-
I agree this is a long tradition and I have said several times in this very thread that I don't object to the run of the mill use of it, especially with beginners. I agree that use is a cliche and it's not that important. I apologize for my remarks to you.
Originally Posted by fep
-
04-06-2014 09:22 AM
-
Not exactly. Through all my education and the education that I see demonstrated by pros who attended Berklee, UNT, and many other collegiate programs, it has always meant writing it down. The usage you are describing seems to come from uneducated guitarists (meaning, not educated in music at the university level). So the "jazz context" part of your statement may be true, but the "typically" part is absolutely false. Originally Posted by pkirk
He'll, even when I was a 17 year old jazz guitar fan I set out to transcribe a Charlie Christian solo. I wrote down every note and of course learned how to play it too. In fact the process involved (1) listening the the LP and lifting the needle after a few notes, (2) working it out on guitar, and (3) writing it down on paper. There was never any doubt that my transcribing task meant to write it down. My teacher and I were both coming from a pop/rock context as opposed to classical, BTW. i had used the first two steps on many rock and blues/rock solos without ever writing it down. We called that "figuring it out off the record". And if I could play it back after a few listens (no needle lifting) it was simply "figuring it out by ear". Not transcription in other words.
other than that I agree with you regarding the value of #2 and #3.
but I also know that there is value in #4:
a. No need to go through all that writing if someone else has done all the hard work.
b. It can be instructive to see how someone like Wolf Marshall notates guitar and jazz expressions for example.
c. There are many transcriptions available too. It takes time. Life is short.
d. it goes without saying that one will be listening to the recording in question - a lot. that's because notation doesn't do justice to jazz guitar expression in many cases. (The same can certainly be said of rock.) You have to listen to jazz in order to get the feel.Last edited by fumblefingers; 04-06-2014 at 11:48 AM.
-
Re: BIAB Jazz Guitar Solos
Would you have the names of the tunes after 178 ? Vol 4 goes GS179 to GS228.
-
Taken from a recent post linked to this article. Note the reference to "language" which I highlighted.
We get a lot of questions about practicing scales and how they relate to improvisation all the time: How should I use scales when I’m soloing? What’s the best way to practice scales? Do I even need to know my scales in order to improvise?
If you’ve read any of the articles on this site, you know that thinking about a major, minor, or any other type of scale while you’re improvising is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to the musicianship and harmonic understanding that go into creating a great solo.
You can memorize your F Major scale until you can play it in your sleep:
But, no matter how many times you run that F Major scale up and down, thinking of those eight notes when you’re soloing will not magically turn into lines like the one below:
To achieve this, you must listen intently to your favorite players, develop your ears, and transcribe some language from your heroes. Improvisation requires all areas of your musicianship, not just the theoretical knowledge of chord/scale relationships.
Scales are only one small part to developing as an improviser. However, knowing and practicing scales, in all their variations and forms, does have some real benefit for your playing – you just have to approach them in the right way.
-
One interesting difference between jazz and spoken language is that we can say that spoken language is grammatically correct, or not, regardless of whether it is compelling, while in jazz, there is theory to understand what is played, but you can't say a solo is theoretically (theoristically?) incorrect, only compelling, or not.
Is that a great run-on sentence, or what?
Of course, you could argue that grammar the first rule of grammar is to break the rules of grammar when you want to.Last edited by Jonzo; 04-08-2014 at 09:51 AM.
-
[QUOTE=Jonzo;414969
Of course, you could argue that grammar the first rule of grammar is to break the rules of grammar when you want to.[/QUOTE]
A few writers (and many writing teachers) have said one must know the rules of grammar before can break them effectively. Grammar helps me convey specific meaning to someone who has only my words go by. You're probably too young to recall a popular song called "My Girl Bill." Here's a YouTube clip. Not a great song but it does not make a point about how important grammar can be.
-
This has nothing to do with grammar but it is a better known Stafford song, "Wildwood Weed."
-
Here's Henry Johnson's perspective on some of the lame !@#$ jonzo is posting here. I completely understand why a player of Henry's stature (who got chased out of here by the resident experts) would not want to post here anymore.
