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i think you're missing the point. there are indeed many experts who have trouble trying to play. no argument there, lol.
Originally Posted by Reg
but being an expert on jazz is a prerequisite if you want to play well. if the preemptive grinding method worked threads like this one would not exist.
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07-30-2023 11:17 AM
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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Spoiler warning! Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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as usual i find myself in total agreement with denis chang (whom i suspect lurking in this group)
this video is long, but imo it is pure gold for anyone wondering about the process.
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I agree with this:
Not this:It's not grinding technique and you magically become a jazz player... it's grinding technique so you have the opportunity to become a jazz player.
This part I think bears some picking at:The other stuff is just not that hard.
I just think it’s important for me, as a teacher, to have a little humility on this point. Everyone learns differently. Even amongst people who learn the same way, everyone is starting in a different place, and with a different background. Even amongst people who learn the same way, and have the same background, there are almost as many different goals and interests as there are individuals. All that is aside from the amount of time each person can commit, given their other obligations.Generally I give free lessons, and it only takes 1 lesson to give most students what they need to work on to help get where they think they want to get. Most just don't want to do the work...
So the idea that I would even know, what a student needs after one lesson, let alone be able to pack it all in, let alone let alone have it be comprehensible to anyone but myself, seems like a stretch.
This is just me, but when a student doesn’t absorb what I’m giving them, I try to take it as a signal that my approach didn’t work. Maybe they didn’t put in the time necessary, but it’s just as likely they put in the time they have and I’d just be beating my head against the realities of their life to suggest otherwise. So I try something different. I’m frequently surprised by how often the “something different” works.
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The best jazz guitar teacher I ever had was my classical guitar teacher for sophomore to senior years of high school. The only jazz he ever mentioned was that Roland Dyons “Night and Day” arrangement, but the dude taught me how to practice.
How do I evaluate myself, how do I decide what “finished” is, how do I pinpoint the actual problem in a difficult passage, and how do I think creatively to solve the problem.
That kind of thing takes time and attention and is going to look different from person to person.
Anyway … we’re drifting far afield.
for the OP … stay the course. Try and relax. Shift gears when you get bored or feel stuck. Ask for help. Try to take some time to just knock around on the instrument and have fun.
Also I like your exercise. It will work for a while. Then it will feel like it doesn’t anymore. Don’t quit; just work on something else and come back to if later. You will probably be better at it.
Over and out.
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Yea... different people yada yada.
I have always said get good at a few thing and the rest will come easier etc..
I say a lot of BS... but at gigs I play really simple stuff... Sure I play what I enjoy, but most of the time I'm playing what the ensemble is trying to play or what I'm being asked to play. And always what the audience is enjoying.
Peter... I agree with what your saying about the baby sitting part. But jazz is like swimming in a river.... not still water.
Sorry maybe lousy metafore... Jazz is not for beginners.
dig... sure I miss many points. But I take it as a given that one needs to be expert on what jazz is.
Denis's vid was cool... but do you think of him as a jazz player. And yea could have made his point in 5min.
The school etc... seem cool, But, man it's nothing new...
I'll stay with my opinions... about the technique thing. Feels, phrasing and choosing how to melodically spell whatever one wants to is much easier... when you can be ahead and not need to stare at the fretboard while playing.
Subdividing...
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*shrug* Originally Posted by Reg
any pro or semi-pro who has ever been put sheetmusic in front of them can do this easily. it's no big feat. for recreational players, who cares. they want to have fun and the least thing they need is being put pressure on with this kind of BS.
and look at this rubinstein guy, staring at the keyboard for 60 minutes straight. it's such a non-topic.
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After you get the basics down.... is it really that hard to go from C to D then A- down to G7 to get through Satin Doll? You can make this stuff as hard as you'd like with exotic scales and chord substitutions, but at the base of it, if you can move from one sound to the next with the tune you'll be fine. In my experience, that's come from the technical grind more than the theory stuff. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
Taking a phrase through 5 positions then through 12 keys helps me way more than knowing the theory of why each note works.
