Getting started with modal Jazz

[ragman1]

Yes, I see. He's a professor at the Royal Academy. He's done a lot of stuff as a sideman all over the place and now composes, offers to sit in on peoples' recording sessions, but it doesn't look like he gives lessons per se. Not that I can see, anyway.

I think the thing is he's never wanted to be a great personality, he's just happy helping out. That probably explains why he's not more famous or whatever it is :-)

(I like his lines, by the way. Some of that sounds very original).

[pamosmusic]

There's a vast difference between listening and copying, as anyone knows.

Apparently Bill Evans and Miles Davis were mining Debussy and Ravel for ideas when they were writing Kind of Blue.

You’d be hard pressed to find a great musician who doesn’t raid the music of their influences.

[Jazzjourney4Eva]

Well, you may not go for this particularly but I'm not altogether sure about that. Sitting at the feet of the masters leads to imitation. The problem there is that we'll never be them.

Whatever they do is from their brain, their mentality, their background of life and experience. So it's not us. We might copy their technical ideas but those ideas, if they work, can be found anywhere. They can't be playing something not already known and understood from studying music.

Imitation leads to loss of confidence. We convince ourselves that we're not so good but they are great, so we'll never be like them, and so on. It destroys initiative. Creative powers do not flourish that way.

The strange thing is that when someone comes up with something really original we worship them and want to copy it. But we never see that, to produce that originality, those people were not copying anybody else, and that's the point. They may be using the same technical ideas but they weren't following anybody else.

Creative originality comes out of nowhere. It never comes to a mind that is trying to be something other than it is.

Lunacy.

[mr. beaumont]

Originality comes when you acknowledge your influences and stop trying to sound like them...AND stop trying to NOT sound like them.

[ragman1]

AND stop trying to NOT sound like them.

Absolutely :-)

Trying to be different is not being different.

[Peter C]

Originality comes when you acknowledge your influences and stop trying to sound like them...AND stop trying to NOT sound like them.

Or just from having twisted DNA. Lol

[ragman1]

You’d be hard pressed to find a great musician who doesn’t raid the music of their influences.

Sure, why not? But everyone's missing the point about creativeness and imitation. The whole world's trained to imitate, which they call education, and look what a mess it's in. The very word creative means something new. What is imitated can never be new. It's a very simple point, this.

[mr. beaumont]

Sure, why not? But everyone's missing the point about creativeness and imitation. The whole world's trained to imitate, which they call education, and look what a mess it is. The very word creative means something new. What is imitated can never be new. It's a very simple point, this.

To paraphrase Jimmy Raney, conversely, if you can't play, who cares if you're original?

[Reg]

Yea... Mr B, skipping all the BS, that pretty much what it's all about.

[Jazzjourney4Eva]

Nothing is entirely new, not even the arrogance that fantasizes that it is.

[GuyBoden]

There has been and always will be original players, whether they sound good or not is personal opinion.

[Jazzjourney4Eva]

"Original". Sure. Just not entirely new, right?

Rennaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Chromaticism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Atonality, Noise Music, blah blah blah.

So. Noise "music" on a Gibson Archtop. K.

[Christian Miller]

That was good! Why is he only a local legend?

(edit)

He's not, I just looked him up. He's done lots of stuff :-)

quite a few people believe Mike would have achieved wider recognition if he’d moved to London. But yes he’s played with loads of people and done lots of stuff and taught a lot of fine guitar players. I think Mike Outram was a student for instance.

[Christian Miller]

There has been and always will be original players, whether they sound good or not is personal opinion.

yeah ok so even this isn’t an example. Bailey spent years playing lounge jazz gigs and in commercial dance bands and so on. People said that he sounded like Jim hall at that stage .

As for the harmonic and textural approach approach he developed he was really influenced by early Schoenberg, Webern and Messiaen which tracks.

Anyway he was highly influential on other free players…

All of this is true whether or not you can stand his playing (I like the piece you posted an awful lot personally) so he’s another example.

Even to reject tradition as he did - he described his music as anti-jazz - is only possible if you know what the tradition is.

[ragman1]

There has been and always will be original players, whether they sound good or not is personal opinion.

Yes, well, I wouldn't call weird, eccentric, idiosyncratic, etc, creative necessarily. In fact, quite the contrary.

anti-jazz

So his mind's just flipped from one thing to its opposite. That's not music, that's gymnastics. Or politics, if you want to be earnest :-)

[Christian Miller]

Yes, well, I wouldn't call weird, eccentric, idiosyncratic, etc, creative necessarily. In fact, quite the contrary.



So his mind's just flipped from one thing to its opposite. That's not music, that's just gymnastics :-)

The person who described Trane as ‘noodling’ now deigns to grace us all with his opinion on what is and isn’t music. Yeah sure, whatever lol.

EDIT: hmmm actually to be fair politics is not so far from it. Bailey was very … ideological? … in his approach. Many modernists were - Boulez most obviously. Adorno trained first as an avant garde composer with Alban Berg, remember, which is probably why he hated jazz so much lol. Derek’s thoughts on the matter are interesting even where I don’t agree. Which is mostly.

I don’t believe that good music can’t be political. Beethoven was highly political both musically and extramusically.

EDIT 2: or maybe Derek was just from Yorkshire.

[ragman1]

It's an Emperor's Clothes thing, Christian. Our trouble is we're far too learned, we know too much, we've absorbed too much opinion and culture. But an ordinary person, and I don't mean ignorant, would listen to Coltrane on that track and just hear him zoom up and down the same notes all the time and then do bugle calls.