He's played with Benson , Rodney Jones and a virtual who's who of jazz but what does he know?!?
Well, if that [deleted] scientist wanted proof, it's easy enough for him do some research into how many great jazz masters said they learned to play by copying their heroes, as opposed how many didn't. I'm sure the ratio would be something like 99.8 %! If you include people like Ornette Coleman. If you don't, it'll be 100%!
No sh!t! If he ever READ any jazz musician autobiographies and biographies, they cite who they copied in them. How would WE know it if they hadn't told us themselves?? If you know how to speak French, you know when someone DOESN'T. It's so simple to see, that it is downright painful to watch these folks who keep spinning their wheels thinking they're going to get a different result. It's lunacy. When you hear them playing a bunch of gibberish on changes that you have to be able to play over, is also maddening and sad at the same time.
-
jonzo, post some clips. I'm interested in hearing you play.
-
Tony DeCaprio also got fed up with all the nonsense. A damn shame.
-
Yes, the shame of the matter here is that knowledge and playing ability are not respected. People who can barely play satin doll are doling out advice, giving lessons and lecturing people on how to learn to play jazz while established veterans like Johnston, Bollenback, Jones, Johnson, etc., are chased away by the amateurs. Originally Posted by coolvinny
Anyway, it's another example of the uselessness of learning to play jazz by reading about it in message forums.
-
Despite disagreeing with Jonzo on this matter, I want to say something in defense of him saying what he is saying.
First, he never suggested he was a first-rate player. (For that matter, I don't know if he play at all.)
Second, he never asked anyone to take his word for anything. (That is,he is NOT saying 'this is what worked for me and I recommend it to you.')
Third, his over-arching interest seems to be in how people learn and how that learning might be made more efficient. (And further, whether some new approach might prove successful where previous approaches did not.)
Fourth, he is nowhere claiming that master players did not learn the way they claimed to learn.
Fifth, he is not suggesting his approach is a good one. Rather, he is saying he would like to see it put to a rigorous scientific test. We disagree on how we think that would that test would turn out, but I find nothing disagreeable with him saying he think it's a good idea.
-
no mark, he was not innocently asking any of those questions. He was very belligerently disagreeing with players who can actually play, who actually learned that way, who have gone to school and studied with others who have learned to play this way and who have done their homework in discussing this with other great players.
-
Here is the proof:
If
one learns other people's solos,
Then
one will be able to improvise
Classical and other non-improvising musicians learn other people's solos, but cannot improvise.
Therefore
If one learns other people's solos, one will be able to improvise is false.
If you don't think this is proof, then you do not understand what a classical proof is.I don't think Mr. Beaumont's point was given the proper consideration it deserved. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
there is an ENORMOUS difference between learning something from sheet music and learning it by ear. it is an entirely different task, with entirely different results
there are, of course, examples of classical musicians learning pieces entirely by ear. Mozart as a child, famously, transcribed a choral piece entirely by ear since the Catholic Church held the only copy (was it Allegri's Miserere? I can't recall now, and am too lazy to look it up). and a young Gunther Schuller actually transcribed Alban Berg's Violin Concerto by ear because the sheet music was not available yet.
so perhaps you're right, maybe it doesn't mean that you.... oh wait, both those guys could improvise? nevermind then.
I hate to break this to you, but absolutely none of this matters.I have taught reading, writing, math, science, sex ed., and history. I only perform one of these at a high level. My emotionally disturbed high school students came to my class at an average grade level of 3, and left at an average grade level of 6. In other words, in one year, they learned twice as much from me as they had learned from all of their other teachers in the previous 10 years. This is all based on standardized testing data.
I don't care how good you can play. Your students are already talented and highly motivated. They may learn from you, or despite you. At a university, you can point to the hoop, and your students will figure out how to jump through it, regardless of your teaching skill. If you have a private student who is unmotivated, you can just drop him.
in a variety of other disciplines, absolute mastery of a subject is not necessary to teach it at a high school level. you don't need to be Norbert Wiener to teach high school calculus or Feynmann to teach physics.
