How to absorb Jazz

**matt.guitarteacher** · 05-01-2014, 11:21 AM

I learned to read music on sax, then guitar, and finally piano. I've taught a ton of students to read notation over the years as well.

All of that said, after 20 years, I still think the guitar is just stinkin' hard to read on; way more difficult than piano for sure. There's a lot of value in learning to read, but learning to read music in a way that's valuable for playing jazz on guitar is pretty beastly. To play the kind of things you want to read in jazz study, you really have to be "untransposing" a lot (playing things up an octave). So, learning to read out of a method book won't necessarily help a lot with playing out of a real book or non-guitar jazz text.

I would definitely work on reading, but think of it as a *part* of your study and definitely not something you have to have 'down' before studying other aspects of jazz playing.

**targuit** · 05-01-2014, 12:41 PM

Matt - I appreciate your opinion and experience, as I assume you would mine. I have to respectfully disagree that reading music on a guitar staff is difficult. Why? Because I learned at twelve and beyond without much problem at all. Granted, like any skill, your performance improves with practice. But there is nothing inherently difficult about reading a G clef apart from the transposition thing, which I don't really think much about in practice. As I also play piano, I found it much harder to read two different clefs at the same time. Of course one can cheat with your ears, which is just fine as ultimately that is how I play jazz. I improvise off my own transcriptions I create with Sibelius. I agree, however, that the ear rules. Nonetheless, there are times when the ability to sight read or just to comprehend what a composer or producer wants is important.

I would note that reading is especially helpful if a student is studying a Real Book style notation of the melody with the implied chords as "Dm7b5", for example. In fact, in my transcriptions I tend to use a lead sheet type thing with the melody and lyrics on one staff and a block chord accompaniment on another staff. I just improvise off the melody and harmony. Nothing better than rehearsing with your own backing tracks and orchestration.

BTW, on another thread about a web site that helps with sight reading skills, generating random measures that will also play back the music as played at a specific tempo, I posted a question that no one has answered yet. I noted that just recently I realized a neat improvisation trick that applies to the hoary debate on the forum about "chord-scale theory" versus "chord tones" and also regards the use of transcriptions like mine as I described above. I just wanted to see if anyone else can arrive at the answer, which involves sight reading skills.

Just rereading the posts, I realize that this discussion about notation and its relevance to the thread may have strayed a bit from the original thread about immersing oneself in jazz. Certainly, writing out the music which you are playing or off which you are improvising is relevant to that goal of playing jazz as well as appreciating it. But, I'll defer from further commenting about notation. Pardon moi....

Jay

**matt.guitarteacher** · 05-01-2014, 02:45 PM

Again, to the OP, I think that reading is valuable as a *part* of learning to play. I just don't think it has the same payoff (for time invested) for a beginning jazz player that it would on another instrument. If you read melody on piano or a horn in a pretty basic way, you're going to be able to read examples out of jazz instructional texts or a real book and it sound basically like what you want, even if it's in a different key. You can also do the same thing on a bass clef instrument by transposing it; slightly more difficult but not too bad.

With guitar, (assuming you've learned to read at that basic level that we talked about with the pianist or horn player) you're really going to need to transpose the whole thing up an octave to be anything like what a real player would practically play. This requires you to use almost 0% of your reading practice that you've been doing out of a guitar method book (which transposes an octave) in playing out of your new jazz book. Otherwise you're playing in open position and that isn't necessarily what you're looking for.

You could learn to read everything up an octave from the start I suppose, but you'll still have issues with playing up the neck. For example, if you start with C at the 8th fret and play a simple C major scale, you can pretty easily come up with 4 different fingerings for that scale just by beginning with either the 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th finger. Of course you could do CAGED fingerings as well, which work fine as long as you're in the same key and you know where you are. Once you have accidentals or changes of tonal center, you have "decisions" to make as to what "system" you use in fingering them. Jazz doesn't typically stay in one tonal center.

Once you get to notated harmony, you have to make decisions about how to finger things in the context of all of the pitches and deciding which pitches (that pianists simply play) to omit because of the limitations of the guitar. (BTW, anything which can be read with difficulty on a piano grand staff will almost definitely be *more* difficult to read on guitar whether on a guitar clef or read from a grand staff.)

All of this is a lot of work, (and I'm sure most real players would tell you it's totally worth it) but it's not quite the same thing as a horn player or pianist reading from a jazz text or real book. It's more of a long term process on the guitar. The prevalence of guitar tablature is not *only* because guitarists are lazy or idiots. Although, I'm sure there's some of that as well. ;-)

**Lionelsax** · 05-01-2014, 02:53 PM

I actually agree with Matt ! I share exacly the same experience.

**Jonzo** · 05-01-2014, 03:42 PM

Originally Posted by coolvinny

This thread was about "how to absorb jazz" - sight reading has nothing to do with how to absorb jazz. The last thing you need to absorb jazz are your eyes, let alone written music.

"Nothing"?!

**TonyB56** · 05-01-2014, 05:25 PM

Early jazz musicians could barely read or write if at all let alone read write and transcribe music, people spend so much time bogged down in theory it amazes me they actually find time to play at all.

**Lionelsax** · 05-01-2014, 06:38 PM

How to absorb jazz ? Play it !
My best Youtube "friend" does it very well.

**jtizzle** · 05-02-2014, 12:18 AM

Originally Posted by Jonzo

What are these "records" you keep going on about?

Personally, I like Spotify. I don't know about the sound quality (or how well they pay artists), but you can't beat it for exploration.

By record, I mean record. Anything you can get your hands on. My current music library has almost 200gb of music. A lot of it is classic recordings, lots of box sets by musicians. I'm currently going through 3 Bud Powell box sets (complete at Verve, complete RCA trio sessions, complete Blue Note & Roost).

I mean, the main thing to get into are classic working band recordings. Miles Davis is definitely one to check out. Coltrane's group is another. There's also a bunch of really good stuff with Sonny Clarke. I mentioned a couple of Ahmad Jamal records that are a must own (considering Miles pretty much took everything Ahmad did and played it himself).