Looks like Jaco didn't improvise the Donna Lee solo?

[CliffR]

Not a real fast tempo though, maybe 185 bpm.

Nope, definitely north of the 220bpm sound barrier.

[pamosmusic]

I took it as suggesting that truly improvising at the note level at 150 is kinda like truly improvising at the chunk level at 300. Which I'd agree with, FWIW.

yeah that

[Mick-7]

and how many is that?

and that’s aside from it being 280 and the most difficult set of changes in common usage … so not the best example

Two recorded versions and a live version is all I've heard, admittedly a small sample set, but I have not heard other musicians improvise freely at 260 or so on tunes with uncommon or quick chord changes - i.e., not tunes like Cherokee where you have chords that last 4-8 beats.

[pamosmusic]

How is it not correct?.

I hope it’s clear now ….

You’ve revised the tempo up 40 clicks, given a debatable definition of improvisation, and confined it to particularly hard changes.

any other caveats we need to add?

[Mick-7]

Nope, definitely north of the 220bpm sound barrier.

I just checked it against my metronome, it's about 210-215 bpm - seemed slower to me.

[pamosmusic]

i just checked it against my metronome, it's about 210-215 bpm - seemed slower to me.

perhaps its the loose and effortless musicianship at thay tempo that made it feel more relaxed?

[James W]

I don't get how some people here seem to be speaking as though from a place of knowingness, or authority when making claims about how the "greats" are creating their solos at fast tempi. I mean, even true greats like Brecker would never dare to suggest they knew how Bird or Coltrane were conceiving ideas for their solos. So let's just all agree that we can never know definitively how anyone conceives of anything, much less how they conjure their solo lines.

Don't be passive-aggressive - name names! Who are these people speaking from a place of knowingness?

Speaking personally, I was talking about what I can hear in Coltrane's music, coupled with stuff I've read about it that I agree with. You appear to be keen to shroud this basic knowledge and listening in some kind of mysterious unknowable esoteric lore or something. Which is silly.

[James W]

220 bpm was an arbitrary number I chose, my point was there is a tempo at which one can no longer freely improvise but must instead combine memorized phrases, which can also be an art but I wouldn't consider it "improvising." No doubt this will become a debate about what does or does not qualify as "improvisation.

Yeah sure. You think these cats aren't improvising? -

[Mick-7]

I hope it’s clear now ….

You’ve revised the tempo up 40 clicks, given a debatable definition of improvisation, and confined it to particularly hard changes.

any other caveats we need to add?

My original statement was (I quote) - "220 bpm was an arbitrary number I chose, my point was there is a tempo at which one can no longer freely improvise but must instead combine memorized phrases, which can also be an art but I wouldn't consider it "improvising." Do you disagree with all of that or just the definition of improvisation?

Do you consider arranging lines one has memorized to be improvisation?

[Mick-7]

Yeah sure. You think these cats aren't improvising? -

(3) Impressions (Extended - Live (1963 Newport Jazz Festival)) - YouTube

On the modal chord changes they're playing, sure, that isn't difficult (but of course doing it well is).

[pamosmusic]

My original statement was (I quote) - "220 bpm was an arbitrary number I chose, my point was there is a tempo at which one can no longer freely improvise but must instead combine memorized phrases, which can also be an art but I wouldn't consider it "improvising." Do you disagree with all of that or just the definition of improvisation?

Do you consider arranging lines one has memorized to be improvisation?

Uh no …

Your original statement and the thing I said was wrong was:

Here's a little secret: solos played at 220+ bps (more or less) are never improvised, no one can make lines up at that speed - vary them a bit, sure, but the architecture has been composed.

And it was wrong as evidenced by the eighty seven caveats you’ve added.

[James W]

On the modal chord changes they're playing, sure, that isn't difficult.

It's not difficult, really? Please post your own effort of playing Impressions at that tempo. Who said anything about it having to be difficult anyway? These and other caveats you only mention when people subsequently call you out on your nonsense. Why not say them in the original post? So as to stop us all wasting our time...

[Mick-7]

Uh no …

Your original statement and the thing I said was wrong was:


Originally Posted by Mick-7: "Here's a little secret: solos played at 220+ bps (more or less) are never improvised, no one can make lines up at that speed - vary them a bit, sure, but the architecture has been composed."





