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05-16-2016, 07:30 AM #51destinytot Guest
Thought becomes self-embrace. Extend chi. Breathe, and return to centre. Step back, and repulse monkey. Gratitude. Play guitar.
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05-16-2016 07:30 AM
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Dizzy actually said to shout out the rhythm when asked what he thinks about. Art Blakey also said that the improviser should rhythmically mimic a drum solo.
Originally Posted by christianm77
Here's a great book that Hal Galper (definitely check out Galper's videos on improvisation on youtube) highly recommended. The book is called "The Primacy of the Ear". Amazing!
http://www.amazon.com/Primacy-Ear-Ra...acy+of+the+ear
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I play with a couple of guitar players who have said they can't stand Charlie Parker, along with bebop in general. Then they ask me how come they can hear the changes in my lines. I have no tolerance for "jazz" players who refuse to acknowledge the rich history of jazz. They sound like they're practicing scales while soloing. Originally Posted by christianm77
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05-16-2016, 08:40 AM #54destinytot GuestDon't we all play percussion? The late Joe Lee Wilson used to say, "Jazz is syncopated silence." Originally Posted by jbucklin
"Now He Beats the Drum - Now He Stops" (from Chick Corea's Now He Sings, Now He Sobs).
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Absolutely! Rhythm is the ingredient that seems to get overlooked by many "modern" players, but that the masters of bop fully understood. Originally Posted by destinytot
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This looks relevant, anyone checked this out?
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05-16-2016, 08:55 AM #57destinytot Guest Originally Posted by jbucklin
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you city boys have to go surf up pictures of chicks. Out here in the country, the chicks come to us
These are goslings, which are baby geese for all you city slickers out there
of course if I don't have any feed out, they come up to the house and eat my straw door mat until I make with some feed corn
and here's the whole family
but to answer the original question, when I'm playing these geese are
probably thinking about more stuff than I am.
Last edited by Nate Miller; 05-16-2016 at 09:14 AM.
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Well, Bebop, it is said, has not been played for decades and has become in effect a dead language, just as Latin has become pretty much unspoken.
Strict Bebop was rhythmically advanced in so many ways compared with later styles, no one will argue, BUT... I actually prefer the Hard Bop era because the rhythmical aspect was straightened out, became less angular, less disjonted and became more driving and "groovy"- IMO anyway. Can't be just me though, I'm pretty sure the forum members listen less to Ellis or Kessell and more to Wes, GG, Martino or GB.
But yeah, if you play too many straight 8ths (like I do) then the best thing to do is to listen to Parker or Powell for lessons in phrasing, but no need to emulate them too carefully in that regard. Bop got too clever for it's own good, the peeps couldn't tap their feet to it, let alone dance.
Some even suggested it was a failed experiment...
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That's hilarious! I had similar thoughts when these guys exposed their ignorance.
There's a guitar player who lived here (Dallas) and graduated from and even taught at UNT. You may have heard of him---Tim Miller. Mind-boggling technique but definitely a more modern player. Anyway, he got a gig teaching at Berklee and even co-authored a book with Mick Goodrick. A student of mine went off to Berklee and reported to me that Tim was making all of his students transcribe bebop solos. Although I never found out why, my guess is that he became frustrated with so many students not being able to solo through changes. My hope is that Tim himself began to acknowledge the masters.
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Are you under the impression Tim didn't previously?
I can't believe anyone would downplay Charlie Parker's influence, playing, anything...he's the reason jazz is what it is and that it's still around, if you ask me.
Re: Bop, I listen to more hard bop, but mostly just because the recording technology was so much better by the 50's.
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Originally Posted by jbucklin
wow. When I went there it was NTSU. When it was NTSU, Jack, Rich, and all those guys were still teaching there and it was a division II football school. I got back from the service and all of a sudden they were playing in division I and calling themselves UNT. That is the first time I ever saw anybody reference the music school at North Texas as UNT
North Texas State University (NTSU) had a college radio station called KNTU
when they changed their name to UNT we were all waiting for them to change the name of the radio station
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Bird's rhythm is the air we breathe. Like the air, we don't notice it till it's gone :-) Originally Posted by princeplanet
Well, Bebop, it is said, has not been played for decades and has become in effect a dead language, just as Latin has become pretty much unspoken.
