Easy Diatonic Standards

[AllanAllen]

I don't think I've heard anyone talk about a tune being in the key of 'D dorian' or a blues in 'F dominant' for example. Apart from Tal, maybe. Key is major or minor.

It's in the tune right?

You call So What in D minor and dorian is implied

You call al blues in F and mixolydian is implied, unless dominant is a mode I'm not aware of.

When you call Yesterdays in D minor and no mode is implied.

This is why we learn repertoire

[GuyBoden]

Tonality of some type is probably hard wired into the way we perceive music.

Maybe, tonality is in some ways cultural conditioning by being subjected to western music tonality all our lives.

[pamosmusic]

It's in the tune right?

You call So What in D minor and dorian is implied

You call al blues in F and mixolydian is implied, unless dominant is a mode I'm not aware of.

When you call Yesterdays in D minor and no mode is implied.

This is why we learn repertoire

Sure.

Blues is always an asterisk though.

[Christian Miller]

Maybe, tonality is in some ways cultural conditioning by being subjected to western music tonality all our lives.

yeah, I was referring to tonality in the wider sense, not specifically CP in this case. See, the terminology is a mess.

[Tal_175]

yeah, I was referring to tonality in the wider sense, not specifically CP in this case. See, the terminology is a mess.

No kidding.

[Christian Miller]

Sure.

Blues is always an asterisk though.

Well Bird liked the major 7 tonality on blues tunes… usually he reserved the b7 for bar 4, and the blues licks for bars 5-6

Otoh we can play blues on standards too! I hate this idea that blues is a special thing that only happens on blues tunes. I think we know that’s not true from our listening.

Jazz is a massive asterisk, blues is part of that.

(The thing that I think is especially bogus about modern jazz edu is that it has tidied up all the false relations….)

[Christian Miller]

It's in the tune right?

You call So What in D minor and dorian is implied

You call al blues in F and mixolydian is implied, unless dominant is a mode I'm not aware of.

When you call Yesterdays in D minor and no mode is implied.

This is why we learn repertoire

yeah we’d name the tune’s key basically in order to check we all have it in the same key, or to transpose it.

if you analyse the tune you always get more specific. So what is Dorian, Yesterdays contains secondary dominants and tonicisations of A7 and Bb, etc.

[Tal_175]

To confuse things a bit more, Yesterdays can also be improvised in Dorian. But that would be Common Practice Dorian, not modal Dorian, LOL. In other words, you have ii-V to D minor in the tune but the dorian can be used for D minor.

Before someone embarks on a historical rebuttal of the term CP Dorian, I just want to say I'm using the term descriptively.

[pamosmusic]

Jazz is a massive asterisk, blues is part of that.

Confirmed.

(The thing that I think is especially bogus about modern jazz edu is that it has tidied up all the false relations….)

Can you elaborate on the above?

I sort of figure you mean hardening up those porous boundaries. But your words tend to be better than mine on these things.

[Reg]

There are lots of ways to create function using modal concepts.

Sometimes it's useful to expand what one believes is possible. Different references can create different uses of terminology. Functional Harmony is just a reference. Most except Borrowing, relative and parallel expansions of Functional harmony... Modal is just more expansion. Helps keep everything in the box...LOL

I think I posted functional.... maj/min functional concepts decades ago. With exceptions... functional, traditional Maj/Min Functional concepts are designed with Ionian as the Reference. We don't really say Ionian... it's generally accepted and implied. That's generally what I'm implying when I say "Vanilla". Not Bad, good, right or wrong... just accepted common practice. Modal concepts are used to expand guidelines... which creates expanded use of musical terminology.

Sometimes what you learn in collage or as is possible ... become educated on the net... discover that what one believes they understand.... well maybe you have limited understandings. Ears can change... Don't just live in Groves Dictionary of music... world. (disclaimer... I've always owned a reference collection.)

It's seems silly to say what Tal posted is wrong... I'm just a musician... but I have composed a shit load of professional music and still do... Compose a few quartets, or larger ensembles for different instrumentation...using different forms... and have them performed, live or experience what your talking about. Terminology is just tool guidelines designed from a reference... it isn't the only point.

