiola can be find in a wide variety of non-African music, seems to me an inadequate means of establishing the priority of one form's influence over that of the other.

    Although I can't imagine you agreeing with this, my take on jazz history and jazz aesthetics comes down to a central, unavoidable point: in the final analysis, jazz is a part of the global black Diasporic aesthetic tradition, an internationalist and syncretic tradition in which improvisation, syncopation, group participation, what Zora Neale Hurston called the "will to ornament," the correlation of beauty and feats of skill, and a deeply dialectical relationship with Christianity (and Christian music) have been and continue to be central aesthetic tendencies.

    I am not essentializing, not being a racial determinist--simply making a commonsensical observation from reasoned historical study and critical reflection. I am not denying that scottish pipers, klezmer fiddlers, or baroque organists improvise--but they don't play jazz, and counterfactually, it is impossible to imagine any context for the emergence of jazz other than African diasporic communities. Am I wrong?

    There is a vast literature on this. I might recommend reading Farah Jasmine Griffin, Robin D.G. Kelley, John Szwed, George Lipsitz, Eric Porter, George Lewis, and the more recent ethnomusicological literature on jazz and blues. You might discover, as some other posters have noted, that your complaint is a very old one, and that in fact the sorting out of taste hierarchies re: jazz and "serious music" is one of the central tensions of American musical history.

    Denying African American music its African American (and African) contexts does violence to historical memory and distorts the political meanings of jazz. (And a final point--the assertion re: African retentions evaporating because of the end of the slave trade in 1808 is deeply wrong... this is a deep and complex subject--among other things, the illegal importation of slaves continued well after 1808, varying levels of solidarity existed in different places and times, and there was a whole network of interaction between diasporic African communities from the beginning of the slave trade to this day-- you might want to read Sterling Stuckey's Slave Culture, Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism, and George Rawick's essays on the WPA slave narratives...)

    Didn't mean to rattle on so long... and sorry to be so insistent. You may well choose to ignore or fight me on these points. That's cool. But if you are going to argue what you argue, I thought you should at least be prepared for some justified anger and bafflement, of the variety presented above.

  18. #42

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    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    Nuts. You're now saying that composed music = classical.
    Not that is not what I said. What I said was that through much of Western music history, the vast majority of what we see is church music - that was classical music. It isn't until the second millennium that we see secular court music being written down. I'm sure there was folk and court music going on, but we know little to nothing about it. And since then (and as far as we know before) the three (sacred, court, and folk) have been interwoven. The theory of the folk music that we know of has always been a watered down version of the theory of the court music. This is not like in some Eastern societies where completely different musics evolve in different castes. No, there is a lot of "communication" going on between these musics and they are very closely related.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    No idea who you are talking about. [Bill Nye the Science Guy] But if he is really respected, that means he doesn't just make it up and present it to the public. Neither did Bernstein, I feel.
    He hosts a kids show on science. Well respected as an educator but when the asteroid is plummeting to the destroy the earth, he is not the guy their going to call, because he is a TV personality. Likewise Lenny was just really good at communicating with people (along with other prodigious talents) but was not a scholar. He didn't get a degree in musicology, he didn't spend years working on a doctoral dissertation on the roots of blues, that was later analyzed by other scholars. He didn't submit articles to peer reviewed journals. He didn't go to conferences to present papers to be discussed by panels of experts. That's what scholars do. Lenny was a celebrity and he used that to reach people - Great! - but that doesn't make him a scholar.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    You asked our opinion not as musicologists but as members of this forum. We aren't musicologists, most of us, at least. Neither are you, as I understand, excuse me if I'm mistaken and not that I want to make anything of it, but if you're doing a Master's in music after coming from somewhere else, you're at most a fledgling musicologist.
    True, but the standards of evidence are the same wherever you come from. If this were a physics forum and someone said that perpetual motion were possible, we wouldn't say, "Well, he's not a physicist, so we'll say that he's correct." No, the standards are the same, regardless of the background. People make mistakes, so do I. People have misconceptions, so do I. But the standards of proof are still the same.