Strict Bebop was rhythmically advanced in so many ways compared with later styles, no one will argue, BUT... I actually prefer the Hard Bop era because the rhythmical aspect was straightened out, became less angular, less disjonted and became more driving and "groovy"- IMO anyway. Can't be just me though, I'm pretty sure the forum members listen less to Ellis or Kessell and more to Wes, GG, Martino or GB.
But yeah, if you play too many straight 8ths (like I do) then the best thing to do is to listen to Parker or Powell for lessons in phrasing, but no need to emulate them too carefully in that regard. Bop got too clever for it's own good, the peeps couldn't tap their feet to it, let alone dance.
Some even suggested it was a failed experiment...
Something that really struck me when I started listening to pre-bop jazz is how old it sounds. Even stuff a couple of years before the bop revolution. I appreciate it now, but at the time it was a real culture shock. Most of the reason is the rhythm, and the way the section works - very on the beat - 'square' perhaps, until you get into it.
Anyway, the bop guys loved to dance - they were of that generation. Not IT professionals going away to camp to learn advanced Lindy or whatever - just that's just what everyone did, social dance. Dizzy was one of the top amateur dancers at the Savoy, for example :-)
In fact BH says that when bop moved out of the dance halls it lost it's rhythmic edge. So, yeah it did get clever clever. For me the second gen boppers (Stitt for example) are less interesting because the rhythm started to get a bit stereotyped. Too many jazz club dates? :-)
Needless to say, Hard Bop would have been unthinkable rhythmically if Charlie Parker had never appeared on the scene. Hard Bop isn't a throwback to the pre-bop past... It's taking a characteristic rhythms from bop and adding a bit more obvious structure, including a bit of that old school swing riff sensibility - but the material itself? Mined out of Parker's phraseology, at least to my ears. Certainly doesn't sound like Lunceford or Webb.
I would go as far to say what Bird did influenced even popular music - the syncopation in soul and funk etc. It's a funny one because people make a barrier between 'swing' and 'straight eights' - I don't hear this distinction in Jamerson's bass lines, for example. There's a lot of swing in hip hop, too.
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I think you can think about anything or nothing
(this depends how comfortable you are in the music)
but thats not the important question
which is what are you feeling when you're playing ?
thats what comes across to the listener
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i have exactly this going on too - i used to listen a great deal to anything i could find by bird - and then i got way out west and workin' with the md quintet etc. and i very quickly began to appreciate how much easier the later recordings were on the ears Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
but i don't feel in the atmosphere the level of love for parker that seems to me appropriate
there are no gimmicks whatsoever in his playing - you can slow it down as much as you like and the time still glows and surprises
i think the hard-bop vibe - watered down bird - is much more common than a late forties bop thing
and parker's music is certainly dance music - its just more crazy and fabulous dancing than e.g. lee morganLast edited by Groyniad; 05-16-2016 at 10:31 AM.
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Princeplanet, my point is not that we should all try and sound like Bird and other players from 70 or so years ago. What I'm trying to say is that there is a constantly evolving tradition in jazz, just as in other art forms. Jackson Pollack, before he started literally spilling paint onto canvases, was very influenced by Thomas Benton, a Regionalist, who in turn was influenced by artists that came before him, those artists being influenced by artists before them, etc. Miles is a perfect example of an ever-evolving jazz musician who, although he became somewhat "anti-bop", was still informed by the profound aesthetic which is bebop, which is evident in his entire recorded output. Bop, and "pre-bop" i.e. Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Christian, and others, should be every jazz players jumping-off point. Think of some of the Christian-influenced guitar players of the 50s, such as Tal Farlow and Jim Hall. Both were CC disciples that sound totally different from one another. Jim Hall, although not necessarily considered a bebop player, continued to expand his style into a thoroughly modern style (he studied classical composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music). Yet pre-bop and bebop were the very air he breathed in his early, formative years.
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If you speed up Prez and imagine starting and ending his phrases more randomly, it's not a million miles away from Bird. Even Don Byas, there were guys already on a similar path (Stitt claims this too, of course...). Regardless, Hard Bop certainly was an outgrowth of Bebop, but if the rhythm was simplified, it doesn't follow that the linear expositions were. Whether it was Rollins, Dex, Clifford, or any of the players in Blakey's Messengers, for example, melodic and harmonic sophistication continued to expand along with the distillation of the Blues and Gospel influence. Originally Posted by christianm77
But Bird's "children" were appropriating Parker's language into the new thing, no doubt, just with less jerky, start-stop phrasing. Lordy Lordy Lord, what I wouldn't give to have heard an album with Bird out front The Jazz Messengers, anywhere between '56 and '62....