This is a jazz forum... it's more useful to get your playing skills together.

[pamosmusic]

There are lots of ways to create function using modal concepts.

Sometimes it's useful to expand what one believes is possible. Different references can create different uses of terminology. Functional Harmony is just a reference. Most except Borrowing, relative and parallel expansions of Functional harmony... Modal is just more expansion. Helps keep everything in the box...LOL

I think I posted functional.... maj/min functional concepts decades ago. With exceptions... functional, traditional Maj/Min Functional concepts are designed with Ionian as the Reference. We don't really say Ionian... it's generally accepted and implied. That's generally what I'm implying when I say "Vanilla". Not Bad, good, right or wrong... just accepted common practice. Modal concepts are used to expand guidelines... which creates expanded use of musical terminology.

Sometimes what you learn in collage or as is possible ... become educated on the net... discover that what one believes they understand.... well maybe you have limited understandings. Ears can change... Don't just live in Groves Dictionary of music... world. (disclaimer... I've always owned a reference collection.)

It's seems silly to say what Tal posted is wrong... I'm just a musician... but I have composed a shit load of professional music and still do... Compose a few quartets, or larger ensembles for different instrumentation...using different forms... and have them performed, live or experience what your talking about. Terminology is just tool guidelines designed from a reference... it isn't the only point.

This is a jazz forum... it's more useful to get your playing skills together.

In summary, Sprite can be cola.

[pamosmusic]

In terms of how to play music, theory in its formal constitution isn’t super duper important. It’s just about pattern recognition — notice a sound, give it a name, find it again later, and (maybe most important) change it around.

It’s easy to say that the terms don’t matter, but terms are there for a fairly obvious reason: communication. That’s why I was saying (way back on page one or two) that it seemed from context like the OP was looking for simple tunes with functional harmony and mostly diatonic root motion. We got into this whole rabbit hole because a handful of folks decided it would be more useful to just dismiss the OP by saying “there aren’t really any purely diatonic jazz tunes” rather than actually reading the post with some context.

So the terms do matter.

One can organize the books in one’s house in whatever way they like, but the library uses the decimal system because it’s a way for everyone to know where everything goes. Look a book up, and there it is.

The flipside of this is also true, it would be weird to go to someone’s house and get tiffy because their own bookshelf isn’t organized using the decimal system. It probably has some kind of internal logic, even if it’s just “most read goes on top.”

A bookstore is maybe the best analogy for theory’s practical importance. Most bookstores aren’t as formal as the decimal system, but they have to organize in a way that helps other people find what they need in good time.

If I want to communicate with people, I have to acknowledge that people use flexible definitions but I also have to acknowledge that there is a common language. I don’t go to the bookstore and insist on rearranging, whether I’m trying to “simplify” or put everything into the correct library-style decimal organization.

So it’s a balance, but I do think it’s a bit too easy to say the theory doesn’t matter. It does matter or it wouldn’t be there. All the formal ins and outs don’t matter, but it is the means by which we communicate.

And for the record … I’m not saying that anyone in this conversation is saying theory doesn’t matter. By engaging in it, the implication is that you think it does matter. Just a thought based more on the folks who extricate themselves from the whole thing on that basis.

[Christian Miller]

Can you elaborate on the above?

Yes. Have a look at this for example from the tune ESP. I choose this because most seem to go right into chord scales with Wayne’s music. I think there’s something else going on with him.



Now I’ve seen a few analyses which give the typical chord scale for those #9 chords … this is what Tymozcko uses in his analysis in his paper on the tune (and Wayne’s harmony in general) before disappearing off into tonal matrices or whatever. To be a dick about it, this CST analysis seems more like an undergraduate theory exercise than a real investigation of the song as a composition. For example the melody in fact happens to be, well, diatonic, and blues/pentatonic influenced.

The use of a G on the E7#9 here does not suggest the altered scale. It suggests the blues. This is common in Wayne’s music, and suggests to me that rather like an old school songwriter he clothed the melody in harmony rather than realising the harmonies as a melody.