    But musicologist is a label. It refers to an approach and an attitude. It is a mindset. I haven't gotten my PhD yet, but I'm getting there. Did I have to wait for my degree in classical guitar to call myself a classical guitarist? I think that having done years of grad work in musicology allows me to wear that hat.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    If it is already being taught that European music is more important than was previously thought [in the development of jazz], where's your thesis?
    That there is a lot of resistance to the idea in the general public.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    Jazz as it began could not, ever, under any circumstances, be played without blue notes (the 'microtonal' is an irrelevancy, who cares if the correct terminology is ' microtonal'? They're just blue notes).
    There's a huge difference - but that was mainly about Lenny's idea of the importance of those notes in between the notes. And I've transcribed a lot of Dixie and old swing stuff and I don't recall being bombarded with blues notes. There are many pieces that don't have blues notes. Are they not jazz?

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    Scales are about as structural as it comes in music, in this case especially so as melody is always superior to harmony, in any musical system. ...
    Well, I don't really think of the blue notes as being scalar - maybe in blues, but not really in jazz. For the same reason that I don't think of the passingtones in the so called bebop scales as being scalar - they are not functioning as scale tones but as chromatic color in the scale. (But this is getting into semantics.) Again, there are heaps of great jazz solos that have no blue notes in them.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    Tells me something. One of the advantages of living in Spain nowadays is the easy access to Latin American music, and it is totally obvious to me that the umph that good salsa has is pretty much the same as swing.
    Well, if you think that Salsa has swing, then you and I are talking about two different things.

    Quote Originally Posted by max chill
    The basic question is usually, "what makes jazz different from European classical music"? The answer would describe the African elements. You seem to propose a similar question, which is, "what makes jazz different from African music"? Then the answer would be the western classical elements.
    Yes, the problem is that people seldom ask the second question.

    Perhaps there is an element of perspective - we notice things that are different. But that fact that they stand out more from our subjective position does not make them uniquely worthy of notice, at the expense of everything else.

    Quote Originally Posted by max chill
    Jazz has evolved to be so much more than it was, but the original jazz needed the African elements to be considered jazz
    My point is that it also needed some extremely important elements from the European tradition as well. These are often given short shrift.

    Quote Originally Posted by max chill
    The earliest blues were much closer in melody and form to African music than western music.
    I think that that really depends on what we're defining as the "earliest blues." Once we get to the point that there is a chord progression, then there is a heavy component of European tradition. What element of "form" are you ascribing to African origin? When I hear Western African traditional music, I don't hear anything even resembling jazz.

    Peace,
    Kevin
    Last edited by ksjazzguitar; 02-01-2011 at 02:41 AM.

  19. #43

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    Quote Originally Posted by JEdgarWinter
    ...Your argument seems to be premised on an underlying sense of white victimhood, that white jazz musicians and Western aristocratic and bourgeois traditions of "classical music" have been done an injustice by overzealous African American nationalists and pseudo-scholars.
    I think "victim" would be harsh, especially to the extent that it pales in comparison to the suffering of African-Americans. But guilt is not a reason to distort facts. Whites are not suffereing as a result - the truth is the victim.

    Quote Originally Posted by JEdgarWinter
    While I do not have much use for Bernstein, and regard W Marsalis as in fact deeply conservative, the idea that we would dismiss non-academically-affiliated intellectuals because they do not submit to peer review, etc. is extremely limiting.
    My complaint is not that they don't have a degree. My problem is that they are putting forth suppositions that they (while consistent with popular sentiment) contradict scholarship. The facts are not a popularity contest. It doesn't matter how many people believe it. Unfortunately, celebrities often think that they are brilliant just because someone sticks a microphone in their face. But being a celebrity and being an expert in music history are not the same thing. I don't blame discount them just because they are celebrities, I discount them because they don't appear to know what they are talking about. They have thrown together a few factoids and spackled it together with suppositions. Forgive me, but Lenny and Winton are phenomenal musicians, but humilty is not a virtue with which either familiar. And good scholars have to start with the humility of assuming that they may not know something and be willing to do the work to find out - those guys are too busy being stars to do the work - but they had an plenty of ego to take it's place.