And it was wrong

But wasn't it just the tempo I gave that you disagreed with? (As I said later, it was an arbitrary number). Is my statement "wrong" at 300bpm too?

[Mick-7]

It's not difficult, really? Please post your own effort of playing Impressions at that tempo. Who said anything about it having to be difficult anyway?

What started this conversation was: "Looks like Jaco didn't improvise the Donna Lee solo?" It was never about soloing over simple chord changes at a fast tempo.

[lawson-stone]

Coltrane played 'Impressions' mostly above that tempo loads of times and we know from recordings that no two performances were the same.

Sure he had vocabulary, licks and phrases but these are constantly varied and recombined - especially cellular ideas and motives.

So it seems to me that your assertion that no one improvises at or above 220 BPM reveals a misunderstanding about what jazz improvisation is. It's not - or at least not mostly - about inventing vocab on the fly.

It's easy to take what we cannot do, or cannot see ourselves ever doing, and decide that nobody can do it. But there are players who can. I have pulled solos of different players over the same tunes from lots of recordings and noticed that they might repeat a solo in a session, like for a second take, but a good many will still play different solos in different contexts.

Generalizations like this are very risky.

[lawson-stone]

What would go against the spirit of jazz is to play someone else's solo note by note. I think what separates jazz musicians from musicians who are strictly performers is to be able to say "this is how I comp", " this is what I've come up with in my solo over this tune" when they play a tune. Even though the resulting music may not be as good as a rehearsed performance of the music of a great composer/arranger.

The distinctions between what is purely spontaneous, what has become ingrained over years, what reflects a recently practiced concept, or what stems from a compositional process are complex—and perhaps not even that relevant—as long as the music expresses genuine individual artistry.

I dunno man. I read a comment by Wes Montgomery once that when he started out he just played Charlie Christian's solos. I've heard others specifically talk about playing CC's stuff for a time in their career until they worked out their own. And down here at the amateur level, it might be more common since nobody knows or cares what a local guy plays at a coffee shop.

Reminds me of a preacher I knew once, a local pastor who was a really splendid preacher. Every month one of his sermons would be transcribed and distributed. A lot of guys I knew would just use his printed sermons in their churches the next Sunday. I asked him, "What do you think of guys like me using your sermons?" His answer, with a twinkle in his eye, was "Well, that might be the only good sermon you preach!"

[sully75]

There are two different conversations happening here
1) do players oftentimes play the exact solo, note for note, over a bebop tune, several years apart
2) do players repeat language/phrases/scales/concepts mixing and matching, on the same tune, particularly at high speed.

My feelings is that 1 is very rare and 2 is the norm, more or less.

[AllanAllen]

I am still wondering if people actually listened to the Jaco recording in question and the famous self titled solo...seems like we are talking about different things.

This is absolutely what is going on. We call it thread drift. Did you ever listen to any Jaco versions in the 10 years from the album to his death? Did he always play the same solo?

[Tal_175]

I dunno man. I read a comment by Wes Montgomery once that when he started out he just played Charlie Christian's solos. I've heard others specifically talk about playing CC's stuff for a time in their career until they worked out their own. And down here at the amateur level, it might be more common since nobody knows or cares what a local guy plays at a coffee shop.

Reminds me of a preacher I knew once, a local pastor who was a really splendid preacher. Every month one of his sermons would be transcribed and distributed. A lot of guys I knew would just use his printed sermons in their churches the next Sunday. I asked him, "What do you think of guys like me using your sermons?" His answer, with a twinkle in his eye, was "Well, that might be the only good sermon you preach!"

I don't disagree with you in the sense that if there were a musician who specialized in performing solos by masters and s/he played those solos with great groove and feel, and they were playing a standards gig, I would definitely go see that show and I am certain I'd enjoy it far more than the average standards gig. That's of course assuming that the musician is not pretending the solos to be his. It'd take a very high calibre musicianship to pull that off at a high level. But I don't know if I would call it "jazz musicianship". I think it'd be missing a defining characteristic of being a jazz musician.