You can dress it up it up as genius or whatever nonsense you like but that's what he's doing. At least on one or two videos I've seen. Don't, as some have done, immediately point to another one where he didn't do it, that's not the point. I was talking about when he did do it.

And Bailey, bless him, making some very strange discordant noises. Why should that sort of thing be considered musical, creative, or anything else? It's just a form of expression from a particular kind of mind. And I wouldn't call that mind a very healthy one, frankly. Why is he satisfied with doing that all the time? Why doesn't he yearn, as most sensitive, intelligent people do, for some beauty in what they hear?

But we seem to have forgotten beauty except when it merely reflects our own personal bias or tendencies, or particular culture. Which is not beauty at all, of course. We prefer the novel, the bizarre, the odd, because we've become so utterly shallow and superficial, satisfied with nonsense which has been given importance by the intellect.

That's all, isn't ? The intellect has taken over, has superseded intelligence and sense. But the intellect is a limited world and there are far too many intellectuals who are unbalanced in so many ways. I hear them on the radio!

So intellect is not creative, can't be. All its products as ideas and ideologies are inevitably divisive. The fact is there's only a possibility of creative feeling when we love what we're doing. But we don't, we're much too clever, too cynical, too reactionary, and all that. We've lost the love of simple things. We've really lost touch with ourselves which is why we prefer the artificial, the respectable. It's a great tragedy, really.

[pamosmusic]

Small point, but free jazz of the wilder species is not really well captured in a recording.

Basically the entire point is the interactive quality of it. I didn’t really get it until I was able to hear it live on a semi-regular basis. Super into it now, but still don’t really listen to recordings of it.

[Christian Miller]

It's an Emperor's Clothes thing, Christian. Our trouble is we're far too learned, we know too much, we've absorbed too much opinion and culture. But an ordinary person, and I don't mean ignorant, would listen to Coltrane on that track and just hear him zoom up and down the same notes all the time and then do bugle calls.

You can dress it up it up as genius or whatever nonsense you like but that's what he's doing. At least on one or two videos I've seen. Don't, as some have done, immediately point to another one where he didn't do it, that's not the point. I was talking about when he did do it.

And Bailey, bless him, making some very strange discordant noises. Why should that sort of thing be considered musical, creative, or anything else? It's just a form of expression from a particular kind of mind. And I wouldn't call that mind a very healthy one, frankly. Why is he satisfied with doing that all the time? Why doesn't he yearn, as most sensitive, intelligent people do, for some beauty in what they hear?

But we seem to have forgotten beauty except when it merely reflects our own personal bias or tendencies, or particular culture. Which is not beauty at all, of course. We prefer the novel, the bizarre, the odd, because we've become so utterly shallow and superficial, satisfied with nonsense which has been given importance by the intellect.

That's all, isn't ? The intellect has taken over, has superseded intelligence and sense. But the intellect is a limited world and there are far too many intellectuals who are unbalanced in so many ways. I hear them on the radio!

So intellect is not creative, can't be. All its products as ideas and ideologies are inevitably divisive. The fact is there's only a possibility of creative feeling when we love what we're doing. But we don't, we're much too clever, too cynical, too reactionary, and all that. We've lost the love of simple things. We've really lost touch with ourselves which is why we prefer the artificial, the respectable. It's a great tragedy, really.

Time to listen to Cha Cha Cha for the 1,235th time this week to expunge the scent of this sulphurous brainfart of a post from my mind nostrils.

[grahambop]

It's an Emperor's Clothes thing, Christian. Our trouble is we're far too learned, we know too much, we've absorbed too much opinion and culture. But an ordinary person, and I don't mean ignorant, would listen to Coltrane on that track and just hear him zoom up and down the same notes all the time and then do bugle calls.

You can dress it up it up as genius or whatever nonsense you like but that's what he's doing.

lol, on the first track of the best-selling jazz record of all time.

[kris]

[ragman1]

lol, on the first track of the best-selling jazz record of all time.

False argument, Graham, I'm surprised at you. It doesn't stop being the best selling etc, etc, because of a smallish section of one track! Besides, the head is brilliant. And Miles wasn't bad either :-)

[grahambop]

False argument, Graham, I'm surprised at you. It doesn't stop being the best selling etc, etc, because of a smallish section of one track! Besides, the head is brilliant. And Miles wasn't bad either :-)

It’s the second solo on the album. If it was as bad as you make out, I really doubt the record would have sold 5 million copies.

Also I doubt Miles tolerated anything he considered noodling, from anybody.

I get that you don’t like it, and I agree that Coltrane played similar modal stuff much more dynamically/excitingly etc. on his own records, I think he began to explore outside the strict modes pretty quickly. But on this record they were all playing within the constraints that Miles set out for them, it’s all detailed in the sleeve note written by Bill Evans (you can probably find it online). I also think Miles wanted to throw this challenge at them and see what they could do without much preparation, so it would sound fresh.

Anyway, within these limitations I think Trane did a pretty good job of finding a lot of interesting mileage out of one scale etc. I’d be very happy to come up with a solo like that.

[ragman1]

they were all playing within the constraints that Miles set out for them

I thought that the moment I heard it and I hadn't read anything about it. Here's the post I said it in:

Getting started with modal Jazz

[ragman1]

Anyway, in that case it's all Miles' fault. As usual :-)