    Quote Originally Posted by JEdgarWinter
    I spend a lot of time reading peer reviewed academic literature, and I have not found scholarly writing to have half as much profundity and wisdom as the words of Louis Armstrong, Monk, Duke Ellington, Sun Ra, etc. The Italian radical Antonio Gramsci had a term for folks like the giants of bebop-- "organic intellectuals."
    Being inspired by choice words is one thing. But if you want history, ask an historian. If you want inspiration or art, then you want someone with their head in the clouds (not meant as an insult) but if you want good history, you want someone who is careful and follows good methodology.

    Quote Originally Posted by JEdgarWinter
    The argument that jazz's true history has been traduced by overzealous Afro-centric interpreters is all over the recent literature on white jazz (see, e.g. "Lost Chords"), and it is not persuasive, connected as it is historically to the neoconservative attacks of the 1980s and 1990s on efforts to expand the literary canon, offer courses in ethnic studies, etc.
    I think that that is an unfair characterization. (Calling me a neocon - man you know how to wound me. ) The facts are the facts. For the record, I'm a strong supporter of multiculturalism. I think that the African-American contributions to music are strong enough to stand on their own without distortion.

    I notice that you don't delve into the merits of the musical arguments. Where did jazz get harmonic language and chord progressions? Where did it get their instruments? Where did it get its fixed meter? Where did it get its diatonic scales? Where did it get its temperament? Take away even a few of these and it isn't jazz anymore. My point is that if you take away the European influences, then it is just as much "no longer jazz" as if you took away the African influences. But when people talk about the origins of jazz, they only talk about the African contributions and if they mention the European traditions contributions, it is usually just lip service and incomplete. Many definitions of jazz bend over backwards to list and define all the African contributions, sometimes even to the point of exageration.

    Again, I'm not saying that jazz is from the European tradition. I'm saying that it's core (harmony, chord progressions, fixed meter, instruments, scales, temperaments) is essentially European music which has been transformed with African elements (swing, poly-rhythms, call and response, improv, group dynamic, heterogeneous sound ideal, etc.) Both are extremely important and could not have done it alone. But I do feel that one gets emphasized at the expense of the other.

    Quote Originally Posted by JEdgarWinter
    Denying African American music its African American (and African) contexts does violence to historical memory and distorts the political meanings of jazz.
    I'm not denying it, just seeing that it's origins are more complex than often portrayed. And let's not conflate African and African-American - they are too very different things.

    Quote Originally Posted by JEdgarWinter
    (And a final point--the assertion re: African retentions evaporating because of the end of the slave trade in 1808 is deeply wrong...
    There was a gradual transformation of culture that took place that accelerated in 1808. Again, many of the freed slaves that tried to return to Africa were in for a major culture shock - they were not the same cultures. Many of the African aspects of their culture were brutally suppressed in the the colonies and the US. Their religion was flat out banned, families were broken up, they were grouped together without regard to language, their languages were often banned. They were also constantly exposed to "white" culture and music. Again, the Gullah culture was probably the most successful of the African-American groups at continuity of culture and avoiding white influence. But even they were no longer purely "African" - in language or culture. And no other group even came close.

    We can call it a travesty of history, but the African-Americans were not allowed to hold onto their culture in its entirety. But I cannot build a time machine. And if it were not for that enforced aculturalization, we would have no jazz - sometimes travesties can have a good outcome (not to diminish the cultural tragedy.)

    Musical traditions were easier to keep. People could sing together even when they didn't speak the same language. Slave owners even encouraged singing because it made it easier to keep track of where their field hands were. Singing and dancing were an easy form of entertainment for slaves. But slaves also heard and even participated a wide variety of "white" music, from songs and hymns, to folk songs, to even classical music.

