Rock Players who have transitioned to Jazz

[gingerjazz]

music is music with regard to the original post as to wether to learn jazz or rock first my belief is that you should learn to be a musician first and then decide what your going to say with the language that we all speak youve got to learn the alphabet before you can write shakespeare

[Reg]

They're all very difficult to become proficient at. If you start to make a list of what knowledge you need to play rock, jazz, classical, blues,bluegrass etc... and this list is not the extremes, more of general rep. That list for playing jazz is pretty long... Most can memorize and perform, some better than others, and most can pull off a gig or session with preparation, but what jazz players are able to do is pull off all these abilities and also play with out the preparations. Jazz is a lot of material and takes way to much time to learn, even for the talented..
Granted there's good and bad, and I dig rock, jazz and blues, but I would rather go to a rock gig with good jazz players than a jazz gig with good rock players. Most of the, what I call good rock players I've known over the years that tour or make their living playing music all end up into jazz when they can. As most know, Jazz and Money is almost an oxymoron, and your choices are limited.
If you don't take the question personal... don't make it competitive in a personal manner or personal abilities... the answer is fairly simple...Reg

[dmort]

I'm actually trying to transition now from playing rock to playing more jazz. I do think that the basic structure of most jazz songs is already more complicated than the structure of most rock songs. Additionally, the chords involved in jazz are more complex, mostly requiring some understanding of music theory. I've found that generally that the chords required to play rock are not as complicated.

However...

I think that if you talk about rock, you almost have to dumb down the whole genre because the large quantity of simple rock and roll. However, there are a lot of rock musicians and bands who do not write or play simple music. Furthermore, if you start to look into the jam bands, (ween, phish, string cheese incident, and the like) you'll start to find rock that has been heavily influenced by jazz.

Sometimes I think this is easier to think about if you think historically, what came first? When did the rock and roll movement really begin? Are we talking about Chuck Berry or Metallica? There is a wide spectrum. And today there are a lot of fusions of rock/jazz/blues and whatnot.

To answer the initial question: I wish I'd studied more jazz guitar earlier. It would have helped my theory and my technique and deepened my knowledge base more rapidly than rock.

[musicjohnny]

I think Jazz is much more structurally complex and also requires more vocabulary in all aspects of music to play.

[P.J.]

i think we're defining rock differently. im not talkiing about ONLY the classic rock station. there are many rock bands that are still putting out very creative music right now.

Big difference between King Crimson and Yes vs. The Ramones and Green Day.

PJ

[derek]

Big difference between King Crimson and Yes vs. The Ramones and Green Day.

PJ

For sure. I wouldn't put them in the same category. Ramones & Green Day are punk rock, KC and Yes are prog rock. That is the reason I put the disclaimer about prog in my initial post upstream. Stuff that bands like Dream Theater are doing is as complicated (or more so) as any jazz I have run across. Then there are the Dregs, and all the jazz influence jam bands that dmort mentions.