In this case, I think it makes more sense to think ‘blue third on dominant’ than altered. This links it to similar figures in his other tunes such as Speak no Evil which use a m7 instead a 7#9 but have the same basic movement.

Otoh see the treatment of 7#9 chords in All Blues for example. Or Blue bloody Bossa for that matter since we are on the beginner tunes haha. (The clue is in the name of the songs???)

in short the #9 does not need to be understood in terms of a well behaved seven note scale that follows the western convention of the alphabet rule. It’s the blues, innit.

You can of course play whatever you like if it sounds good to you, but I’m interested in what the song seems to be saying, and Wayne had that abstract blues thing in his music…

(Wayne’s treatment of altered dominant chords in his solo in this tune is also at odds with the vanilla chord scale analysis to an almost hilarious degree btw.)

The blues is just the most familiar example of the tonal layering we see throughout jazz and Black American music in general.

I sort of figure you mean hardening up those porous boundaries. But your words tend to be better than mine on these things.

No I think that’s good! I like it

[Christian Miller]

In terms of how to play music, theory in its formal constitution isn’t super duper important. It’s just about pattern recognition — notice a sound, give it a name, find it again later, and (maybe most important) change it around.

It’s easy to say that the terms don’t matter, but terms are there for a fairly obvious reason: communication. That’s why I was saying (way back on page one or two) that it seemed from context like the OP was looking for simple tunes with functional harmony and mostly diatonic root motion. We got into this whole rabbit hole because a handful of folks decided it would be more useful to just dismiss the OP by saying “there aren’t really any purely diatonic jazz tunes” rather than actually reading the post with some context.

So the terms do matter.

One can organize the books in one’s house in whatever way they like, but the library uses the decimal system because it’s a way for everyone to know where everything goes. Look a book up, and there it is.

The flipside of this is also true, it would be weird to go to someone’s house and get tiffy because their own bookshelf isn’t organized using the decimal system. It probably has some kind of internal logic, even if it’s just “most read goes on top.”

A bookstore is maybe the best analogy for theory’s practical importance. Most bookstores aren’t as formal as the decimal system, but they have to organize in a way that helps other people find what they need in good time.

If I want to communicate with people, I have to acknowledge that people use flexible definitions but I also have to acknowledge that there is a common language. I don’t go to the bookstore and insist on rearranging, whether I’m trying to “simplify” or put everything into the correct library-style decimal organization.

So it’s a balance, but I do think it’s a bit too easy to say the theory doesn’t matter. It does matter or it wouldn’t be there. All the formal ins and outs don’t matter, but it is the means by which we communicate.

And for the record … I’m not saying that anyone in this conversation is saying theory doesn’t matter. By engaging in it, the implication is that you think it does matter. Just a thought based more on the folks who extricate themselves from the whole thing on that basis.

Well I thought you summed it up perfectly well in a paragraph in post #25. But you know, this is JGO BABY!

[pamosmusic]

Well I thought you summed it up perfectly well in a paragraph in post #25. But you know, this is JGO BABY!

Ah well.

There is an interesting binary on this forum a lot of the time where the assumption is that people who yack about theory must be sort of university eggheads or whatever. But there’s the other possibility — that people who yack about theory know a lot of theory because they have had to communicate with a lot of musicians.

Not that the two are mutually exclusive. I happen to be an egghead who has also had to communicate with a lot of other musicians.

[pamosmusic]

It’s also worth mentioning that it’s totally cool to have idiosyncratic definitions of theoretical concepts, but it also really helps to have more than one.

For example, one person might look at your Shorter example and see the blues. Another person might see an altered scale. Another person might see a triad with an extension. Whatever. But each of those people will extrapolate that understanding out into a different set of lines. Which is super cool.

But guess who has the most cool ideas? The person who tried all of the above.

CAVEAT: I would agree that one of those approaches might be more correct than the other, but still.