    Again, I'm not saying that jazz is a product of American/European culture - that would be idiocy. I'm saying that it was music, made by African-Americans which brought together elements of American/European music traditions along with African-American culture, which still had some important elements of African music that they'd managed to hold onto. I just think that the emphasis that is often given is lopsided. If I made it lopsided in the other way, I'd be called a racist. So I guess I'll label the standard slanting reverse-racist.

    Peace,
    Kevin
    Last edited by ksjazzguitar; 02-01-2011 at 03:01 AM.

  20. #44
    I'm not going to weigh in on the "if the European aspect of Jazz is understated, why is that?" matter, and, personally, as a scholar (undergraduate, admittedly, but definitely going on to post-grad work) I don't think that Kevin should, either. Hypotheses non fingo. It is enough to demonstrate a phenomena without going into why.

    When people ask if this is a topic worth pursuing in a scholarly fashion, I'd have to say the answer is "Yes". The end conclusion of Kevin's work might not end up changing scholarly opinion in any fashion, but it's a perspective out there, and that is what the scholarly establishment IS. A bunch of people yelling their opinions and citing sources about it in such a way that ends up with a general consensus. Just saying "I thought this was already a given" doesn't mean that the work is any less meaningful or worthwhile.

    To Kevin directly- If you're looking at similarities between jazz and European music, I'd say that looking into klezmer is an interesting diversion, if not exactly on topic. The similarities there are rather interesting.

  21. #45

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    Quote Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar
    No, there is a lot of "communication" going on between these musics and they are very closely related.
    Of course. You seemed to be trying to give a pre-eminence precisely to the one least entitled to it, though. You name psalms as a source of European influence, instead of the songs of Stephen Foster, for example. Then you try and say that oh, it's got chord progressions, so even if it isn't classical it comes down to the same thing. Doesn't.
    That's what scholars do.
    I know what scholars do, I've known many. I don't remember any history student or geology student who called himself a historian or a geologist, though. When the meteor is on it's way, as you so nicely point out, they'll call the physicists, not the physics students, not even the physics teachers.
    There are many pieces that don't have blues notes.
    ...there are heaps of great jazz solos that have no blue notes in them.
    You might even be right, but examples, please.
    Well, if you think that Salsa has swing, then you and I are talking about two different things.
    Nothing new, there, then.
    Quote Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar
    But if you want history, ask an historian.
    Or an eyewitness.
    Quote Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar
    Again, I'm not saying that jazz is from the European tradition.
    I, and I think most of those who have replied to you, thought we were arguing about precisely this statement in your original post:
    Quote Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar
    This is part of my larger thesis that jazz (contrary to how many of the public see it) is really an extension of the European tradition.
    So, why don't you make up your mind, make your hypothesis coherent? That way we could discuss it coherently. I suspect from what JEdgarWinter says that there may well be scholarly issues involved with which I am not familiar. If your argument is against some kind of supposed exaggeration of the African side of the input, tell us about it. I haven't heard anything here to make me mistrust - either way - what I learned from Marshall Stearns back in the seventies.
    Last edited by JohnRoss; 02-01-2011 at 11:36 AM.

  22. #46

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    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    You seemed to be trying to give a pre-eminence precisely to the one least entitled to it, though. You name psalms as a source of European influence, instead of the songs of Stephen Foster, for example. Then you try and say that oh, it's got chord progressions, so even if it isn't classical it comes down to the same thing.
    Are you saying that the harmonic language of the European tradition have nothing to do with Foster? The harmonic language of all Western music is inextricably interwoven with the classical tradition. That is where it's language ultimately comes from.

    And also Foster is a bad example - he wasn't as much influencing blacks as they were influencing them. He made a living writing songs that were in a "black" vernacular (many of his songs sound quite racist nowadays.) There was two way communication going on at this point. Black music had already absorbed Western harmony, long before, from the psalms and hymns that informed their spirituals.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    You might even be right, but examples, please.
    Nothing new, there, then.
    *sigh* OK, how about Armstrong's recording of"West End Blues." I looked through a transcription of his playing and cannot find a single blue note. There are chromatic notes, but that are consistent with standard composition. Is this not a blues or a jazz solo because it doesn't contain a blue note? No, because blue notes are not a structural element, if we remove it the structure does not fall. Now, what if we removed the meter or harmony, what would happen? The tune would fall apart because those are structural elements.

