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Originally Posted by Litterick
I don't agree that hammer-ons and pull-offs are not charcteristics of jazz guitar. Lots of excellent jazz guitarists use it. They are not primarily used as "embellishments" but as means to make a line more fluid and legato (like horn players slurs and portamento - Lester Young is a good example) and can thus actally help the line sound more "clean". They can add a little line variation by contrasting the slurred notes agaist the more staccato sounding individually picked notes. They are also a life saver when playing fast lines for those of us who are less than virtuoses.
Generally, I find it futile to set up hard rules for what characterises jazz. Duke Ellington deliberately stopped using the term "jazz" back in the 1940s and talked about "music" thereafter. He said: "There's only two kinds of music - good music and bad music." Charlie Parker said: "They teach you that there are boundary lines to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art."
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10-01-2023 04:52 AM
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Of course, these guitar techniques are not unknown to jazz guitarists.
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Originally Posted by djg
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Originally Posted by kris
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Originally Posted by oldane
Originally Posted by oldane
Originally Posted by oldane
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Originally Posted by djg
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Originally Posted by oldane
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Originally Posted by djg
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
You are nasty little man, Christian.Last edited by Litterick; 10-01-2023 at 07:56 AM.
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Originally Posted by Litterick
Slurring into downbeats is extremely characteristic of jazz playing — particularly horns — and imitated by lots of guitarists.
Even those who don’t use them that way use them all the time. Jim Hall, Wes, Grant Green (somewhat less so). Guitarists who don’t slur often (Pat Martino for example), are very much the exception to the rule.
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Originally Posted by Litterick
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Originally Posted by Litterick
But you’re still wrong about slurs and couldn’t think that if you’d listened closely to any of the jazz guitarists being referenced.
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Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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Originally Posted by Litterick
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Originally Posted by kris
He’s obviously not a straight ahead dude all the time, but he cited the way he slurs as the reason his weird stuff still sounds like jazz when he’s playing in the context. In other words, the slurs were essential to the jazz.
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Maybe everyone can band together and try to think up five guitarists who don’t slur all the time, and help our man out?
We might be here a while anyway.
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John MacLaughlin?
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
You nasty little man.
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Why must you be so unpleasant? Why can you not be civil towards me? I have never done you any harm. This is supposed to be a friendly forum, but you have such a puffed-up ego, you are so afraid of anyone who argues against you, that you make sneering comments about them. You are not evil. You are small.
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Originally Posted by pamosmusic
if not maybe Charlie Christian? Or Pat Martino?
I haven’t studied much Pat, but you must take my opinions on him seriously or I will take mortal offense.
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Originally Posted by Litterick
Otoh I have transcribed some jazz guitar solos
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Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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Originally Posted by pamosmusic
Thanks.
But as I have been trying to explain to my many critics on this thread, it is not a matter of individual guitarists. It is the conventions of the music. Extraordinary musicians do extraordinary things, but jazz guitar music doesn't require those things. We all know its necessary components, because they are discussed on this forum daily: changes, chord melody, arpeggios, all that jazz. We don't say much at all about hammer-ons and pull-offs because they are not essential parts of jazz guitar. But go to a rock guitar forum and you will find they are the subject of everyday conversation, because those techniques are the bread and butter of blues-based rock.
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
You can hear slides and slurs quite consistently here, though I find his picking technique itself to be quite smooth -
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Originally Posted by Litterick
Jazz, broadly speaking, emphasizes upbeats and de-emphasizes downbeats. There are a lot of ways of doing this. For example, articulating everything and accenting upbeats, ghosting downbeats, or using slurs to avoid sinking into the downbeats.
All jazz musicians use some combination of the above, along with regularly slurring triplets and turns, and accenting various other points in the line. Slurring is by far the most common, because it’s subtler, easier to execute at tempo, and generally sounds smoother. Most jazz musicians will tell you these characteristic patterns in the articulation are more important to a swing feel than the rhythmic component everyone thinks about (the elongated first eighth note). Lots of people play straight eighth notes at all tempos and still swing. No one can play a rhythmic swing at 300bpm. The essential component of swing is the articulation.
Any serious listening to any good jazz guitarist would show this immediately. There a loads of ways to get a good jazz sound, but slurs are essential—to varying degrees—in all of them.
The Autumn of Solo Guitar 2024
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