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Okay. Originally Posted by AllanAllen
I don’t think what you describe is all that hard. In fact, I think it’s simple enough that a beginner could get it with a few pretty rudimentary tools.
Remember that Reg is the one saying you can’t get in there until you’ve gone all out on the technique. I’m arguing that most (jazz) beginners with a few chord grips and a few moveable pentatonic shapes absolutely can and should. From those two little things, and a little push from a book or a teacher or the internet, arpeggios can be drawn, progressions assembled, scales fleshed out.
What I do think is difficult is phrasing. Articulation. Dynamics. A swing feel. Line shape. What Reg refers to as “playing in a jazz style.”
I didn’t say anything actually about theory or exotic scales. My argument is that a person can very quickly start making the simple music you’re describing, and immediately start the work of making it interesting, and making it jazz. By which I mean, making it rhythmic, making it dynamic, making it jump and swing. THAT stuff takes time. So why not take the tools you describe and get to it?
Is it really necessary—for a person just looking to get into the music and learn and enjoy it—to buckle down and shed the heck out of technique for a really long time prior to getting to the work of making music?
I’m not saying that technique is pointless. I work on articulation and rhythm related pick technique for about an hour and a half every day. But most people can get by without that.
The technical stuff can come together slowly as you work on the aforementioned musical stuff.
To borrow Regs metaphor. Jazz might be swimming in a river. But swimming just isn’t that hard. Do you really need to lift weights constantly to build up your strength, work with a trainer to improve your lung capacity, work on the mechanical motions on dry land until they’re perfect? Get yourself up to snuff and get in the water as soon as you can. Work your way up to the current.
Reg called it a bad metaphor, but maybe it’s not.
My toddler took swimming lessons last summer. Every second of it in the pool. At least once a class, he was required to put his face under water. My in-laws live on the James River. Guess who goes swimming in the river this summer?
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Also since you brought up theory and exotic scales … I would agree that exotic scales are a bit goofy. 90% of jazz vocabulary probably fits into the big three. 95% probably fits into those and the symmetrical scales. The rest is probably chromatic in a way that has little to do with scales.
But the knock on theory in these parts is a bit silly.
Sure people (me) get into the weeds in ways that are interesting, if not particularly useful.
But you’ve got three tools when you playing guitar: hands, ear, brain.
You can play stuff, hear what it sounds like, name it after the fact so you can find it later.
You can hear something, play it, name it later.
You can hear something, identify it, then better find how to play it.
Or you can know that something could or should sound good, play it, and let your ear learn it.
My point is that I don’t use theory to make things needlessly complicated. I use theory because it helps me get to ideas I can’t hear yet. I have a good ear, but it’s not natural. I’ve always had to really work hard to develop it and it’s always atrophied when I don’t. But my brain is sharp. I can look at a short idea and come up with literally dozens or hundreds of ways to apply it or change it. From there my ear can usually narrow the field without having to play them, then narrow it further and learn the sounds as I practice.
So you have ear, instrument, theory. All three are tools. Everyone uses them differently and to varying degrees, but all three are tools.
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I used to swim loads, happily up and down an Olympic pool for length after length, and love it. I moved out of the area and the pool shut down, so after lockdown started running more instead, which has been generally great, but it’s interesting. As soon as got back in the water and started doing lengths I realised how much strength it takes to swim, even with an efficient technique (which I have thanks to lessons) and how much I’d lost that as I hadn’t been working on core/upper body strength really (but I was kicking better haha)
Need to get back into it.
But my point is, it might not impress a serious body builder etc but swimming is good strength training; provided you know how to swim so you aren’t getting out of breath. And it builds muscles without you realising it as your general fitness improves.
i think working on music is analogous. The challenges and building of capability are quite organic. That’s not to rule out gym sessions and strength training or say they aren’t important esp to serious athletes, but it’s interesting to compare to music.
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Yeah, maybe swimming is an excellent analogy?