I would argue that to be a great teacher at those subjects, you WOULD need to have mastery of the material you are teaching. but this is not even an argument I need to make, because this is jazz we're talking about. the difference between what Sonny Rollins is doing and what even an intermediate jazz player is learning is not the difference between the vanguard of mathematical thought and a high school calculus class. a closer equivalent would be the difference between what Sonny Rollins is doing and teaching a second grader about "Every Good Boy Does Fine." yes, the gap is that wide. and sure, I would agree that you don't need to be a virtuoso to show a 9 year old where Middle C is on a staff.
but i'm sorry, once you're teaching JAZZ, in order to teach it properly, you need to be assessing and correcting a student on dozens of different criteria: swing, time, the quality of the lines, voice leading, harmonic fluency, vocabulary, repertoire, and a hundred other criteria. and the only way to have the ability to properly assess/correct these things is to have a mastery of them yourself
in other words, be a damn good player yourself
but since you are big on proofs, here's your chance to disprove it:
name one great jazz teacher who is a poor jazz player
I don't mean someone who's not on Coltrane's level, because that's a level of mastery that most life-long professionals never even reach. no, I mean someone who just straight up cannot play
because every great teacher I can think of... Charlie Banacos, Dennis Sandole, Mick Goodrick, Hal Crook, Lennie Tristano, Jaki Byard, Ted Greene, Joe Diorio, Hal Galper, Mike Longo, Jerry Bergonzi.... all those guys can PLAY.
it's utterly baffling that an amateur musician could come across an extremely talented working professional and then get into an ARGUMENT with them instead of trying to absorb and learn everything they could learn from that person
maybe that's why they're still an amateur
-
You forgot Barry Harris Originally Posted by dasein
-
If 100% of jazz musicians, so far, say they learned by any one method, it does not prove that it is the best or only method. It proves that it is a method for learning. You could say it is a proven method, but not necessarily proven the best or only method. Meanwhile, expert improvisers are regularly publishing new methods.
Assuming that all jazz musicians have practiced improvising, my basic argument is that practicing improvising is more essential to learning to improvise than copying, because many great mimics cannot improvise at all. Still, I acknowledged that it is difficult to imagine anyone learning to improvise by only doing any one thing.
I brought up a model from language learning, that I think overlaps with the big picture of how people learn improvisation, but I am not here to sell anything.
I am surprised that anyone would say I need to have a certain playing ability to say these things on a forum. If you want to be an unquestioned guru, you should start a blog.
-
Dasein - I'm not sure what you are suggesting regarding classical musicians and learning to play. Julian Bream, perhaps the greatest classical guitarist of the twentieth century in my opinion (and I do play classical and jazz), played a bit of jazz as a young man. And he certainly created transcriptions of lute works and other pieces, partly from sheet music surely. But I think you are exaggerating the difference. Are you classically trained? I suspect that you read notation, and therefore you know that harmony and development of a theme could not be much more complicated than the genial works of Bach. But learning Western harmony is not brain surgery - not even close. Nor is transcribing jazz solos. But playing jazz is a complex skill. As Clark Terry said, "Imitate, assimilate, innovate."
On the other hand, to be a great improviser does require talent and dedication. I would also defend what Jonzo wrote, as there is often a tendency on forums for posters to create a "straw man" argument so they can knock it down. Like suggesting that classical musicians cannot improvise as if it were Einstein's theory of general relativity. It ain't true, my friend. I am classically trained, but I developed my ears at the same time playing rock and country music styles as well as jazz. I agree that most musicians do learn jazz initially by playing along. When I was growing up, I had a tape recorder (reel to reel) and a stereo and spent lots of time playing along to albums and the radio. But I also learned to play great classical works. It is all music to me. But the tools to learn today are much different than in my youth.