Example: I’ve been diving in on Jordan’s stuff. Still working on the super simple pure triad stuff on tunes, but doing some fiddling with the triad-plus-one stuff so that I’m ready when I decide to move on. ANYWAY … I’ve been fiddling around in particular with the first five notes of Anthropology today. If you call it a triad with a neighbor note (C down to Bb), then you get lots of inverted triads with neighbor notes in various places, maybe you sub out the upper neighbor for a leading tone and put that over a bunch of things. But if you call it reordering of a Bb with a 2, then you get a completely different set of vocabulary when you start tinkering. If you think the specific positioning of the “2” is important, then you get another set still. It’s one of my favorite things about music.

So the theory does matter. The second the rubber hits the road, it matters what you call the thing you’re using.

So, Reg is totally right that theory doesn’t matter at all if you can’t play the thing you’re describing. But assuming you can play, theory can have a huge role in what you play, or even what you conceive of to play, or think is possible to play.

[Christian Miller]

It’s also worth mentioning that it’s totally cool to have idiosyncratic definitions of theoretical concepts, but it also really helps to have more than one.

For example, one person might look at your Shorter example and see the blues. Another person might see an altered scale. Another person might see a triad with an extension. Whatever. But each of those people will extrapolate that understanding out into a different set of lines. Which is super cool.

But guess who has the most cool ideas? The person who tried all of the above.

Yeah this is all very nice and diplomatic, but it doesn’t really cover the basic point which is that the use of chord scales to contextualise every note on every chord (which it doesn’t do very well but that’s another rant haha) writes the existence of the blues out of the theory books. The people who came up with this stuff knew this because they were good musicians - the problem is people take the theory books on their own.

All it takes is a pair of lugholes and a bit of effort to quickly appreciate that Wayne played and wrote the blues very often; he plays it on Night Dreamer for example, minor blues language on the turnaround. It suffuses his music at a molecular level, far more than modes or seven note chord scales.

You know as well as I do that the vast majority of jazz students will look at this example and go ‘oh D G and E on E7#9, these are notes that belong to E altered’ if it occurs to them to look at the melody at all, and leave it at that. A blues rock guitarist would have a better understanding!

This type of analysis is basically the default and everyone knows Wayne is post modal music, right? It needs a bit of pushback imo.

(if I learned anything from Peter Bernstein it’s that you look at the song for clues and don’t just throw notes on chords.)

(also not sure if I agree that the best players have always checked out everything.)

Anyway I need to stop before I turn into the crap Ethan Iverson haha

Example: I’ve been diving in on Jordan’s stuff. Still working on the super simple pure triad stuff on tunes, but doing some fiddling with the triad-plus-one stuff so that I’m ready when I decide to move on. ANYWAY … I’ve been fiddling around in particular with the first five notes of Anthropology today. If you call it a triad with a neighbor note (C down to Bb), then you get lots of inverted triads with neighbor notes in various places, maybe you sub out the upper neighbor for a leading tone and put that over a bunch of things. But if you call it reordering of a Bb with a 2, then you get a completely different set of vocabulary when you start tinkering. If you think the specific positioning of the “2” is important, then you get another set still. It’s one of my favorite things about music.

So the theory does matter. The second the rubber hits the road, it matters what you call the thing you’re using.

So, Reg is totally right that theory doesn’t matter at all if you can’t play the thing you’re describing. But assuming you can play, theory can have a huge role in what you play, or even what you conceive of to play, or think is possible to play.

I would say it’s Jordan’s stuff which helped move towards this way of thinking.

[pamosmusic]

Yeah this is all very nice and diplomatic, but it doesn’t really cover the basic point which is that the use of chord scales to contextualise every note on every chord (which it doesn’t do very well but that’s another rant haha) writes the existence of the blues out of the theory books. The people who came up with this stuff knew this because they were good musicians - the problem is people take the theory books on their own.

Well yeah I mean you did cut the quote before the part where I said one of those approaches was more right than the other.

But yeah. Agree with all this. The chord-scale stuff is pretty pervasive and pretty obnoxious in its application. Mostly just that it seems like an excuse for people to not need vocabulary a lot of the time (or the context of the actual tune).