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Implied in this thread is a whole conversation about how performance/production execution skills are acquired and extended, not just in jazz but in any expressive-creative activity. I'll never be a jazz guitarist, but I have been a professional writer (not of fiction) for most of my adult life, and I see some crucial similarities in the way we learn to play, to write (and probably to act, to paint, or in general make stuff). I'm also hearing echoes of the old "theory" posts, but maybe that can of worms needn't be reopened.
Short version: Learning to write can be as mysterious as learning to play jazz, and in my experience the "knowing that" part is distinct from "knowing how." The latter in particular seems to me to be iterative--try, fail, try again, fail better. The role of "practice" would seem to be to acquire and extend particular skills, but the practice regimen is not quite the same thing as the "trying" part that is the actual expressive activity. And just to make things more complicated, writing (like, say, filmmaking) is not presented in real time but shaped and reshaped before the audience sees it. (On the other hand, I've done enough teaching and conference-panel presentations to feel the connection between my writing and public-speaking skills. But I digress. As I did in the classroom.)
The classical teaching regimen for rhetoric (the combination of writing and speechifying that is the ancestral version of college composition) involved lots of copying and imitating of exemplar texts, along with naming the figures of speech and other technical-analytical activities that reveal how language and argument and explanation work. Not unlike the practice regimens discussed upthread. And the lesson I took away from my years in the classroom was that exercises might be necessary but they are not sufficient to produce coherent, readable prose. Only actually working at producing text for an audience (a teacher, an editor, a plain old reader) tells you how to do that.
But then, I'm a terrible student--I've never much liked the buckle-down-and-practice approach, and as much as I've valued the structured workshops I've attended for decades, it's been learning tunes and playing them in public (under the guidance of generous and patient bandmate/mentors) that have gotten me this far. (Yes, I'd be farther along, technically, if I were more disciplined. But I'm not sure I'd be any more musical, whatever that means.)Last edited by RLetson; 07-31-2023 at 03:56 PM.
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Yeah I agree with most of what you said in that whole post, but with the added distinction that jazz isn’t just presented in real time. It’s actually composed (in a manner of speaking) in real time. Originally Posted by RLetson
So jazz would be akin to the writer getting one draft, and being required to do the actual writing before an audience.
(I actually did a good bit of writing in a past life … during the burnout period I mentioned a while back.)
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Actually, it's public speaking of the off-the-cuff kind (for example, classroom teaching or debate) that strikes me as approaching the real-time composition-and-presentation that is the heart of jazz. Writing for publication, like filmmaking, is like musical composition in that it's generated, assembled, and reworked before presentation in fixed form. Like this post, which did not emerge from the Magic 8-Ball of my mind in this form, lucid and elegant and touched (at the end) with irony.
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Maybe.
Anyway.
I guess the purpose of the analogies is that sometimes the practice of the craft is the most effective way to build the muscles and habits the craft requires. I’m definitely, a technical practicer in my own time, but in the main, I still think this is true. In particular when it’s paired up with some careful attention and patient fine tuning.
Also excelling at the craft requires some actual time spent at the craft.
To write requires some writing.
To swim requires some swimming.
To improvise requires some actual improvising.
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The point has been made, here and elsewhere, that the bebop masters did not learn bop licks from records. I’m not saying you should not listen to the music and learn from it, I’m just not sure it should be the fundamental building block. That said, I generally agree with this. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
IMO so much of it depends upon your age. If you’re a 14 year old kid who got turned on to Bireli, then find a jazz instructor who has a good reputation and do everything he/she tells you. But if you’re a working adult with a family, between your family obligations and work weariness and household chores and everything else you won’t have the opportunity to spend hours daily woodshedding. And of course as you age, your brain gets less able to fully assimilate the new musical information. So you kinda have to pick and choose for yourself what you wish/need to work on. A good instructor still helps of course.
