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I cannot believe people in this day and age would bend a note in order to express themselves. Especially on Jazz guitar.
And that a large percentage of the audience would be moved by (or even accepting of) it shows just how hollow (the people not the jazz guitars) they are.
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10-18-2010 02:35 PM
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It seems to me that the greatest aspect of guitar is the fact that it, as an instrument, is sort of a compromise - it combines the expressiveness of a horn with the functionality of a piano. So I don't think that guitar is ever going to be the pinnacle of either of those points, but if we can stretch it and push the boundaries there, then we can really stretch the instrument's potential. If I can approach the expressiveness of a great sax player on an instrument that still allows me to comp, then to me, that makes me a musician that band leaders would want to recruit.
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Golly, now I wish that I played the sax, so I didn't have so many rules to follow. They get to use whatever noise they can make come out of their horn, stretching all it's limits. I surely don't want to get a slapdown for trying that on guitar...what jazz musician would ever want to get accused of breaking the rules???
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Don't want to butt in here, but didn't Monk bend notes on the piano, or is that just my imagination? Monk? jazz? naaaah!
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My own personal rule for playing jazz is this: whenever I'm told that I can't/shouldn't do something, I always do it. This way I can form my own opinion.
As it turns out, there really are some things that you just SHOULDN'T do because they tend to sound shitty no matter how you do them. Playing full chords when you're in a band with a piano player and a bassist is one of those things. Bending strings is not.
String bending is only a gimmick if you use it as a gimmick, and this goes for any technique on any instrument. Sweep picking could be considered a gimmick if it were used to impress people by playing fast, whereas it would not be considered a gimmick if it were used tastefully and musically. Playing octaves could also be considered a gimmick if used in such a way.
Also, just because it is a technique that is not and has not been commonly used in jazz does not mean that people shouldn't use it now. This kind of thinking impedes musical progress, because it implies that things should only be done if they have been done before and are accepted by the jazz community. You know what else was at one point not accepted by much of the jazz community? Bebop. Back then, many people considered the use of the flatted fifth to be a "gimmick". Now EVERYONE does it. This is how paradigms shift.Last edited by max_power; 10-18-2010 at 10:35 PM.
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Well, I'll just speak for my very newbie self here.
I like the sound of bending. However, I have not really thought about using it much yet, or where it fits in with jazz or my nascent playing style. Furthermore, I have had very little practice doing it. There's so much to learn that I just have not gotten around to bending, hammers, or pull-offs at all yet. I just never think of those things when I am practicing improv.
Further still, I really like heavy strings (currently using 13s on my archtop, and thinking very seriously about 14s), and whereas bending a semitone is not too difficult so far (and getting in pitch seems pretty easy, but maybe my ear training is working), a whole step bend is pretty tough for me. (I don't think it's a strength issue; I can deadlift double my own weight, and that requires much more grip strength than any guitar bend. Not really sure what the issue is, but again I have not spent much time working on it.)
Anyway, this noob opines that bends in jazz are cool; just do what you like. I just have not bothered with all that stuff yet.
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I have Thomastik-Infeld "Be-Bop" 14's on my guitar (24.5" scale length), and can bend without much trouble. Yes there is more felt resistence over lighter strings, but a heavy stiff string doesn't have to physically move as great a distance to get the note: so it seems like there is a bit of a trade-off.
Originally Posted by Steve in Hatfield
If the leverage is right and I'm somewhere up the neck near the middle of the string, it's absolutely no problem to bend heavier gauges a whole step (on the plain strings).
I do save the step and a half stuff for other styles (and guitars) however.
I don't bend a lot on jazz tunes, but I'm game for a bluesy smear in context sometimes. It's always a sure way to get a rise out of the cornet player in our band. He loves that kinda thing.Last edited by backliner; 10-19-2010 at 07:46 PM.
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When I was younger, I was at this jazz club, and I approached the guitarist when the band was on a break. I asked him if he could give me a bit of advice. He took a sip from his glass of Old Crow and said to me: "Get Bent". I was so flattered that he shared that insight with me. Been bending ever since.