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I heard Tal Farlow say that he learned all the standards listening to the radio while he worked as a sign painter in the Carolinas.
I say this because I never thought of Tal as a disciple of Charlie Christian. When Tal came and gave a talk for the jazz lecture series when I was at NTSU (North Texas when it was still North Texas) he never mentioned Charlie Christian at all.
what Tal said was that he learned how to play by listening to the radio painting signs
that's what the man said
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Hey man, I live next to a small lake. I get plenty of chicks... Originally Posted by Nate Miller
you city boys have to go surf up pictures of chicks. Out here in the country, the chicks come to us
These are goslings, which are baby geese for all you city slickers out there
of course if I don't have any feed out, they come up to the house and eat my straw door mat until I make with some feed corn
and here's the whole family
but to answer the original question, when I'm playing these geese are
probably thinking about more stuff than I am.
Goslings last year, also ducklings in the main (!) Park.
Also, Parakeets in the trees out the back of the building I live in...
It's pretty green out here in Crystal Palace....
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Originally Posted by princeplanet
Right?
Back to thinking for a second...
I guess I'm trying not to think, but allowing myself to be able to, if that makes sense.
I'm trying to hear and visualize...if I'm playing good, it's almost simultaneous. I'm definitely seeing both possibilities "light up" on the fretboard, sort of, and kind of a general contour of the line...it goes up, it goes down.
As far as the thinking, it's like thinking while playing a sport like basketball or soccer. It's very in the moment...split second decisions, not planning too far ahead. But that's as I'm playing.
Recently, I've been thinking a lot about "hearing a whole solo" and visualizing it ahead of time, in a matter of seconds. Kind of getting a basic shape in mind and going after it, if that makes sense and doesn't sound too hippy dippy.
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The influence of Charlie Christian in the forties was as unavoidable as the Beatles when I was growing up in the 60s. But just to be sure, I Wikied Tal and in his bio it says that it all started when he heard CC with Benny Goodman---on the radio!
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Sure - Lester is definitely one of the guys I listen to from the 30's and think - this sounds more modern. Hawkins too in a completely different way. One thing that helps with the seminal Lester recordings (Lady be Good, Shoe Shine Boy ) is that they were cut without rhythm guitar which makes the whole thing sound a lot more boppy... Originally Posted by princeplanet
So bop = Kansas City swing - Freddie Green? :-)
Yeah, in a sense - and also, no... At least in the sense that I hear Bird very much as in the Kansas City tradition - his playing is so much out of that school. Without question. But there is a very real difference in the rhythmic structure of the phrases... You could take Lady be Good for example, and note how many phrases start on a beat for example, and compare to any Parker solo.
There's an absolutely direct massive influence on Dexter from Lester Young as well who can be heard playing in a pretty perfect facsimile of Prez's style on his earliest recordings (as can Bird, for that matter)...
I think Dexter's rhythm is a distinct concept from Bird's, while still obviously having that influence - very original... As is Sonny, of course...
You are right, the later boppers lost some of that short/long phrase stuff....Last edited by christianm77; 05-16-2016 at 10:36 AM.
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parker's phrases don't start and end more 'randomly' than others
they start and end more creatively, more surprisingly - the center of gravity of any given phrase is often elusive - and that's just addictive - makes other players sound dull
where are the pivot points and targets? they are consistently not quite where you expect them to be
that's his genius - and why he sounds so fresh however much you listen to him
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Do you think you could ever do that? Do you suppose anyone can/does? I mean, we can probably hear whole solos it in our heads, but if they're fast and chromatic, then it's hard enough to sing. let alone play. And that's another thing, I don't agree with the notion that if you can't at least sing it, then you didn't hear it. I "hear" things way under and over my singing range. Again, think of the Tunisia break... you can hear it in your head, right? Now sing it! Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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True, "random" was a poor choice for the word I was looking for... Originally Posted by Groyniad
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