Play the melody, Miles, play the melody

[christianm77]

When Bernstein came here to give a Master Class at the Old Town School of Folk Music, he railed against these type of lines, calling it "box playing".

One the other hand, you have to have some rudimentary language that can link idea to idea. There's this local guy who is a retired saxophone player (and also flamenco guitarist) who studied with Art Pepper and Harold Land in LA in the 1950s, and the first thing he showed me is some Wardell Gray cliches. He said you have to some cliches, or basic backup language everybody has them because there is no way you are going to be original 100% of the time.

I think I have arrived at a point where I can generate some rudimentary language just from the Barry Harris stuff (if you think about it , the 54321 cliches and also 4 note chromatics associated with each degree of the major scale, if you mix and match appropriately, will get you instant language if you shed it thoroughly).

Tim Miller has this 2-1-2-1-2-1 arpeggio system, which, if you think about it, is kind of the "box type" playing Bernstein is railing against. But even then, he says to mix it up with some "melodic playing".

Maybe this rudimentary language or system of cliches is a way to tread water and prevent one from drowning, while you develop your various swim strokes that can get you to the shore.

I don't know.

But you can't be "100% inspired and original" all the time. So there is plenty of room for "box playing" or cliches.

So why not just play the melody instead? It'll be better than my shitty box licks haha.

TBH I wonder if this isn't a classic bit of ebb and flow. You learn lines and language and changes running and then you get dissatisfied with that, and focus on something else for a bit.

The Barry Harris stuff, in the way that I practiced it maybe, can get a bit 'boxy.' I don't blame Barry for this, more my method of practicing the material. But OTOH it does give me plenty of nice licks I can play.

Bernstein advocates flexibility in practice, making sure that you don't just play an idea but also experiment with variations on it. This is not something you can ask of a beginner. You have to be able to play to a high enough level already to do this. Until then licks are far from the worse thing you can do.

That's why internet advice and video masterclasses are kind of useless in a way. There is no advice which generally applies right across the board. Everyone here is simply documenting their own process.

TBH I couldn't imagine a more different jazz player from PB than Tim Miller. Your ears and your own tastes will govern which approach you find more appealing. But I think every top player will emphasise the importance of knowing the tune.

[NSJ]

Ya, one has to go through a long period of initial heavy lifting for a protracted period on the learning front until one finally arrives at a point where it's possible to discern what type of player one wants to be, what fundamental direction to take, what the fundamental approaches should be, how one views music in a discriminating way, et al.

I feel like, for myself, I think I have finally arrived at that fork in the road, where I finally am discovering who I am as an individual playing music. Finally, some clarity: fingerstyle, pianistic, counterpoint, poly-rhythms are not just words, any more.

[destinytot]

I went to see the MoTown Museum during my last trip to Detroit. Interesting in some way, kind of an empty shrine in another (but that's a different story). But whether you're a Berry Gordon fan or not, that music was memorable...the riffs...the tunes.

Motown - marvellous music!

[christianm77]

Motown... Jamerson played with Barry back in Detroit, you know. :-)

[MarkRhodes]

And then you have this ditty, from a 2011 Blindfold Test by Lou Donaldson, comparing Bird to Stitt:

"Just by listening, how can you tell the difference between Charlie Parker and Sonny Stitt?Let’s see, let me explain it so the average person can understand it.
Even me?
Even you [laughter]. Jazz critics are the worst. They’re good writers but they don’t know what’s what. When you play music, you have the concept of the song. Like when Charlie Parker plays “April In Paris” with strings, no mater how he plays it, it still sounds like “April In Paris.” But when Sonny Stitt plays it he plays a little bit of the melody then he has to run his harmonics. And it’s not “April In Paris” no more, it’s Sonny Stitt’s harmonics. That’s the difference. That’s the difference with the way the guys play today ‘cause all of them play like Coltrane. They play a melody, then after the melody you don’t know what the hell they’re playing. But Charlie Parker played the song."