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I think a major reason _I_ don't use bends when playing Jazz is my kinesthetic association with the rock styles of playing I grew up playing. I think for a lot of us it's easier to let the notes themselves simply speak, and incorporating bends makes it easier to fall into patterns we may have earlier played in another style. When i play a bend in a certain position my fingers "take over" and I'm playing some non-jazz riff from muscle memory. I've just got so many years with that stuff that "Johnny B Goode" just asserts himself almost automatically.
That being said, maybe it's actually out of laziness that we haven't taken the time to make bends more a part of our playing even when we play jazz. It's certainly a huge part of horn players' phrasing, and of course theirs is based on trying to immitate the human voice. On that premise their certainly can be no real reason for not bending notes on the guitar. I know for myself it would require some time and kinesthetic "unlearning" to incorporate it into my jazz playing. It's just easier (lazier?) to avoid it.
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Bends are improvising tools. Stock playing, relying on set patterns is true of any 'tool' we apply to guitar.
The art is in being creative with such things. Being honest about those things you know you do over and over again, but somehow can't shake off, is so important to the creative process.
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I think alot of the posts on this philosophy are really backwards thinking. Let's look at what our job is as a jazz guitarist. The purpose behind practicing is to play live, in an ensemble, right. Ok, let's look at the music and put yourself on the bandstand, for example in a tune like cherokee where there is alot of chords moving by quickly and you are playing in a trio with no chords underneath you, your job is to tell the story within the tunes' chord changes; What kind of musical material would you NEED to practice to learn to move around in the changes. Well you want to learn how to get some nice quick phrase/melodic motions going around all your majors, minors, and dominant type chords. This is your job, to work on such things so your audience can still hear the changes. If you would like to work on jazz licks that use bends in different places, that's one thing, but the most important thing is to learn to talk around the chords without losing your audience...
Last edited by texasjazz; 11-05-2011 at 08:35 AM.
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I'm wondering if the notes we use to improvise with over any standard
Can be bent into. I'm just wondering mind you.
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I think I went through some of the David Baker 2 5 patterns and tried to add some bending stuff once. I didn't really care for it in that context of fast bebop phrasing. I like Mike Stern though so to me he's the modern master of the fittin it ALL together. Really nice guy and I think he's a monster jazzer
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This is a very important thread. I tried bending on Solar, and it didn't work. Then I tried it on Blue Bossa, and it didn't work. I used an arpeggio, I think it was a minor seventh arpeggio, and then I bent a note, and it didn't work.
My friend watched me do it.
So there you have it - a peer reviewed study.
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You guys realize of course that you if can bend an octave like I can (which is totally bragable), then you can play a chromatic half-dominant diminshed scale at, like, a thousand beats per second.
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I don't see anything wrong with playing something that gives you emotional gratification or uplifts a crowd. Music doesn't need to be intricate or complicated or deliberate or scrutinized to be profound and impacting. It just needs to be genuine.
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Maybe part of what makes a style of music sound the way it does is how far back into its history of development the current consensus of players look back into its history to form what they produce as "authentic" playing of the historical techniques of that style.
Might look something like this:
For classical, the reference to authenticity of sound spans back centuries
For jazz, the reference to authenticity of sound spans back generations
For blues, decades
For rock, years
For pop, months
Not that these specific periods are accurate, but if the idea is correct it might make sense that the use of techniques (like bending) would be influenced by both the mechanical limits of the sound from old instruments the way they used to be played (jazz guitars with hard to bend strings) and the preservation of that traditional sound even when using modern instruments that make the technique possible or easy.
So you hear a lot of modern jazz players using bendy capable guitars, but not bending, or just using the occasional microtonal bend on a bluesy flat third or fourth.
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I'll admit to missing a few posts here but I didn't notice much about bending by country players, who tend to play clean and precise, even when bending two strings at once (and one a half-step, the other a whole), or bending one string down a whole step, grabbing the next highest string with the same finger and bending it up a half step, thereby releasing the first bend. Hard to get right but a most musical achievement. I don't do much "faux steel" bending but I respect the artistry.