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right. they actually learned swing licks from records. Originally Posted by coyote-1
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and made the bop licks up themselves Originally Posted by djg
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It is very akin to a debate. There are certain protocols, certain forms to be followed, but you bring, not just the facts of the issue (your general and specific lexicon), but the ways in which they interact within contextual commonality (syntax), but in the end, it's yourself and what drives you in the moment and what comes through within the interaction in the expression of the ephemeral self (semantics) that it's about. Originally Posted by RLetson
I see this as the biggest danger of neglecting or marginalizing the importance of creating one's own model of the medium. The emergence and the assertion of the self is not something that can be achieved without practice; it's not something that comes as a direct result from merely studying others.
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What they learned and how they learned it is also important to consider. Yes, they learned licks from records...at some point, but I contend that as bebop was being created, at that very formative time in the music's history, the key players had access to a lot more living, live and experiential music than students today. They also had a healthy respect for the music as a living thing, infused with the personalities of individuals. So why does that make any difference? Because as a living thing, what you chose to assimilate is not merely the notes, but the dialect, and an internalization of WHY a musician made the filtering choices they did in the search for what you ultimately hear. Originally Posted by djg
That generation was forged from a mastery of the artform as a composed (not literate necessarily, but self aware and structured) and idiosyncratic art. Sure they had records, but a young Clifford Brown, or a young Roy Haynes or Dodo Mamarosa wasn't modeling themselves from a static recording, but rather trying to figure out how the recorded notes fit into the choices of feel, phrasing, reactionary impulse and very open notion of where the music can grow. Their ideas were formed through an artform that changed every night. They knew that.
I really feel that's why that era spawned such diversity as Oscar Peterson, Monk, Herbie Nicols, Elmo Hope, Red Garland, and Phineas Newborn, all extremely diverse piano voices and ones that I feel drew from the idea of possibility more than the stigma of existing in the shadows of others. There was, at the inception of this music a clear distinction between the extrinsic re-creative imitation and the intrinsic creative innovation.
Licks, or the phrase members, may be the identifiable characteristic of the music from a student as an outsider to the music, but their utility can be a burdensome weight to an emerging artist who can't find their own contextual model of these phrases.
I had a friend and mentor who, although he taught many students, never encouraged anyone to take their language from recordings. He believed that through immersion and educated awareness of the shaping forces within, certain essential commonalities would become apparent- but even listening to recordings and more importantly, live music, is a creative process. That creativity is constantly practiced. That's jazz thinking.Last edited by Jimmy blue note; 08-04-2023 at 01:50 PM.
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This whole post is great but this part is particularly interesting. Originally Posted by Jimmy blue note
Charlie Parker would probably be a good example. Stories about how he would wear holes through the grooves in his records from repeated listening.
But also Kansas City would’ve been a prime stop for all the dance bands and swing bands touring the Midwest. There isn’t really an analog for that anymore. There’s still sort of an analog for the kind of scene they would’ve been playing in after they got to New York. New York isn’t the same for sure, but it’s still hopping. But theres no comparison for the way live dance band and pop music was coming through small and medium sized cities on the regular. There are a handful of places with vibrant live jazz scenes—NYC, Philadelphia, maybe DC, LA—but in most places jazz is concert hall music and pop music is piped in through the speakers.
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If you know your prez listening to early Charlie Parker is quite funny. Bird of course remained an inveterate quoter. A good example is his famous use of the Alfonse Picout High Society solo and many players transcribe and use this line as a ‘Parker lick’ without realising it didn’t originate with Bird.
I sometimes wonder how much of birds solo lines are based on quotes now lost to time
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Yeah it’s interesting how often the “I don’t play licks” vibe comes up. I sometimes think the licks and quotes are kind of what makes the music more alive. The live interaction with the world around it or whatever. To Jimmys point, that’s a fun part about seeing the music live. You can hear people stealing from each other in real time. I went to a show a couple days after Shorter passed and one of the soloists quoted Witch Hunt and everyone clapped and cheered, and that kind of context is lost the moment the tune ends. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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