Part of the problem with that is that players who graduate from really good music schools don’t actually play that way, though it’s a trope to say that those guys just play chord scales over stuff. By and large they’re buried in Bud Powell records and transcribing all the time and whatnot. I think guys with the resources and-or skills to get those educations also get the context for it. (Bernstein, for example, has had several university gigs, and he is alllllll about that context.) But it’s the chord-scale stuff that trickles down to the rest of us, whether it’s on the internet or in lower tier music programs or whatever you want to call it. Probably because CST and things like it *seem* so straightforward. They look like they’re plug-and-play, and a lot of educators treat them like they are.

also not sure if I agree that the best players have always checked out everything

Well, geez I dont know for sure if I agree with myself on that one either, but can’t you grant a guy a little poetic license now and again?

For what it’s worth, that’s the part of Jordan’s thing that I really run my head up against. He’s a one-thing-done-perfectly guy, and he’s probably right about that in the big picture. I’m a different type of learner though (more a spaghetti-against-the-wall kind of cat).

[Tal_175]

I know of one person who is a Berklee graduate and teaches at a jazz program using a CST based curriculum. My understanding of his objective with CST stuff is not to turn students into artists. The point of CST is to teach students their instruments with a jazz perspective. What students do with it is up to them. They learn how to read, they learn how songs are put together, they get their chops together, they learn how to find the changes in their instruments and off they go. Quite possibly, some of them don't even get this far. An undergraduate program is not an artist factory. Of course if a student already has everything together by the time they start the program, then I'd assume they'd get more artistic guidance from the faculty and get invited to their gigs and what not.

[pamosmusic]

I know of one person who is a Berklee graduate and teaches at a jazz program using a CST based curriculum. My understanding of his objective with CST stuff is not to turn students into artists. The point of CST is to teach students their instruments with a jazz perspective. What students do with it is up to them. They learn how to read, they learn how songs are put together, they get their chops together, they learn how to find the changes in their instruments and off they go. Quite possibly, some of them don't even get this far. An undergraduate program is not an artist factory. Of course if a student already has everything together by the time they start the program, then I'd assume they'd get more artistic guidance from the faculty and get invited to their gigs and what not.

Thats interesting to hear. I’d be interested to see the curriculum, y’know? Like how CST works in those applications. Also what does he teach? That’s more of that context.

With respect to that part about students who have things together getting more artistic guidance — that’s undoubtedly true a lot of the time, and a huge bummer too. It makes you wonder if the students who don’t have it as together would benefit from that artistic guidance too.

I think that might be part of Christians beef here (though he’s perfectly capable of articulating his own beef). What do we consider to be properly “together”?

If you know all your scales, you have it together. If you know a bunch of blues licks, you do not. If you have it together in that particular way, you get into the program. Otherwise, you do not. When really, either one of those things would be a pretty valid foundation for developing a vocabulary. And you could probably say that blues without the heavy scale stuff is a better foundation than scale stuff without the blues licks. Grant Green, maybe.

I absolutely think a student should have scales together in all those positions and stuff. Jazz aside, you just have to know your instrument. But there aren’t a lot of classes (that I know of) focused on getting your “blues chops together.”

My guess is it probably is as simple as CST being easier to grade than where a person put their blues lick and whether or not it swung.

EDIT: this is not a judgment about your friend. Just something I’ve noticed with other places.

[Christian Miller]

Well yeah I mean you did cut the quote before the part where I said one of those approaches was more right than the other.

But yeah. Agree with all this. The chord-scale stuff is pretty pervasive and pretty obnoxious in its application. Mostly just that it seems like an excuse for people to not need vocabulary a lot of the time (or the context of the actual tune).

Part of the problem with that is that players who graduate from really good music schools don’t actually play that way, though it’s a trope to say that those guys just play chord scales over stuff. By and large they’re buried in Bud Powell records and transcribing all the time and whatnot. I think guys with the resources and-or skills to get those educations also get the context for it. (Bernstein, for example, has had several university gigs, and he is alllllll about that context.) But it’s the chord-scale stuff that trickles down to the rest of us, whether it’s on the internet or in lower tier music programs or whatever you want to call it. Probably because CST and things like it *seem* so straightforward. They look like they’re plug-and-play, and a lot of educators treat them like they are.