A question for you about something that bothers the crap out of me. This insistence in some quarters that learning "licks" will teach you to improvise. Pure and utter BS in my humble opinion. And an opinion has been likened to a part of human anatomy, in that everyone has one and is entitled to it. I think some musicians are embittered by the state of our economy and the dumbing down of culture in the entertainment field. I only wish that the ambience was more like the fertile period of the Forties and Fifties. But, I could same the same thing about my job - the medical profession. It ain't what it used to be.
-
Seriously people, you're bashing your heads against a brick wall.
How do you have a real conversation about learning jazz with someone who:
a) doesn't think that learning by ear is important; and
b) doesn't think that memorizing tunes is important?
You can't.
Points (a) and (b) may not be evident from this thread, but I know these things to be true from previous discussions. This is why I didn't even bother.
Nobody can prove in the causative sense a connection between transcribing (and all that entails, which I believe is lost on many...it is most definitely not like copying a text - it's more like studying a play), so why bother trying? How many different ways can you say that this was the most common method employed by all the jazz masters (i.e., establishing correlation)? Lots of ways, but it still doesn't prove causation.
It's a futile exercise to try. It's clear that some individuals just like to argue and enter into heated debates, whether they know the subject matter or not. Once it's clear that's the agenda, why throw more wood into the fire? That's what leads to the pros leaving the forum. I'd prefer if they just disengage from the futile discussions rather than move a bit closer to eventually abandoning ship altogether.
Ok, I just drank my coffee while writing this to fuel a bit more practice time. Back to the mid-day shed to transpose 24 bars of a Billy Bean solo to another key...
-
i appreciate the attempt to make your argument seem more reasonable, in the same way that i appreciate the grace and skill of Inspector Clouseau Originally Posted by Jonzo
but the Internet makes it a bit harder to backtrack:
so it appears the argument against learning solos aurally has transformed from "such a method is demonstrably wrong" to "well, it's not the ONLY method and not necessarily the BEST method"Sorry, but you people saying to learn to improvise by copying other people's solos are demonstrably wrong.
well, thankfully, the former has never been argued... since Mr. Zucker clearly stated at the beginning that this was the best method, not the only one.
and I think, by now, it should also be clear that Mr. Zucker is not arguing against a multi-disciplinary approach that would include theory, technical studies, general repertoire building, and a host of other learning methods in addition to learning solos by ear. after all, he did publish two volumes of technical studies and has been studying theory for a lifetime
but recall that the OP did not ask for a hundred resources to learn improvisation... he asked for one resource. and Mr. Zucker gave it to him based on his experiences as a working professional/teacher and the experiences of countless other high-level players.
there are enormous differences between languages and music, certainly enough to call into question the applicability of these models into learning improvisationI brought up a model from language learning, that I think overlaps with the big picture of how people learn improvisation, but I am not here to sell anything.
if you disagree, kindly translate "I am going to the store to buy milk around 6 o'clock" -- a sentence that can be translated into any Indo-European language without losing any vital information -- into jazz. over "All of You" in mid-tempo swing, please.
please do not flatter yourself by mistaking your lack of humility or self-awareness as a noble attempt to fight dogma or group-think.I am surprised that anyone would say I need to have a certain playing ability to say these things on a forum. If you want to be an unquestioned guru, you should start a blog.
you are not Aristotle challenging Plato. you are a student arguing with his physics professor that it has to be possible to go faster than the speed of light. because, after all, if a spaceship is travelling the speed of light, any astronaut who walks across the floor of that spaceship would be going faster than light!
-
What's wrong with learning licks (Ii-Vs, turnarounds, cadences?) ? Isn't it just a form of vocabulary that one can internalize/utilize/steal/make one's own? Practically every reputable jazz teacher I've encountered/read about/met encourages people to learn licks. Sometimes, it's just semantics: when I think of licks, I think of vocabulary, ideas, that can be tested out in various contexts, over various progressions, in certain melodic passages. That's all.
By the way, Targuit, my teacher once tried to play jazz with Bream, at Bream's request.
