How did the greats learn how to play?

[Ukena]

The Charlie Parker biography by Ross Russell (Bird Lives) says that Parker had a portable record player which had an adjustment which lowered the speed of the turntable (it doesn’t say by how much). He used this to learn loads of Lester Young solos by ear while on a summer job with a dance band in the Ozarks in 1937. (He was also taking lessons from the band’s pianist).

Supposedly when he returned to the city from this job, his playing had taken a massive leap forwards.

In 1971, I had a turntable that had 16-2/3 rpm speed (the switch said 16). It would play regular LPs one octave lower, and correspondingly slower, so I could play along with Doc Watson's solos at a more manageable speed. Parker may have used something like this.

[AllanAllen]

Heard a rumor once that probably isn't true, but is it possible that by scratching into a record you could force it to loop on a short section that might have been used as a backing track to practice against? Can't see how a loop could be made long enough...

Benny Goodman Trio makes a good backing track

[Jimmy blue note]

Heard a rumor once that probably isn't true, but is it possible that by scratching into a record you could force it to loop on a short section that might have been used as a backing track to practice against? Can't see how a loop could be made long enough...

The grooves on a record are what the needle (pickup) follows. The needle can only "jump" one groove, less than a half second, so you'd never be able to intentionally cut or loop a useful segment of music to study.
Developing one's ear to analyze and contextualize the musical language is an essential skill for learning a solo on the fly. If you understand the language, the harmonic structure the soloist is working with, the melodic options and ornamental lexicon, the range and design decisions based on what came before and after and the nature of the integrated and contextual phrase, it becomes much easier to isolate and learn a phrase or line.
THis is a big difference in blind transcibing and learning a solo with the theoretical and practical knowledge that the player had.

If it's not just notes but ordered sound with intention and design, you don't need to have nearly as much looping time to internalize a solo. As with anything, informed practice is more productive.

[charlieparker]

All this talk of transcribing makes me wonder what people did in the pre-recording era. Sheet music, word of mouth? Make up your own stuff?

I wonder if a lot of the complexity we see in Jazz is due to the rise of the recorded medium or if it was inevitable anyway.

I lean towards the latter as evidenced by Gypsy and African American Church based musical traditions. However, I imagine if you weren't born into such a community you would have a tough time assimilating the music.

[GuyBoden]

All this talk of transcribing makes me wonder what people did in the pre-recording era. Sheet music, word of mouth?

People share info in all professions, so I suppose that's what the older Jazzers did 'shared their ideas with others.'

Personally, I think we're sharing ideas on this forum too, so are we continuing the tradition?

[Jimmy blue note]

Would it be safe to say that the types and depths of distraction, the ease of convenient but not necessarily self engaging competing activities was different back when this music was being codified?
Remember that it was once an accepted practice that most households had instruments that people played for entertainment. Books were a patient form of information. If you wanted to learn about playing music, it was not something you could learn by semester, and nobody told you that you understood it just because you got a B in harmony class.
There's something to be said for that very uncomfortable period of learning where one wrestles with the great measure of self doubt and questioning, where no YouTube platitudes could provide an answer to something that you had to earn by listening until you can hear.
All these videos, books, courses are based on one perspective of "what it's all about". Those first generation cats? That was THEIR perspective, and they wrote the book because there was so much open space to invent the music.

How did they learn? They invented. They wrote the book. Because they had to.
It began with the ear. If your book, or teacher, or video, or channel, or school doesn't insist that your ear can hear a form and actually take the joy of inventing your own form, then you are missing something that all those giants did: They worked real hard and invented the music.

[princeplanet]

Benny Goodman Trio makes a good backing track

Wow! Where is this from? What year?

[grahambop]

Some details here.

Session details: Unknown venue (Unknown 1943)

[AllanAllen]

Wow! Where is this from? What year?

It’s Charlie Parker recording himself playing along to a Benny Goodman Trio record.

I first heard it on one of these podcasts. I can’t figure out which one. Found the episode it’s about 40 minutes in.

