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I watched a Mezzrow stream after reading his blog about blues riffs and was surprised at how little his music was rooted in the tradition he vehemently defends. I was not surprised by how much he talked in between songs.
Originally Posted by Tal_175
Ethan Iverson Trio - Live at Mezzrow Jazz Club - 11/8/2025 - YouTube
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12-03-2025 06:33 PM
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Or framed another way, you were surprised by how even someone so modern takes the tradition so seriously Originally Posted by AllanAllen
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That was your takeaway? Originally Posted by Tal_175
(Well I mean - he is a professor at the New England Conservatory. And if I learned anything from reading up on the history of jazz education for my Master's it's that jazz professors love nothing better than bemoaning the state jazz education. But I don't read this article like that.)
To me, it reads like - "there's a technical approach to jazz improvisation called chord scale theory that was popularised in jazz education and through popular products like Jamey Aebersold, and it can give people the idea that they are playing jazz by shuffling the chord scale notes around when in fact to play jazz well you have to be very serious about the music itself and learn it. Here's Goldblum by way of an extreme case."
No disagreement from me there.
So is he saying there are inauthentic practices in jazz education? Absolutely. I also get the feeling he sees a lot of technically gifted young players whose playing is somewhat unrooted in the blues and swing that he values highly.
I don't think Ethan is saying that all jazz educators are teaching badly.
He is undoubtedly getting on his soapbox and maybe leaning a little towards oversimplification for rhetorical effect, and I don't think I can really speak to the truth of Ethan's statements on jazz education in the US or go into the specifics. I just don't have the knowledge. I have read somewhat on the subject however, and there are interesting tensions there.
(For example, it seems like EVERYONE learns the Coltrane diminished lick at some point at jazz school. There's the Cry Me a River lick .. and so on. Personal expression lol? Well I'm not against this sort of thing - it's good to have things to play. I do videos like that myself. But there's something deeply funny about hordes of jazzers worldwide learning the same licks and mostly the same blinking tunes that happen to be on Miles Davis records form the 50s because that's what their teachers tell them. Yes we are all individuals... Can't we have more variety?)
There is an aspect of the nature of the jazz that became highly represented in the academy which is the progressive stuff which is rooted in the modal approach, and a student base already somewhat rooted in the older styles and ready to expand their horizons. The faculty had their own cultural biases too.... Paul Berliner tells some humorous anecdotes about the way New York musicians regarded Berklee...
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Literally, that's what I said. There is a view out there criticizes that institutional jazz education for it's lack of authenticity. Also from the article: Originally Posted by Christian Miller
"There was no such thing as institutional jazz education until the late 1950s, a time when modern jazz was comparatively popular in American society.Most jazz educators decided that the chord scale was the answer. "
That was your takeaway of what I said? Originally Posted by Christian Miller
I think if I did like 15 min google powered search, I can find posts of yours that carry a similar sentiment about the institutional jazz education as the article. Not sure why you seemed surprised about the existence of such perspective.
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Originally Posted by Tal_175
I'd like to break this down a bit
- Ethan's critiques of CST I think are all well founded.
- Ethan says that CST became popular during the boom in jazz education. This I think is well evidenced both though oral and documentary history. That's what the sentence above is literally saying.
So that's all good as far as I'm concerned, and I think that's the point that Ethan makes in the article. So is it a criticism of jazz education? Kind of. But mostly its a criticism of a specific and popular approach to jazz education. And I agree with Ethan on every point there.
Now you specifically seem to be saying that as so many of the practitioners in colleges were themselves masters of the craft, that their teaching of CST must represent some sort of continuity or evolution with how they themselves learned to play jazz?
I would say this last point is actually highly questionable, and really why I don't think a critique of the use of CST in jazz education is really about that faculty knowledge base. Apart from what I've already talked about above - CST being taught originally to those who could already play - academic institutions have their own logic.
Here's one way that happens. Berklee became an accredited College in 1974 for example. One requirement of accreditation is that you have to have an academic syllabus and (IIRC) some sort of top standardised internal testing in order to award degrees. Now the real purpose of Berklee might be to get a bunch of talented musicians together in a space to play and connect and create, but if you are handing out actual degrees, the needs of academic syllabus are well suited by things like CST.
So you may have Ritchie Hart in a room somewhere teaching people that chord scales are a crock and you need to go and use your ears, but the institution itself is going to test you on Jazz harmony 101. Sure... but there's also the need to have some sort of syllabus. CST fit the bill.
I mean Beato tells this same story, of all people.
How "The Lick" Killed Jazz? (Not That One) - YouTube
Is it true? Yeah I buy it. Things happen in institutions for reasons like this.
Latterly it manifest itself in musicians on performance degrees having to write essays. Needs of accreditation.
(Now someone like Jimmy Blue Note could set me right on this as he was there, but as understand it the old joke is if you graduated Berklee, you'd failed... Meaning that the talented musicians would all get gigs with top pros and never finish their degrees. So it seems like it was really understood that the whole academic thing was always kind of an excuse back in the 70s at least. Today, Berklee is a very different institution in a very different world.)
OTOH for many CST is the first point of contact with jazz improvisation thanks to Aebersold etc, and widespread use of CST in beginner workshops etc.