Yes.. and I do think its often assumed post-bop falls into the CST camp even if it's understood bop isn't really based on chord scales. Mark Levine for instance kind of took that assumption as the basis of his books. The real situation on those records is much more interesting; some players tend towards that approach, such as Herbie, but others have their own way of doing things.

I think jazz edu itself is quite culturally destructive in that it selects for a canon on the basis of what supports the curriculum. Ethan always uses the example of Bill Evans being the model of jazz piano practice.

Anyway, I think that's all completely true. You can go to music college as a motivated self starter and hook up with high level practitioners and get good info and all this syllabus stuff is kind of neither here nor there. Most of the students on high level jazz programs seem to have this ethos.

None of which is to say CST is useless. It is a great tool for certain things. A better way to look at it is that CST answered a number of problems for jazz education within the higher education institution none of which have much to do with jazz per se, and this became one reason for its ubiquity. Actually Tal's post and your response illustrate this very well.

I wonder if there's a fair chance of Barry Harris stuff being instituted in the same way as CST. it's a better system than CST for learning how to play bop for sure, but it bugs me because I can see how it may become another ideological system like functional harmony, CST etc. I do appreciate people who know the approach inside out, but it seems to me many musicians passed through Barry's door (people you wouldn't always expect) and got a lot out of it without necessarily becoming purely wedded to that way of doing things. Barry was about so much more than a bunch of scales and exercises.

Or course even vocabulary becomes a trap over the longer term.. but at least it helps early stage learners sound musical and idiomatic.

OTOH there's lots of people who seem to be able to talk about the system and maybe even work it a bit without seemingly being able to play many tunes or just the bog standard guitar grips and stuff which get you up and running.

To be fair to Mark Levine, I think he got a sniff of this tendency towards systems and dogma and wasn't comfortable with it, reading between the lines of his foreword to the Theory Book. He knew the book would be considered authoritative. I like that he included a chapter of myths, for example. But when something's in print and widely consulted, it becomes definitive for many people.

Well, geez I dont know for sure if I agree with myself on that one either, but can’t you grant a guy a little poetic license now and again?

Absolutely none.

For what it’s worth, that’s the part of Jordan’s thing that I really run my head up against. He’s a one-thing-done-perfectly guy, and he’s probably right about that in the big picture. I’m a different type of learner though (more a spaghetti-against-the-wall kind of cat).

me too. I admire Jordan's focus.

[Christian Miller]

Thats interesting to hear. I’d be interested to see the curriculum, y’know? Like how CST works in those applications. Also what does he teach? That’s more of that context.

With respect to that part about students who have things together getting more artistic guidance — that’s undoubtedly true a lot of the time, and a huge bummer too. It makes you wonder if the students who don’t have it as together would benefit from that artistic guidance too.

I think that might be part of Christians beef here (though he’s perfectly capable of articulating his own beef). What do we consider to be properly “together”?

If you know all your scales, you have it together. If you know a bunch of blues licks, you do not. If you have it together in that particular way, you get into the program. Otherwise, you do not. When really, either one of those things would be a pretty valid foundation for developing a vocabulary. And you could probably say that blues without the heavy scale stuff is a better foundation than scale stuff without the blues licks. Grant Green, maybe.

I absolutely think a student should have scales together in all those positions and stuff. Jazz aside, you just have to know your instrument. But there aren’t a lot of classes (that I know of) focused on getting your “blues chops together.”

My guess is it probably is as simple as CST being easier to grade than where a person put their blues lick and whether or not it swung.

EDIT: this is not a judgment about your friend. Just something I’ve noticed with other places.

The more I teach - or attempt to teach - jazz, the more I align with Reg’s emphasis on technical skills.

Where I may differ from Reg a little (maybe?) I don’t actually think it’s that important what syllabus you learn; working through the Berklee scale stuff and patterns etc will teach you HOW to go about putting stuff on the instrument. At Julliard they have a different syllabus (more trad major/minor) but the upshot will be much the same I expect.

it’s been my experience that outside the college world most guitar players have not gone through this type of process. I really had to work on tightening this stuff up to get myself to the place to be able to access Barry’s stuff for instance.