[AllanAllen]

We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. The greats are no different. A traveling musician back in the day had to have a huge repertoire of different tunes. For example depression era, traveling acoustic blues guitarist Robert Johnson played blues, rags, polkas, spirituals, popular music etc. to earn a living.

Episode 166: “Crossroads” by Cream – A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

This episode of 500 Songs has a different take that the acoustic blues repertoire as we know it now was a white invention, meaning labels had the artists play the repertoire to sell records.

Trust me, the guy explains it better than I just did.

[supersoul]

Episode 166: “Crossroads” by Cream – A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

This episode of 500 Songs has a different take that the acoustic blues repertoire as we know it now was a white invention, meaning labels had the artists play the repertoire to sell records.

Trust me, the guy explains it better than I just did.

Is this it?
Robert Johnson can't make polka music, he's supposed to be possessed by the devil, damnit.

But the thing is, this generation of people making blues records, and the generation that followed them, didn’t think of themselves as “blues singers” or “bluesmen”. They were songsters. Songsters were entertainers, and their job was to sing and play whatever the audiences would want to hear. That included the blues, of course, but it also included… well, every song anyone would want to hear. They’d perform old folk songs, vaudeville songs, songs that they’d heard on the radio or the jukebox — whatever the audience wanted. Robert Johnson, for example, was known to particularly love playing polka music, and also adored the records of Jimmie Rodgers, the first country music superstar. In 1941, when Alan Lomax first recorded Muddy Waters, he asked Waters what kind of songs he normally played in performances, and he was given a list that included “Home on the Range”, Gene Autry’s “I’ve Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle”, and Glenn Miller’s “Chattanooga Choo-Choo”.

[AllanAllen]

I guess that’s the gist of it. They were more musically developed than the idiot savant sharecroppers they were marketed as in the 1960’s. It’s also interesting they were almost completely forgotten until Bob Dylan and the British Invaders sold our music back to us.

[Mick-7]

Episode 166: “Crossroads” by Cream – A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

This episode of 500 Songs has a different take that the acoustic blues repertoire as we know it now was a white invention, meaning labels had the artists play the repertoire to sell records.

Trust me, the guy explains it better than I just did.

I don't think so, there were were white guys in America that did at least as much to popularize country blues music as the British bands. I'm thinking of guys like Stefan Grossman and John Hammond Jr. I think it was the folk music revival that brought most of the old blues musicians to the publics attention - the Newport Folk Festival, etc., where Skip James, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and others performed.

Hammond's first album was released in 1964. I saw him in a little coffee house once and he was amazing, only musician I ever heard who could play Robert Johnson's music as well as the man himself, it was like going back in time. He sang, played slide guitar and harmonica, all superbly well.

John Hammond, Jr. Songs, Albums, Reviews, Bio ... | AllMusic

[m_d]

That book has some answers:

[Jimmy blue note]

That book has some answers:

The first and in many ways only book I've read that really conveys the social, economic and artistic/creative environmental differences between the world that this music was born from, and our world today.
Who would even think of living and traveling with a circus as a training ground for a life of music? That was Lester Young's formative education. He new how to make music for live audiences before he even imagined what jazz was.
I read this book a long time ago and it made me want to know much more music than I was ever aware of. Great in-depth analyses too.

[Tom Wright]

How do you learn to speak? More precisely, how do you learn how to speak extemporaneously in public? You develop a catalog of arguments and propositions, jokes, stories, etc.

I like to remember that Louis Armstrong learned to improvise as King Oliver's second trumpet. His job was to create a counterpoint line under King Oliver's lead trumpet. You can hear how he looks for the important notes, not a blur.

My path has been to emulate other instruments, the tone/voice and the typical phrases. Those are the vocabulary of the conversation. I learn the tunes, not just the notes, but the feel, the underlying harmony. I make sure to know the bass line and how it joins the melody to create the harmony.

When I hear a cool riff I try to learn that. What I have not done since trying to cover Jimi Hendrix or Frank Zappa is transcribe entire solos. Those made sense in the context of that gig, that session. Instead I try to build up more clever words, more cute phrases, more jokes and stories of my own, so that in a real setting I can contribute stuff that adds to the conversation.