That said I don't think CST is useless, and this isn't what Ethan is saying either. It's just that it is not an improvisation method. No one I know seems to think it is, and yet we use it like one lol. I can't quite get me head around it.Last edited by Christian Miller; 12-03-2025 at 08:22 PM.
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^ That's a good thought that the institutional accreditation of jazz material created the disconnect between CST and actual appropriate practices to learning jazz.
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Yes, exactly. I wasn’t putting him down. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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I talked with Ethan briefly when he was here for a gig a few months ago. I was wearing my Barry Harris t-shirt and he told me that Bud Powell is still his favorite pianist. I wouldn’t have guessed that when I saw him with the Bad Plus a dozen years ago in NYC. Originally Posted by AllanAllen
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The teacher who hit me the hardest on not having the tradition together wasn't Peter Bernstein (a close second) but Brad Shepik. He's as modern as they come. His exact words:
"If you want to play this music, you have to love this music."
It was over me playing a change wrong in some tune or another.
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Would have guessed Monk! Originally Posted by pcjazz
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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"If you want to play this music, you have to love this music."
This! 1000% this. It's an art form. You don't 'solve' Rhythm Changes like finding the area of a triangle. I've found that if someone really loves this music, non stop listening to records, going to gigs, finding jam sessions, listening to more records, learning tunes from charts, learning tunes from records, listening with headphones and no distractions, listening while you drive or wash the dishes, etc etc etc, any 'method' or 'approach' will kind of work. And if someone doesn't engage with the music, no 'system' is going to make up for that...
That said, there are any number of worthwhile ways to engage with jazz guitar. Playing/studying by yourself for personal enjoyment. getting some licks/chords/tunes together to sound credible on a cocktail hour wedding gig, or moving to a major scene to play with the people you've heard on records are all valid, but good advice for one of those folks will be terrible advice for another.
Best wishes for everyone's music!
PK
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Yay, this got posted again. If you haven’t heard it listening for a bit of cultural context on Berklee in the 70s.
(Apparently they weren’t teaching chord scales even in 1974 which is interesting.)
Sent from my iPhone using TapatalkLast edited by Christian Miller; 12-06-2025 at 09:29 PM.
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That was good. A certain amount of BSing I think but really interesting. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
The George Benson asking the names of simple stuff reminds me of Stochelo asking me what a D9 chord was called.
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I was interested in how they seemed to be talking about a Johnny Smith "Diagonal" fretboard system for site reading. I never really thought about it, I was just wondering about some sort of 1 scale system for guitar that would ascend diagonally across the fretboard for site reading. Is there such a thing? Is it just 3 octave scales? Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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4 notes per string maybe? Originally Posted by sully75
Segovia three octave scales I guess kind of.
Extending beyond the octave would break the guitar’s symmetry so that kind of precludes a real “system” like we guitar players enjoy
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Yeah it's probably not a thing. I was just wondering conceptually if there's one extended way to play the guitar with more or less one place for each note. 4 NPS sounds right as it moves you diagonally.
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Johnny Smith imagined a line from the low F (1st fret E string) to the High F (13th fret high e) and tried to play under that line. He thought the notes sounded better there.
it’s in this interview
Maybe someone who worked through his books can tell you if it’s in there. Much as I love Johnny Smith, I haven’t purchased his book.
https://a.co/d/csMJEVy
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That's awesome, thank you! Originally Posted by AllanAllen
I did a scan of his books and it didn't seem like it was in there but the scan was about 3 minutes long of a few PDFs.
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'Mirror' fingerings are probably the closest thing to what you're describing:
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How do you navigate this? Shifting on the 5th? Originally Posted by PMB
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Shifts occur on the 5th, 7th, 4th and 6th degrees of the scale in my example. The point is that each degree of the scale in any ascending or descending form is associated with the same finger (check the indications above the notation). This mimics the regularity of fingering that occurs when playing piano scales. Originally Posted by AllanAllen
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I confess that I don't understand the value of thinking about scales in this way.
But, how will working on such things improve your playing? I'm not saying they won't, I'm seriously asking how.
Having practiced scales too much over the years, my fingers find them while excluding my brain from helping construct a solo. It would have been better, or so I now think, to have practiced making melody within tonal centers. Meaning, use the same notes, but make music from the start.
As far as reading goes, I have a firmer opinion. Thinking about scales is of little value. I think it's much better to learn to read the old fashioned way, and play everything in at least two octaves. Then, you know the neck. You see the notes on the chart and you figure out how to play them. You pick a position that works for the bulk of it and then you problem-solve how to deal with notes that are harder to reach. Could be stretches, position shifts, flattening a finger or whatever. But, unless the chart has you playing a scale, knowing a scale doesn't help much if you know the fretboard.
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He has 3 forms (positions) for each scale, and each one covers 2 octaves, but he does not explain how/where he shifts from one to the other, which is a major oversight because his forms are unconventional. It's one of the worst, if not the worst, scale fingering presentations I've ever seen. Originally Posted by AllanAllen
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Dunno m8. Just play a scale from the bottom of the guitar to the same note 3 of octaves higher. Find a sensible fingering that sticks to the diagonal. 4/3 notes a string seems fine
Am I just a mega-genius?
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Shifting positions a whole step up with the pinky is ridiculously inefficient. Originally Posted by PMB
'Mirror' fingerings are probably the closest thing to what you're describing:
The difficult part is "find a sensible fingering that sticks to the diagonal" because it must be both simple and consistent. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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