Fascinating. Insightful. Although I get this, I think Sonny Stitt was a great player and he played one of my favorite jazz solos, on "Sunny Side of the Street" with Sonny Rollins and Diz. (That whole record is great.)

This is a Sonny Stitt performance that Carol Kaye loves and uses as an example of how great Sonny Stitt was. (She's a big fan.)

[christianm77]

Fascinating. Insightful. Although I get this, I think Sonny Stitt was a great player and he played one of my favorite jazz solos, on "Sunny Side of the Street" with Sonny Rollins and Diz. (That whole record is great.)

This is a Sonny Stitt performance that Carol Kaye loves and uses as an example of how great Sonny Stitt was. (She's a big fan.)

This would sit interestingly with you said about Carol Kaye's approach to improvisation which IIRC you said was based more on changes.

I think I'm a bit bored with changes running personally ATM. But that's not to say changes running is a bad thing per se. I think I've just got pretty good at it and I'm running into it's limitations as a way of thinking. I don't like the way solos can end up sounding samey in my case. Also, it pushes me a little into running eighths which to me gets old fast.

I've heard a lot of people be a bit sniffy about Stitt, including Barry Harris who played with him quite a bit haha. I've always enjoyed his playing, although I do hear people who describe him as a tidied up Charlie Parker.

[mrcee]

One of jazz histories most seminal acts of foolery.

Although he is though very aware of the melody throughout.

I saw Ahmad Jamal and Mal Waldron a couple of times play solo. They would play some well known standards and wouldn't really even refer to the melody until well into the tune. But you know they knew it and couldn't have played the way they did unless they'd completely internalized it.

Melody is king and in some ways rhythm is subservient to it. I love funk and consider myself to be basically a funk player with jazz chops and at times a definite country feel but imo the best funk has got a strong melodic element even if it's just a simple phrase. Being rhythm driven, melody used to take a back seat in my playing but these days I spend lots of my shed time reading and playing heads. It's made a huge difference.

Not that we're trying to be Pop artists here but very few Pop songs that I'm aware of haven't had an interesting melody or been in anything less than perfect time (by human standards anyway).

[christianm77]

I saw Ahmad Jamal and Mal Waldron a couple of times play solo. They would play some well known standards and wouldn't really even refer to the melody until well into the tune. But you know they knew it and couldn't have played the way they did unless they'd completely internalized it.

Melody is king and in some ways rhythm is subservient to it. I love funk and consider myself to be basically a funk player with jazz chops and at times a definite country feel but imo the best funk has got a strong melodic element even if it's just a simple phrase. Being rhythm driven, melody used to take a back seat in my playing but these days I spend lots of my shed time reading and playing heads. It's made a huge difference.

Not that we're trying to be Pop artists here but very few Pop songs that I'm aware of haven't had an interesting melody or been in anything less than perfect time (by human standards anyway).

Well, I assume you are talking about older pop stuff, obviously performances now are heavily produced and quantised so they would be in super-human computer time. But you do get the odd nice melody in pop still.

Pop as in an ethos rather than a style of music? I'm all for that. What can we do in 3 minutes?

I feel every jazz musician should play a bit of groove music and do some pop work. It's so important. It's not like it's easy to play pop well. Jazzers coming into a pop session for the first time play too busy...

You have to think like a pop musician, not a jazzer. But then taking the pop song/arrangement/simplicity thing into jazz is great. I always think some of the old Blue Note records have a lot of pop sensibility in them. They are coherent statements, good records, not just good jazz.

[destinytot]

Motown... Jamerson played with Barry back in Detroit, you know. :-)

Yes, indeed! Barry Harris, interesting, but...

This has been posted in several other threads, but what Barry Harris says about guitarists and the scale of chords seems useful here.

I'm talking about the section from 51m17s to 55m10s (though I think the whole video is gold):

[princeplanet]

Sticking to melody = good.

Change running using unbroken 8ths to express a harmonic concept = bad.

See, now that you read it like that, you don't agree, right? - and nor do I.

We've all heard soloists who never stray too far from the melody that can sound dull.

