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06-23-2019 03:58 PM
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accepting what a "blues progression" is..and then hearing what "jazz" musicians can do with it...Monk..Miles..are prime examples...is "All Blues" a Blues tune? how about Blue Monk..? then throw gas on the fire...is it now called a "jazz tune" with blues flavors...
your liking what you like is perfect..you may not want to or need to understand why something like the music "Return to Forever" plays is considered jazz next to Louis Armstrong doing St Louis blues..
same with the term "Art" .. emotions run high because of interpertations of terms..and self defined limits of any given expression.."well..thats not art..any 10 yr old can do that.." well that may get you into a fist fight and its not called "boxing" either..
hey relax with what you like and by pass how its is defined
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For some people that's Beethoven, for others it's Megadeth :-)
Originally Posted by lammie200
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These big categories like "classical", "jazz" or the worst ever "EDM" - can only argue about the definition or try some kind of convincing. But in the end, these mostly only work the other way round - they hear music and they put it into one of those baskets.. "lets listen some <genre>" would probably make you expect some specific sound but the same time - wouldn't be much of surprise if it turns out to be something completely different, but still in the range of the genre.
About everyday usage for the term "jazz" - it just lives its own life comfortably. Why bother to try making it to mean something very strict? It'd be hopeless.
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I should have said, I am wondering if there is a study of the phenomenon of an "acquired appeal?" Originally Posted by Jazzstdnt
It's called "it grows on you".
We must factor out the Heritage headstock, however.
And I take it that the Heritage headstock never grew on you. At least it grew big on the end of the neck.
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Thanks for all the responses! Wow.
@pauln: Your final paragraph reminds me of US Supreme Court justice Stuart's oft-cited 1964 comment, "I know it when I see it", regarding pornographic films.
@ragman: Thanks for the push to go look at the Wikipedia page. Of course, I've been there before, but it's worth a refresher. I think that my takeaway this time is (as it has been in the past): It's defined as much by "who" as by "what", as some other posts have reinforced.
@rabbit: The Branford Marsalis interview started out talking about Bach's influence on Wagner; tracing the influence. So, music evolves; genres evolve. But then he closed saying that, to him. jazz must have a swing feel and flatted 5ths and 7ths in the melody; that seems to rule out a pretty wide swath of what I've come to understand as jazz. I mean, I get it: that's how he sees it, but this is kind of the crux of my question. I can say that I either like or don't care for particular artists in their identified genre, but I'm unlikely to declare that some recording, performance or composition isn't part of a particular genre in opposition to the artist's assertion. But when conversing about jazz, I've encountered hard line "that's not jazz" comments much more often that I do about other genres.
@newsense: Your comment about prog borrowing elements of jazz, but deriving from the rock tradition, is helpful. That illustrates a clear separation between the influences, practices and instrumentation and the musicians who shape it all into their own thing.
@christianm77: Your last sentence. "... we are still dealing with the basic concepts ...", intrigues me. This speaks to a tension between the freedom to experiment and a certain reliance upon pedagogy and canon (i.e. standards and history).
@TruthHertz: I like the notion of "creative as opposed to re-creative" and of composing in real-time. Put that together with any particular framework (or style), and it does help to define jazz despite the proliferation of styles.
Regarding the "just listen and enjoy it" comments: I do. Or at least I enjoy some of it, just as I pick and choose selections and artists from the other genres to which I listen. But when folks ask what kind of music my trio plays, I'd like to be able to give them a reasonable answer.
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Maybe jazz is various phases of a long evolution of blues and ragtime into something so academic and/or pop-muzaky that people no longer find it interesting?
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A great book that I HIGHLY recommend on this topic (altho it's not specifically written to answer "what is jazz?" is "Moving To Higher Ground - How Jazz Can Change Your Life" by Wynton Marsalis. (and yes- Ken Burns' docu-series "Jazz" is WELL worth watching; nothing generic or cookie-cutter about it.)
https://www.amazon.com/Moving-Higher.../dp/0812969081
At least part of jazz is a mentality - it's how you THINK ABOUT the music (and that then translates into how you play it).
The book also has alot of cultural and societal stuff in it too... it's not just about music. It really is fantastic, and I can't recommend it highly enough- and not just for jazz musicians- for ALL musicians.
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'There is a native American word that Jim Brown filled me in on. Jim and Mary Brown are the people who put the Oregon Jazz Party on. Salishan means a coming together from diverse points to communicate in harmony. They had one word for that. Don't we need that word? Isn't that a bull's eye? Isn't that what jazz is all about? '
Red Mitchell, talking to Gene Lees. In Jazz, Black and White, p164.
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It's not a what, it's a how.
(Bill Evans)
Jazz treats music as a framework. A song is just a skeleton, and it's the musicians' job, collectively, to do something with it.
Other genres treat the song as the Mona Lisa. Jazz treats it as a blank canvas, some paint and brushes, and a general idea (or not) of where it's gonna go.
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For me, two qualities define music as jazz: 1) Swing 2) Improvisation.
As guitar players, something we don't seem to talk about here is, without definitions and labels, I think we all know when we play something whether it's jazz or something else just in the way we play it.