    OK, I provided an example of a jazz/blues solo without blue notes. Can you provide an classic jazz solo without a chord progression or meter?

    Jazz can exist without blue notes, but it cannot exist without chord progressions or regular meter.

    You seem to be caught up on this terminology as if "structural" is more important. But people remember the Empire State Building, not because of the steel girders that hold it up but because of how it looks on the outside. Both the inside and the outside work together to create the overall effect.

    I am not trying to overemphasize the contribution of the European/classical/white-American contribution, I am just trying to give it the place it deserves. Clearly some very imporatant elements of jazz come from the African tradition and clearly the work was done by African-Americans. But my point is that that is all that ever gets emphasis.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    "[KS said]But if you want history, ask an historian."
    Or an eyewitness.
    I'm not aware that Lenny or Wynton were eyewitnesses to this. And where do you think that historians get their information? They get it from eyewitnesses along with other primary sources and see how it compares with the evidence.

    But eyewitnesses can be tricky things. I was just looking up the death of Crockett at the Alamo - I found 4 different conflicting eyewitness accounts.

    Quote Originally Posted by JohnRoss
    I, and I think most of those who have replied to you, thought we were arguing about precisely this statement in your original post: "[KS said] This is part of my larger thesis that jazz (contrary to how many of the public see it) is really an extension of the European tradition." So, why don't you make up your mind, make your hypothesis coherent?
    Perhaps that is a little bold in an effort to make my point. It's called "hyperbole." And I think that from the perspective of essential elements (those without which the music falls apart) one can build an argument. We have jazz that doesn't have swing, blue notes, etc. Can you think of jazz that doesn't have chords or meter? (Excluding "free jazz" which to me isn't really jazz, but that's for another time.) These African-American jazz-inventors built on a European concept of what music is - harmony, chord progressions, regular meter, etc. It is from that that they added elements that are distinctly African to create something new. But people seem to only ever talk about the African elements.

    But ultimately it is how these two musical traditions come together to make something new that is interesting. I'm just saying that we should look at the contributions in their entirety, not just ignore one side for the sake of race politics.

    And ultimately, I'm allowed to change my mind and adjust my opinions. This is not a doctoral dissertation. This is a discussion. I'm not trying to build a linear and coherent argument at this point. I was sincerely interested in some input. Ironically, some of the "evidence" against my claim has shown some of the bias and hostility to discussion that I was trying to prove.

    Peace,
    Kevin
    Last edited by ksjazzguitar; 02-01-2011 at 04:05 PM.

  23. #47

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    Just thinking here.

    Maybe another way to say it is that the theory (chords, chord progressions, meter, etc.) comes mainly from the American side and the stylistic performance elements (improv, group dynamic, HSI, call and response, etc.) elements come from African elements. Really, the blue note (which clearly is not required or it would have to be in every jazz song and solo) seems to be the only theoretical element that comes from the African tradition.

    Maybe that is a better way to say it (or maybe not.)

    Peace,
    Kevin

  24. #48

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    Europen or African? Mm..I don't know that... Aieeeeeeeeee!!!

  25. #49

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    OK, that was cute.

    Peace,
    Kevin

  26. #50

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    Quote Originally Posted by ksjazzguitar
    *sigh* OK, how about Armstrong's recording of"West End Blues." I looked through a transcription of his playing and cannot find a single blue note.
    It's full of them, unless flattened thirds over major / dominant chords are no longer blue notes. They always were in my day, but I expect they aren't microtonal enough for you. And if you're going to ask people to discuss something then get all petulant and exasperated because no-one buys your theory, I call that just plain bad-mannered. So you can have the rest of this conversation with yourself, as far as I'm concerned.