Is it a requisite for playing jazz? Maybe not, but it helps enormously for putting information on the instrument.

[Tal_175]

Thats interesting to hear. I’d be interested to see the curriculum, y’know? Like how CST works in those applications. Also what does he teach? That’s more of that context.

With respect to that part about students who have things together getting more artistic guidance — that’s undoubtedly true a lot of the time, and a huge bummer too. It makes you wonder if the students who don’t have it as together would benefit from that artistic guidance too.

I think that might be part of Christians beef here (though he’s perfectly capable of articulating his own beef). What do we consider to be properly “together”?

If you know all your scales, you have it together. If you know a bunch of blues licks, you do not. If you have it together in that particular way, you get into the program. Otherwise, you do not. When really, either one of those things would be a pretty valid foundation for developing a vocabulary. And you could probably say that blues without the heavy scale stuff is a better foundation than scale stuff without the blues licks. Grant Green, maybe.

I absolutely think a student should have scales together in all those positions and stuff. Jazz aside, you just have to know your instrument. But there aren’t a lot of classes (that I know of) focused on getting your “blues chops together.”

My guess is it probably is as simple as CST being easier to grade than where a person put their blues lick and whether or not it swung.

EDIT: this is not a judgment about your friend. Just something I’ve noticed with other places.

In the past, I've studied with a few people who taught at jazz programs. This person wasn't one of the people I've studied with but he was friends with one. It was a while ago, but I think he studied with Mick Goodrick and William Leavitt in the 70's. What I remember is, his goal was bring the students to a level where they can play the changes using appropriate chord-scales over tunes. Get those chord tones down using the scales. After that, they were on their own. I remember also seeing on YouTube Gary Burton giving feedback to students after they performed. If he could hear the changes in a student's solo, he praised him/her. If he didn't clearly hear the changes, he told them to spend more time on their instruments to get those chords down. It wasn't about whether the students touched his soul with their killer lines. It was about whether they know how to get around their instruments. You get good at each chord, then work on connecting them. Then you make sure you have good enough chops to perform at decent tempos. Then you spend the rest of your life exploring if that's what you want. That's my take on this teaching philosophy. I like it.

Getting fluent with chord-scale mapping on your instrument is also essential to the Barry Harris approach. Of course he taught a different (perhaps a simpler) chord-scale mapping, and emphasized line building over tunes with these scales. But if you can't play the scales at tempo everywhere on your instrument, you are doomed from the beginning.

I remember one of the people who I was studying with complained to me about some students graduating without knowing tunes. So, I don't know how perfectionist they can be with all this stuff in education. There is a bit of garbage in, garbage out factor there.

[Tal_175]

With respect to that part about students who have things together getting more artistic guidance — that’s undoubtedly true a lot of the time, and a huge bummer too. It makes you wonder if the students who don’t have it as together would benefit from that artistic guidance too.

On the other hand, I know a musician who complained about receiving too much artistic guidance in the jazz program he graduated from. He said his private instructor only talked about the more abstract expressive concepts when he was struggling with understanding and putting together the basic elements of improvisation. Instructors can be totally tone deaf (no pun intended) about where the student is at and what s/he needs.

[pamosmusic]

On the other hand, I know a musician who complained about receiving too much artistic guidance in the jazz program he graduated from. He said his private instructor only talked about the more abstract expressive concepts when he was struggling with understanding and putting together the basic elements of improvisation. Instructors can be totally tone deaf (no pun intended) about where the student is at and what s/he needs.

Haha. Yeah I’ve had lessons like that too. I guess both approaches can signal bad teaching if it’s not what the student needs. But most students need both in varying degrees.

My first jazz guitar teacher was awesome. He sat there in a room with me while I played major scales in twelve positions, in each of twelve keys—then harmonic minor, then melodic minor. Also had to turn in a chorus of transcription every week and play it at tempo.

Sounds terrible but it was what I needed at the time.

Also really good at turning some of those artistic concepts in to practical nuts and bolts things which was great.