When I pick up my acoustic guitar and fingerpick "I'll See You in my Dreams", Travis-style, it may be jazzy when I play a m7b5 chord, but otherwise the way I'm playing it isn't jazz.
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From what I have read, Benny Goodman would disagree with you... reportedly a task master who expected perfection, and if you hit even one clam you would get "the ray"... when his band played, it may have been jazz, but it was played as classical music is (altho the solos may have been improvised or somewhat improvised), but the "framework" was to be played EXACTLY as written. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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It might be worth mentioning that Charlie Parker did not regard his own music as jazz, and that Miles Davis was at best ambivalent about the term.
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Yes absolutely. But that includes things like modal jazz and free jazz, even fusion. It’s not just standards. Originally Posted by TieDyedDevil
The fact that we still have such things as the standardised jazz drum kit (the drum kit is a jazz innovation) the double bass and Sax in most jazz performances, for instance. Clean, mellow guitar, and so on.
OTOH increasingly EDM is influencing jazz... perhaps we will move in a new direction with instrumentation.
However, I kind of feel jazz isn’t a binary thing. Those attempts to categorise usually fail because of this.
A lot of instrumental music gets categorised as jazz these days, sometimes contrary to the feelings of those performing it.
(OTOH judging from jazz festivals, we can confidently predict in five years time jazz will be entirely pop songs performed by Nola style brass marching bands. )
It’s probably best not to get to caught up in the j word thing. Categorisation is for sales, not musicians.
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Works for me, too -- especially the bit about "consistent use of the flatted third and flatted fifth in melody (not the harmony) and the swing beat". Add to that something along the lines of "in primarily improvised music" and some historical context along the lines of "built on foundations laid by African American musicians in New Orleans and a few other US cities in the early 20th century", and maybe something along the lines of "and other music played by jazz musicians alongside jazz that might not fit as neatly into th category. Basically -- there's a fairly clear, core set of attributes that define jazz (swing, improvisation on standard song forms, b3 and b5 in the melody, derived from the methods of a subset of African American musicians). Originally Posted by rabbit
If you play that, you're a jazz musician, and the other music you play is jazz by association (e.g., bossa nova repertoire, other Latin jazz forms, fusion, composed and/or orchestral music done by people like Mingus, Gill Evans, acid/happy jazz, etc.). Of course, one can find counter-examples that exactly fit the definition that people who know jazz don't think are jazz, and there are all kinds of edge cases that people argue about. But if you start with the core, and build out from there with the attributes of improvisation, b3/b5, swing beat, and lineage in mind, you've pretty much got it.
John
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Okay, now look. Exactly what is classical music? No, really, I mean it, what IS it? What IS classical music?
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It's math. Originally Posted by ragman1
Okay, now look. Exactly what is classical music? No, really, I mean it, what IS it? What IS classical music?
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AH!
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Here is Wynton on the subject:
(I have time-stamped the video, but if it starts at the beginning, FFWD to 12:00)
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As Mark Twain said, "Classical music is a lot better than it sounds." Originally Posted by ragman1
Okay, now look. Exactly what is classical music? No, really, I mean it, what IS it? What IS classical music?
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He didn't say it, but he could have: "Jazz is just an excuse to play wrong notes." Originally Posted by strumcat
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The problem with defining jazz is the same is the problem with defining anything else: definitions rapidly become circular and you end up using the word to define the word. "Jazz is the music that sounds like jazz." We function in society by sort of intuiting what is that words mean and hopefully intuiting relatively similar to everybody else. Define "orange" or "verklempt." The more precisely we try to define something, the more difficult it becomes. In the definition of any word we can find the edges where that frays. For example in defining physics and chemistry, one does start to bump into places were the two overlap. At that point are we talking about physics or chemistry? The same thing happens with jazz and blues, jazz and rock, etc. Is Allan Holdsworth's music rock or jazz? I hear it as jazz. A 30s swing aficionado might hear it as rock. All we can do with any words is to define them well enough to be getting on with and tolerate a little ambiguity.
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Jazz is what the owner of the record store told me it was when I had to stock the record bins back in the 80s.
But serious, genre labeling is done for marketing purposes to assist consumers with finding similar products in said genre.
Note that David Grisman made fun of the genre labeling 'game'' since his "dawg" music was difficult to pin-down: so he had an album called Dawg Jazz/Dawg Grass. One side was a jazz setting and the other country. I remember asking the owner where to put this (country or jazz), and he said 'why the F do you ask me???"; I put it into the jazz section.
PS: The album has Martin Taylor and Stephane Grappelli and Earl Scruggs and Tony Rice!
Last edited by jameslovestal; 06-25-2019 at 02:55 PM.
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Nope, he didn't say that. He said: Originally Posted by strumcat
"It often happens that people frame phrases which have no meaning to a grammar, and yet convey a clear meaning to the world. William Nye’s remark about Wagner’s music is of that sort: ‘They say that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.’"
John
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90% of the game is half mental. When you come to the fork in the road, take it. It's like deja vu all over again. Originally Posted by John A.
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