To avoid bends, slurs, hammers and pulls is no more than to say you prefer monotony, which you're free to do, but it is silly to suggest that everyone else should be as monotonous (or else judged "inauthentic").
Also, just because this or that rock player bends poorly is no more a fair critique of bending per se than saying some rock vocalists can't really sing and therefore singing is bogus. Or that there's no point in playing a top-of-the-line guitar because you heard someone play one badly. The one (-bad execution by someone) has nothing to do with the other (-a technique, ability, or instrument).
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It's a dilemma though...in order for my guitar to play and sound like I want it to for jazz, I'm using a string gauge that does not really allow me to pull off such precise bends.
Therefore, it's not something I see as "invalid jazz technique," it's something I give up in favor of other good things my setup gives me.
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As a newbie to both this forum and jazz guitar, I found this thread very interesting. I just started back playing guitar after an absence of a few years. Previously, my playing was very much electric Chicago style blues guitar, but I decided to focus mostly on jazz, though I still play some blues. This thread got me thinking that, though I obviously bent like crazy playing blues, thus far I have not worked it into my jazz playing, choosing to slide into or out of notes sometimes ehn I would normally throw in a bend (though I keep it to a minimum). I guess bending didn't feel very, for lack of a better word, 'jazzy' to me. This is probably from my strong association with bending to the blues.
Now this was never really a concious thing, and I always intended to develop some sort of hybrid style for certain bluesy jazz material as T-Bone Walker is one of my favorite blues guitarists. I can see mixing some more 'sophisticated' blues with straight ahead jazz would make for an interesting repertaire, IMHO.
I think I have not done any bending in jazz simply because I don't need to practice it, and am focusing on developing more traditional jazz skills at this point. It's the same with vibrato- I developed a pretty mean 'butterfly' vibrato a-la BB King, but it seems too much for jazz, and I have kept it to more subtle vibrato, at this point.
But I am not philosphically against either. I am very much a believer in 'learn the rules thoroughly before you break them.' At one time in orchestral music you would never have orchestral voices move in parallel fifths. That is until Mozart started doing it, but he certainly knew the rules before he found a way to make breaking it work.
As far as cheating, I can kind of see where Goofsus is coming from, but I'm not sure I agree.
Speaking of cheating, please don't tell my strat about all the time I've been spending with my Epiphone Joe Pass.
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I prefer to slide up or slur to reach for a note rather than bend, although there are times where i will bend slightly up or down to make a point. I don't think it matters that much.
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Depends on subgenre. I've heard contemporary players bend notes and make it sound like the only right thing to do in the moment. In a 50's kind of bebop setting however, it can sound out of place with bends but it depends on the player. A good player will have the ear and sensibility to use his vocabulary with taste, no matter what he does.
Besides bebop, I dabble with Gypsy Jazz. In that genre, bends are accepted but they are very subtle. No over the top blues bending.
In the end it comes down to this: if you hear it, play it!
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It's funny, I come from a piano background where blues and jazz are just two sides of a coin - but from a guitar pov blues and jazz behave like two different animals. Why? One you buy one type of guitar and put one kind of strings and you bend 'em like Beckham. The other, you buy a different type of guitar and put a different kind of string on and - you don't bend.
It took me a l - o - n - g time to realise this.
So in the guitaring world you tend to get more hard-core jazz types, whereas with piano it's more mixed. I know, someone's going to tell me all the folk (folk here, famous players, etc) who mix genres, but, I can tell you, compared to piano, the jazz/blues line divides guitarists more. And it's all because of those strings.
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late to the thread.
- Charlie Christian bent.
- Barney Kessel bent (on 1950's Charlie Parker records too
) - Wes bent
- Benson bent
- McLaughlin bent, but now uses a whammy bar.
Last edited by fumblefingers; 12-20-2011 at 08:46 AM.
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I have several Johnny Smith records on which he bends notes. Howard Roberts too and that's a man's work! Howard used a 16-60 set of strings.
Last edited by Flyin' Brian; 12-24-2011 at 02:33 AM.
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