I've also heard that Wes Montgomery began his gigging career performing in a sort of Charlie Christian cover band where he played Christian's solos note by note. No doubt that has helped him grow into the jazz musician he later became. However if that were all Wes Montgomery had done for the rest of his life, his credentials as a jazz musician wouldn't be the same to say the least.

[princeplanet]

Don't be passive-aggressive - name names! Who are these people speaking from a place of knowingness?

Speaking personally, I was talking about what I can hear in Coltrane's music, coupled with stuff I've read about it that I agree with. You appear to be keen to shroud this basic knowledge and listening in some kind of mysterious unknowable esoteric lore or something. Which is silly.

Tell you what, I'll name names, but only if you care to expound and de-mystify this "unknowable esoteric lore" you're referring to. Feel free to support your explanations with some of your own audio examples where you can show exactly how the greats were thinking, and how that helps you to reach the same heights
in your own playing. Then I'll feel "silly"...

[AllanAllen]

I've also heard that Wes Montgomery started is gigging career performing with a sort of Charlie Christian cover band where he played his solos note by note. No doubt that has helped him develop as the jazz musician he later became. However if that was all Wes Montgomery did for the rest of his life, his credentials as a jazz musician would not be the same to say the least.

Which is why I keep asking OP what Jaco did on Donna Lee live, after the album came out.

[pamosmusic]

There are two different conversations happening here
1) do players oftentimes play the exact solo, note for note, over a bebop tune, several years apart
2) do players repeat language/phrases/scales/concepts mixing and matching, on the same tune, particularly at high speed.

My feelings is that 1 is very rare and 2 is the norm, more or less.

This is probably right.

I think Christian has been pointing to a significant middle ground on point 1 though.

It’s not unusual for folks to have a kind of idea of how a tune might go when they’re performing it. And a lot of the music we love, that’s probably taken to a pretty rehearsed place.

Without a lot of evidence beyond anecdotal stuff in books and gut instinct, it’s probably not unusual in studio stuff for folks to have a pretty significant portion of their solos planned out to some degree. You get one chorus on a three minute track and two takes if you’re lucky — it’s not weird for someone to treat that like a different challenge than a live situation. In the few live recordings we have, Bird for example is more feral and like … kind of explosive maybe? than he was on studio takes. And he’s pretty hot on studio takes.

Big bands too … you get one chorus or part of chorus on a tune people are dancing to. If you get the assignment, then your priority is playing something hot that keeps folks moving and that might mean letting your creativity take a back seat.

I imagine that got to be less normal in the post LP era when there was much less restriction on time. And more experimental large ensembles and whatnot, less dance focused big band music, etc.

[James W]

Tell you what, I'll name names, but only if you care to expound and de-mystify this "unknowable esoteric lore" you're referring to. Feel free to support your explanations with some of your own audio examples where you can show exactly how the greats were thinking, and how that helps you to reach the same heights
in your own playing. Then I'll feel "silly"...

Eh? I don't wish to make you feel silly. I just wondered who the people on here were who you were referring to who speak from a position of knowingness. I never claimed to have reached the same heights as the greats so I'm not sure where you got that from? All I did was make some general basic comments on the kinds of things Coltrane would use in his solos, particularly on things like 'Impressions'. Then you made some comments about how Trane and Bird's thought processes were totally unknowable, so why should anyone bother to try to analyse it? That seems weirdly defeatist - and while I don't claim to know anyone's thought processes, I can talk about what I hear in the music and how it makes sense to me, and I'm not sure that that would be totally different from how the performer conceived of their music.

[James W]

Which is why I keep asking OP what Jaco did on Donna Lee live, after the album came out.

Sounds pretty improvisational -

[bleakanddivine]

There was a re-run on BBC a couple of days ago of an interview of Oscar Peterson by Andre Previn.

OP said he didn't like doing TV recordings because he usually had to run through a tune several times before the actual recording so that the sound crew, lighting crew etc could get things set up how they wanted them. He hated this because during the rehearsal he might come up with a great lick at a certain point in the tune and it then threw him a bit to have to concentrate on consciously avoiding re-playing that idea at that same point in the subsequent live recording as he considered that would be cheating the listener out of a spontaneous interpretation.