Originally Posted by
Cunamara
There is a story about Johnny Smith visiting friends, who played him the Barney Kessel Poll Winners album. He was asked what he thought of Barney's solo on a particular song; Johnny picked up his guitar and said, "play it again." He then played along with the record, perfectly duplicating Barney's solo having only heard it once.
Johnny learned to play guitar, in part, by listening to Django Reinhardt recordings. He would buy the latest record, put it on his record player and copy what he heard. The record wore out after about five plays, so he got very good at picking up the information very quickly. I think 50, 60, 70 years ago most aspiring jazz musicians learned by copying off recordings. Prior to that, they learned on the bandstand from other musicians firsthand. Now, aspiring jazz musicians have almost no opportunity to learn the craft on stage because there are hardly any gigs. So we've come up with all sorts of jazz pedagogy, online lessons, method books, etc., etc. to make up for the lack of opportunity to learn the music properly. I don't know if that means it's harder to learn how to play "authentic" jazz, although I don't know what authentic means in this context, anyway.
In any event, music is an auditory-emotional experience and learning music by ear is probably the most direct way to access that.
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