We've all heard soloists who run long lines and play everything but the melody, and they can sound mind blowing.

To insist that melody is always king seems as pointless as insisting that playing fast is wrong, and that playing slow is best. Of course it is in some cases. Of course it isn't in other cases.

I sometimes get the feeling when there's strong agreement on these forums it's because many of you guys are striving to be competent players of Standards, playing to what's left of any "jazz circuit" that's left out there.

Sure, the few hundred standards everyone plays remain an important backbone to anyone's oeuvre, but people as early as Parker were taking these well known Standards, and doing their best to hide the original melody!

So just wanted to add that, for some of us, how you swing, or how you address the changes in a compelling way (or not) can be more important than whether you allude to the melody in any way. If you played like Eric Dolphy might have over "Misty" for the weekend wedding gig, it very well may be inappropriate, but it doesn't mean it's bad, or wrong, right?

[bako]

Sounds good to me. Contributes greatly to my perception of all that is possible playing a song.

[unknownguitarplayer]

Motown... Jamerson played with Barry back in Detroit, you know. :-)

Jamerson and Barry Harris:
New Music Society 3 Mid 50s | Charles McPherson

[mrcee]

Sticking to melody = good.

Change running using unbroken 8ths to express a harmonic concept = bad.

See, now that you read it like that, you don't agree, right? - and nor do I.

We've all heard soloists who never stray too far from the melody that can sound dull.

We've all heard soloists who run long lines and play everything but the melody, and they can sound mind blowing.

To insist that melody is always king seems as pointless as insisting that playing fast is wrong, and that playing slow is best. Of course it is in some cases. Of course it isn't in other cases.

I sometimes get the feeling when there's strong agreement on these forums it's because many of you guys are striving to be competent players of Standards, playing to what's left of any "jazz circuit" that's left out there.

Sure, the few hundred standards everyone plays remain an important backbone to anyone's oeuvre, but people as early as Parker were taking these well known Standards, and doing their best to hide the original melody!

So just wanted to add that, for some of us, how you swing, or how you address the changes in a compelling way (or not) can be more important than whether you allude to the melody in any way. If you played like Eric Dolphy might have over "Misty" for the weekend wedding gig, it very well may be inappropriate, but it doesn't mean it's bad, or wrong, right?

I agree completely. When I say melody is king I mean that in the sense that it is often the inspiration for a piece of music (or an improvised solo) even in free jazz. John Gilmore's advice to Coltrane to use motifs in his solos is suggesting that the melodic element is important. Even if you're not alluding to The Melody (the head) on a standard, the improvised lines that are being played tend to be most effective if they have an interesting melodic element of their own. I'm personally not that interested in performing standards. I'm not going to spend my creative life playing nothing but GAS tunes. I approach them more like etudes or exercises, and a great way to improve my playing and develop my sense of melody.

[princeplanet]

@ bako - Haha! Way to prove me wrong! I actually hear plenty of melody in those excerpts, which probably served to make it a great listen.... Would have felt peeved, if not for the fact that listening to both these was a sublime experience, as it usually is when we listen to Dolphy. What an extraordinary musician!

[destinytot]

Sticking to melody = good.

Change running using unbroken 8ths to express a harmonic concept = bad.

See, now that you read it like that, you don't agree, right? - and nor do I.

We've all heard soloists who never stray too far from the melody that can sound dull.

We've all heard soloists who run long lines and play everything but the melody, and they can sound mind blowing.

To insist that melody is always king seems as pointless as insisting that playing fast is wrong, and that playing slow is best. Of course it is in some cases. Of course it isn't in other cases.

I sometimes get the feeling when there's strong agreement on these forums it's because many of you guys are striving to be competent players of Standards, playing to what's left of any "jazz circuit" that's left out there.

Sure, the few hundred standards everyone plays remain an important backbone to anyone's oeuvre, but people as early as Parker were taking these well known Standards, and doing their best to hide the original melody!

