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I've been watching Planet Earth. Talk about getting your perspective re-adjusted. I'm thinking "What's harder, being a penguin or a wildebeest?" Well both take a lifetime to become good enough to stay alive. Both take something exceptional to find a mate and be happy. Both follow their inner nature. Both would look at the other and say "Gosh. How do they DO that?" Ha ha.
The first time I saw Sco, it was in the 80's; before Miles. It was a talk he gave and I was pretty new to the whole jazz thing. It was really mysterious and Sco was doing things that were way beyond what even most guitarists of the day. But he said one thing that stuck with me "Gotta know your scales. It's like the blues, you've gotta know what works. Once you know what chord it is, just play the scale and everyone will think you're a genius!". Ha, Sco's a joker and a humble guy but yeah, once you understand the game plan of your own nature, whether wildebeest or penguin, then you walk the migratory walk year after year. You get good at it.
Rock rewards the player who pays attention to proficiency and an emotional tie with the audience. There is a deep and intuitive understanding of what connects. Jazz rewards the player who pays attention to the composition of that has not been done before. There is a deep and uncompromising aesthetic of what challenges. It's a disparate audience that shapes the nature of the beast.
I spoke Chinese when I was a kid. 'don't any more. I remember in school people talked about the hardest language. I never got it when they'd say Chinese was hard. Well I don't do it anymore, it's not my language...and yeah, boy is it hard now! LOL.
Jazz is easy. But it's plenty challenging every day of my life. And hopefully will be. Forever. But that's nothing when compared with making a dollar in a bar where you can get paid. Rock rules, ha. And singing and playing guitar at the same time? I am in awe.
David
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02-20-2019 05:51 AM
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In general, navigating jazz harmony is harder and usually takes longer to become competent than playing rock. Don't make the exceptions the rule.
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That's a good question, rock tends to be like classical music, you have to play a given "arrangement", to play or barely play a "written" solo, it's quite repetitive, sometimes it's very sophisticated.
About blues, for rockers and jazzers, the blues is a form but for someone who really plays the blues it's something else, there are so many forms.
I'd played the bass for several months in a blues band and the singer/guitarist calls himself "Ayatollah Of Blues", a solo was based only on a pentatonic, some blues had some weird parts because the chords underlined the lyrics, so sometimes there was a bar of 2/4 or 3/4 at the middle of a verse. I couldn't play the bass the way I wanted because my lines were too sophisticated... When I was talking about guys like Jack Bruce, they called them a jazzer/rocker, not a bluesman and too white and British to play the blues.
With them I figured out there were blues standards.
Many forms of blues in 8 bars, 12 bars, 16 bars... Very basic chords but none of those blues had to be played the same way.
About jazz, it's something impersonal that can become very personal because it's about creativity. The good thing with, is that you can play with your own sound, sometimes there is no level, if you do the job it's OK, sometimes you can't play because the level is high.
There are a lot of things to learn, playing with people is like cooking, a little bit like... prog rock if we can do a comparison with rock.
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The craft of any art form is endless. One can take it as far as they wish, and will never reach the end. Yes, a master player achieves things that are "harder" on an E blues shuffle, and it can be impressive. A player on Stella can be as bad as a person first holding a guitar.
Don't you think it's harder to be a run of the mill jazz player doing a passable stella at a jam than to be a run of the mill rock player doing an E blues at a jam?
That's about 1 year of playing vs. 5 or so maybe
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Playing rock or blues is about dealing with where you are...playing over one chord at a time.
Playing jazz is about where you're going next.
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I can imagine someone without any musical training but with a decent musical sense being able to sing a melodic solo over "November Rain changes" by ear on par with Slash's solo on the recording (in terms of the inherent musical complexity of the solo).
I don't see them being able to wing a sophisticated jazz solo on par with what Wes Montgomery played on a tune like "Nica's Dream". I don't mean meeting the level compositional quality Wes could produce, but I mean having a similar variety in melodic, rhythmic and harmonic devices while staying coherent over the changes:
Last edited by Tal_175; 02-20-2019 at 10:12 AM.
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Originally Posted by matt.guitarteacher
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Originally Posted by Alter
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Originally Posted by princeplanet
I have heard Reg and other pros talk about it basically being "the same" in the sense that you have to learn to play convincingly over a single chord type. In other styles the single chord type often might be generalized for most of the tune, where as in jazz, you're generally covering many different chord types and functions within a given tune. So, I just think that asking whether they are "the same" maybe isn't the right question.
I think it's merely talking about a couple of slightly different things as if they're one thing...
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Originally Posted by princeplanet
I recognise that teenage rock thing... But now I go back to tunes and realise I learned them wrong haha... There's quite a lot to that rock and roll music, you know :-)
The real difficulty with learning jazz? I think it's a matter of immersion. When I was growing up, teenagers still used to gather around the guitar and play songs on the beach or whatever.... Imagine if those songs were jazz standards... May have been like that at one time, the Beatles used some pretty jazz chords.