The trope often heard for soloing is to take what another player offered and build on that. That is only possible if you have a large collection of the words, phrases, and stories players use. Those come from the tunes, and the tunes are built on those words.

[rpjazzguitar]

I recently hired a talented singer. Degree in music. Plays keys and percussion. You can hand her a chart she's never seen of a song she's never heard and she can sing it like a horn. Good musician, but, afaik, no formal training in jazz.

We just did a gig which I recorded and listened carefully to her scat-singing. It was more than good enough as a solo.

So, not that she asked, but for an instrumentalist who can already scat sing like that, maybe the best advice is, scat-sing to yourself and practice getting your lines on your instrument with full expression, as best you can.

Later, if she gets bored with her lines, you could offer some theory to facilitate increased sophistication harmonically.

[Christian Miller]

Oral tradition

Next?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Jimmy blue note]

Oral tradition

He said Oral Tradition. Hhh Hhhh

Wise words

[Peter C]

Story has it that Maurice Ravel transcribed (bits of) Jimmie Noone's clarinet solos and presented them to leading symphonic clarinetists who replied with "mais, c'est pas possible!" (=WTF). Ravel based his Bolero on Noone's lines AFAIK.

I don't think compact cassette recorders were a thing at that time , so he would have transcribed from memory,... maybe from a 78rpm record?

[Christian Miller]

He said Oral Tradition. Hhh Hhhh

Wise words

Huhuhuhuhhuhuh


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[JazzPadd]

+1 on Berliner, Thinking in Jazz. It took him over a decade to put that book together. I had some correspondence with him when he was in the laborious proofing phase. It’s an incredibly valuable book, with interviews and insights from jazz musicians who passed not long after it was published, a few while he was working on it. Berliner had a good sense of who to interview and what to ask them about.

As a side note, I recommend his earlier book The Soul of Mbira (with its companion LP of field recordings), also a decade long labor of love, and required reading / listening for aspiring ethnomusicologists back in the day. A truly consummate scholar.

[princeplanet]

....
Also, music is not a competition (it's much more interesting than that).

This guy has some thoughts about this:

[John A.]

I don't think so, there were were white guys in America that did at least as much to popularize country blues music as the British bands. I'm thinking of guys like Stefan Grossman and John Hammond Jr. I think it was the folk music revival that brought most of the old blues musicians to the publics attention - the Newport Folk Festival, etc., where Skip James, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and others performed.

Hammond's first album was released in 1964. I saw him in a little coffee house once and he was amazing, only musician I ever heard who could play Robert Johnson's music as well as the man himself, it was like going back in time. He sang, played slide guitar and harmonica, all superbly well.

John Hammond, Jr. Songs, Albums, Reviews, Bio ... | AllMusic

Yeah, the Brits helped bring electric blues styles to a broader US audience. But there were two waves of folkies in the 40s and 50s before Dylan and co. E.g,, the Weavers were a multimillion-selling act before the blacklist, and Dylan was riding the Coattails of people like Dave van Ronk, Odetta, Josh White, and Bob Gibson (at least at first). Also, people like Butterfield and the Blues Project were national acts at the time the Brit blues guys broke in the US. No doubt the Stones and Cream did a lot to shine attention on Chicago blues, the overall picture is more complicated than “Brits introduced blues to white American audiences”. The proof of that is in my parents’ record collection.

[AllanAllen]

Yeah, the Brits helped bring electric blues styles to a broader US audience. But there were two waves of folkies in the 40s and 50s before Dylan and co. E.g,, the Weavers were a multimillion-selling act before the blacklist, and Dylan was riding the Coattails of people like Dave van Ronk, Odetta, Josh White, and Bob Gibson (at least at first). Also, people like Butterfield and the Blues Project were national acts at the time the Brit blues guys broke in the US. No doubt the Stones and Cream did a lot to shine attention on Chicago blues, the overall picture is more complicated than “Brits introduced blues to white American audiences”. The proof of that is in my parents’ record collection.

You can’t judge a situation by the outliers. If the only experience you have with the internet is this forum, you could say jazz guitar is the most popular instrument and genre of music.