So just wanted to add that, for some of us, how you swing, or how you address the changes in a compelling way (or not) can be more important than whether you allude to the melody in any way. If you played like Eric Dolphy might have over "Misty" for the weekend wedding gig, it very well may be inappropriate, but it doesn't mean it's bad, or wrong, right?

Seems to me that treatment of melody is the defining characteristic across a continuum of 'jazz' styles - all good.

[grahambop]

I enjoy trying to 'nail the changes' at tempo like anyone else (and I dig Sonny Stitt!) , but I also found Peter Bernstein's advice in his masterclass interesting. So I have been trying to improvise more around the melody (or at least with some reference to it). It's actually quite refreshing because it stops you playing your usual lines, and it makes you think more in shorter 'motifs' and maybe put more rhythmic spaces etc. into it. I got some nice ideas out of it and at times I was getting a bit of a 'Jim Hall' vibe which was cool.

So definitely a worthwhile exercise for me, has added something else to my playing I think.

[mrcee]

Well, I assume you are talking about older pop stuff, obviously performances now are heavily produced and quantised so they would be in super-human computer time. But you do get the odd nice melody in pop still.

Pop as in an ethos rather than a style of music? I'm all for that. What can we do in 3 minutes?

I feel every jazz musician should play a bit of groove music and do some pop work. It's so important. It's not like it's easy to play pop well. Jazzers coming into a pop session for the first time play too busy...

You have to think like a pop musician, not a jazzer. But then taking the pop song/arrangement/simplicity thing into jazz is great. I always think some of the old Blue Note records have a lot of pop sensibility in them. They are coherent statements, good records, not just good jazz.

I was talking about the older stuff and of course the quantised tunes are spot on. But I think that successful pop hits have more than the occasional odd nice melody. They may not rival Yesterday or Somewhere Over the Rainbow as a work of melodic genius but I still believe that a large part of what makes them hits is that there are at least interesting melodic fragments involved. A good argument could be made that Rhythm is King. Music imo just flat out doesn't work without rhythmic integrity but I feel that without some interesting melodic elements a song or genre isn't going to get large numbers of listeners for very long, which is one definition of a hit.

"""You have to think like a pop musician, not a jazzer. But then taking the pop song/arrangement/simplicity thing into jazz is great. I always think some of the old Blue Note records have a lot of pop sensibility in them. They are coherent statements, good records, not just good jazz."""

I couldn't agree more with the above paragraph.

[MarkRhodes]

This would sit interestingly with you said about Carol Kaye's approach to improvisation which IIRC you said was based more on changes.

I think I'm a bit bored with changes running personally ATM. But that's not to say changes running is a bad thing per se. I think I've just got pretty good at it and I'm running into it's limitations as a way of thinking. I don't like the way solos can end up sounding samey in my case. Also, it pushes me a little into running eighths which to me gets old fast.

I've heard a lot of people be a bit sniffy about Stitt, including Barry Harris who played with him quite a bit haha. I've always enjoyed his playing, although I do hear people who describe him as a tidied up Charlie Parker.

Making the changes is necessary but running the changes soon starts to sound like a practice room exercise. (Except when it's done by way of contrast, then it is welcome. Briefly.)

Interesting about Carol Kaye, Christian. She talks about "patterns" and "phrases" a lot, not so much about running changes. She has a ii-V-I sheet (around 24 bars, I think) that she asks students to play 2-3 times a day, but I don't think I've ever heard her use the phrase "guide tone" or give an exercise like the "connecting game" (in Joe Elliott's book) where you link one arpeggio to the next by the nearest available note, which is a great way to learn the arpeggios in a given position (or from a particular scale fingering) She's pretty dead-set against analyzing things. (!) "Play, don't analyze" could be her motto. (Yet she definitely knows her stuff.) But yes, she is very much a pattern player. (At the same time, she created her most famous basslines---they weren't written and given to her. For one session with Quincy Jones, the direction was "play E minor" and she played what seemed good to her, and it turned out very well indeed.)