Of course to be a great jazz improvisor takes a long long time, esp. on the guitar... But being functional as a player, knowing the melodies and changes to a lot of jazz tunes, being able to play a little bit... That's not something that's valued now, so people either go all in to be jazz virtuosos or give up - even the amateurs.
Perhaps the same is now true of Hotel California...
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Originally Posted by christianm77
John Mayer plays rock and blues well.
pasquale grasso plays jazz well.
yeah yeah not fair to compare artists etc whatever obviously it was bound to happen on this thread right
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Sorry, jazz police, I meant to say to play rock and blues well is a bit harder than it seemed when I was 16.
I did once laugh at somebody for suggesting Julian Lage and John Mayer were on a par... I mean, no...
But then, the way we judge a good jazz players is completely different from a good rock guitarist... And the number 1 thing that I value from any player is individuality and character... that goes for any genre.
Mayer sounds like he listened to the same records I did when I was learning guitar and got really good at copying them.
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Originally Posted by christianm77
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Originally Posted by christianm77
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Originally Posted by Hep To The Jive
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Perhaps learning to play rock guitar is a means to an end, while learning jazz guitar is an end in itself. We learn to play rock guitar because we want to emulate our heroes, because we want to play in a band or because we want to write songs. After reaching a useful level of competence, we stop learning. We learn to play jazz because of musical curiosity; learning continues and never really ends. Experienced and renowned jazz guitarists (Bill Frisell comes to mind) often talk of finding new ways of playing. Rock guitarists seldom talk in this way.
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You play rock to get laid. When it stops working you switch to jazz. Luckily at that point you have lots of time in your hands to finally practice and learn music.
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Originally Posted by Tal_175
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I’m uncomfortable.
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Originally Posted by Hep To The Jive
Last edited by Tal_175; 02-22-2019 at 07:25 PM.
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Originally Posted by Tal_175
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Originally Posted by Tal_175
Who knows ?
Yes, it's true, everyone starts with rock or started, now I guess there is a kind of revival, when I was younger it was difficult to meet someone who really played jazz guitar and all the things around it. Now with internet, everyone knows it's something that exists.
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the thread title compare learning rock/blues to learning jazz
to me this would have to be the most basic of each style...
learning 5 or 6 chords in rock and you could play hundreds of songs by "ear" and not have to learn a bit of theory-- from the 50's and early mid 60s ..after that "rock" evolved and Jimi took over and it has been evolving since..learning a Hendrix solo is not going to be an easy task as learning a beach boys solo..
same time period early 50s/60s..jazz--Wes..Kenny Burrell..and others were playing standards and doing improve over them that took practice to some degree and absorb theory by osmosis if not through formal studies .. learning this by ear alone would be a challenge I think..the harmonic background would require some study of chords and voice movement ..
when Miles went "fusion" .. McLaughlin and many others went with it..and it has been evolving since..again learning a standard from the 50s like "on green dolphin street" would be fairly easy .. but a "return to forever" or Mahavishnu tune is going to take some time and study of music directly or indirectly
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Joe (or anyone):
Are there young rock players who I should be listening to? John Mayer is refreshingly competent instrumentalist at a time when pop artist tend to be mostly dancers with passable singing voices performing music written by professional composers and producers. But John M doesn’t surprise me with his inventiveness (like Julian L) or wow me with his technique (like Pasquale G).
I don’t mean that in an angry old man way. I would love to be turned on to exciting new players. I think I’ve gravitated to jazz because rock guitar felt so stilted and preserved in amber. Weirdly rock feels like its gone backwards where Gilad H, Pasquale G, Julian L, et al, are making fresh contributions.
Whenever I see live music it is usually some grey haired white guy trying to sound like one of the Kings. Hendrix, Page, and even Gilmore were much more avant-garde than what I hear out today. I would love to hear rock players as exciting as the young jazz players (or bluegrass players, for that matter).
Suggestions?
(PS sorry for the highjack. Joe’s posting put this in mind. )
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There is no genre of music harder to comprehend than Jazz. None. It's relatively easy to be an acceptable Rock or Blues player by comparison. Even Classical is easier to master as it's a more linear pursuit with a clear pedagogy. Jazz is unmercifully cerebral. Jazz requires deep commitment. Additionally, Jazz culture is such that unless you can show that you have done the work, you are NOT a Jazz musician. It's set up to be a fairly exclusive club from the get-go. If you want feel ok about yourself as a player and a person, stick with Rock and Blues. If you want to have your world and self-worth destroyed consistently, study Jazz. Jazz looks down on you with utter snark for even asking this question. (With the exception that it gives old-timers the opportunity to man-splain ad nauseum.)
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