-
[QUOTE=dasein;415059]i appreciate the attempt to make your argument seem more reasonable, in the same way that i appreciate the grace and skill of Inspector Clouseau
but the Internet makes it a bit harder to backtrack:
so it appears the argument against learning solos aurally has transformed from "such a method is demonstrably wrong" to "well, it's not the ONLY method and not necessarily the BEST method"
well, thankfully, the former has never been argued... since Mr. Zucker clearly stated at the beginning that this was the best method, not the only one.
and I think, by now, it should also be clear that Mr. Zucker is not arguing against a multi-disciplinary approach that would include theory, technical studies, general repertoire building, and a host of other learning methods in addition to learning solos by ear. after all, he did publish two volumes of technical studies and has been studying theory for a lifetime
but recall that the OP did not ask for a hundred resources to learn improvisation... he asked for one resource. and Mr. Zucker gave it to him based on his experiences as a working professional/teacher and the experiences of countless other high-level players.
there are enormous differences between languages and music, certainly enough to call into question the applicability of these models into learning improvisation
if you disagree, kindly translate "I am going to the store to buy milk around 6 o'clock" -- a sentence that can be translated into any Indo-European language without losing any vital information -- into jazz. over "All of You" in mid-tempo swing, please.
please do not flatter yourself by mistaking your lack of humility or self-awareness as a noble attempt to fight dogma or group-think.
you are not Aristotle challenging Plato. you are a student arguing with his physics professor that it has to be possible to go faster than the speed of light.
Wow, man . . . you actually make that seem plausible.because, after all, if a spaceship is travelling the speed of light, any astronaut who walks across the floor of that spaceship would be going faster than light!
-
Navdeep - The problem with relying on 'learning licks' is that they are someone else's response to the music, not yours. Classical musicians interpret what a composer has created. There is a great difference.
Here is a link to Jazz Advice.com and a section on hearing music in your mind with an internal link in the story to an article about learning licks. Check it out. BTW, I wrote my posts before reading these articles, which are just an opinion as much as anyone else's opinion. But I think on the whole that the perspectives expressed support the multidimensional approach to learning including studying and transcribing other musicians' work. The point is that stringing licks together is not the same as responding de novo to a new piece of music. That is the part of the covenant of the 'lick worshippers" with which I disagree respectfully. The last time I learned a "lick" was probably when I was 18 and playing BB King solos off his album Live at the Regal. That was a long time ago. What I like about some of the advice on that site is that they present learning to improvise as a more comprehensive and lifetime task that includes transcribing and so much more.
Why You Should Be Hearing Music in Your Mind
-
You're right, no interaction with native speakers while learning Latin. As for the method used, it seemed like other methods I have seen: declensions, conjugations... "501 Latin Verbs" resembles "501 Spanish Verbs." Originally Posted by Jonzo
I agree that Japanese people who study English in school may struggle to converse with a native speaker of English. I studied Spanish in high school and struggled to converse with native speakers of that language. Later, though, I lived in a parish where Spanish was prevalent and often used in my presence so that I could practice. I picked up some vocabulary but didn't learn any conjugations or declensions. It faded from memory soon after I left. I don't think I've ever thought in Spanish, though I have had a few thoughts in Latin. Not that I'm any great shakes as a reader of Latin. But I keep at it. Repetitio mater studiorum!
-
Learning licks is how virtually every great jazz player learned. Originally Posted by targuit
-
I look at this the other way around. Who cares if a musician is "responding de novo"? I grant you, the musician himself might. But the audience cares whether they like what they hear. If Pat Martino or Pat Metheny play a turnaround or other lick (-or a quote from a tune, which is also a lick) they have played many times before, I do not mind or think any less of them for it. A line is no better for being new or no worse for being old. Originally Posted by targuit
I chanced upon something interesting in an old Joe Pass interview. (I'll post the link below.) He's talking about how he learned to play and who his favorite guitarists were (-Django, Charlie Christian, and Wes.) Then there is this exchange:
>>>But one wouldn't recognise any resemblance between your playing and Django's,
Well I never copied him. I don't remember that I copied any guitar player note-for-note. But I remember copying Charlie Parker note for note.<<<<<
Joe Pass Interview
Reply With Quote
Track off new album release for anyone interested.
Today, 07:21 AM in Composition