My own sense---not of Stitt or Carol Kaye, but of what I like in jazz---is that I tend to prefer "linear" players to "harmonic" (or "vertical") players. Perhaps more to the point, I like those players who (as Jack McDuff taught George Benson) "put a little blues in everything."

You know, I think Coltrane was a more dazzling horn player than Miles, but I would rather hear Miles play. His solos fit the tune. Coltrane tended to put everything he could play over a set of changes into every solo. I find it exhausting. Yet his tone thrills me. I feel it. I love his sound. But his solos go on too long for my tastes. (My favorite record of his for the past decade is the one with Johnny Hartman singing. Beautiful stuff. Their "My One And Only Love" is among my Top Five jazz performances of all time. Perfection.)

Here's a nice bit of Benson with Jack McDuff. I love this vibe.

[ragman1]

But - and this is the big caveat - you have to know the melody in it's vanilla form before you embellish it.

Absolutely, and preferably as a song*. The words dictate the mood.

There's a world of difference between listening to a skilful, hip variation of the tune and a player waffling because they don't know how it goes....

Quite. Mind you, I've heard one or two decidedly unhip versions from supposedly skilful players, presumably because they just wanted to get it over with and take off :-)

* also singers often embellish the vanilla tune too. First time round, I mean.

[mr. beaumont]

Play it like a good singer, I was told. Not Christina Aguilera.

[matt.guitarteacher]

Sounds like throughout the thread we're talking about maybe a couple of different things at times? There's "melody" and then "THE melody".

As for the maths, I'm actually really glad to have learned some of the mechanics of developing my own melodies with enclosures, chromatics, pulling from other key centers etc.etc. Creating melody is not as much of an elusive , artistic, soft science as I used to believe, where you're arbitrarily putting notes together however they seem to sound good.

I don't know. I don't think knowledge of the mechanics of it makes me necessarily LESS creative or melodic. You still have to do something with all of our of course.

[goldenwave77]

Motown... Jamerson played with Barry back in Detroit, you know. :-)

You know I almost started a thread the other day along the lines of "Maybe Detroit was the real jazz capital of this country back in the 50's"...sounds farfetched, and then you start looking at how many great players there were---long, long list.

Scenario: Wayne State Univ. in the 50's.

OLLIE: "Hey, I hear there are some pretty good musicians down at the college...wanna check them out?"

STAN: "College...huh....how good can they be?..I mean really...what are you trying to get me into, Ollie?".

OLLIE: "Now, Stan...education is a fine thing. I hear they have a specially talented group...the New World Music Collective...so perhaps you should consider it."

STAN: "Do these college students have names...and what do they play?"

OLLIE: "Well, I am glad you are not close-minded...let's see...some guy named Burrell on guitar...and some guy named Donald Byrd on trumpet....and some guy named Jones---that's Elvin Jones on drums....and some guy named Lateef on sax and flute, ...peculiar name...Yuseef is his first name...and oh yes, fellow by the name of Adams on baritone sax...calls himself Pepper."

STAN: "Well perhaps they're worth a listen...I hope this is not another fine mess you're getting us into."

[pingu]

basics are often the hardest thing to get right, and the 'advanced' stuff is often a way of covering up when we don;t know the basics haha

Ain't that the truth !

[mrcee]

The basics are of the utmost importance. I was hanging out at the house late one night with a young cat in his twenties who was a decent player on a number of instruments. His dad was a pro. He was focusing on the keyboard and had some chops and theoretical knowledge. We were just hanging out and tossing some things around. I showed him a very basic scale exercise that he wasn't familiar with. He was a humble guy and said that he really should have known that and said that he'd learned more in a half hour with me than he had in years. And I'm not even a teacher. It was just that he'd never focused on the basics. I talk to people every now and then that are interested in taking lessons. I'll ask them how long they've been playing. If they say a month I'll tell them that I'm not great with rank beginners. If they say a couple of years or more I'll ask them if they know the names of the notes on the fretboard. If they don't I'll tell them to learn them at least up the seventh fret and then give me a call.

[Vladan]

Play it like a good singer, I was told. Not Christina Aguilera.

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