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I don't hear much bop in Jim hall or Julian Lage... I'm not saying I hear none of it, but I don't think is a key feature of their styles
Originally Posted by Rob MacKillop
Interesting to read everyone's take on absorbing the language. Thanks for the comments.
Its interesting going from listening to Parker and Gillespie, to listening to Jim Hall and Julian Lage. The former pair created the language of bebop, while the latter pair have thoroughly absorbed that language, as well as many other languages and dialects, ending up with something that is entirely their own. That's where I'd like to be, but the journey is a long one. So, I'm not trying to imitate a style, but feel that learning licks and cliches is a form of imitation, leading to friends and family thinking you are playing jazz, which in some way you are, but in many ways you are not.
Oh, I don't know where I'm going with this, so let's all get back to playing guitar
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07-12-2017 10:24 AM
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To be fair, I didn't say bebop was a "key feature of their style"...
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Youve mentioned Eddie Diehl, Rob. Have you listened to any Sean Levitt?
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No, but I will now :-)
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True. But I would say what marks out their styles as distinct is their almost avoidance of bebop language, especially in Lage's case. I don't think it interests him. Originally Posted by Rob MacKillop
BTW I say Lage play the other night. Never heard anything like it.
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I'm going to be sharing (via SoundCloud) some low-fi recordings I made of him, and I'll make sure the link reaches you. (Hard to believe now, but I helped set up and run a jazz club over here three decades ago - ha!) Originally Posted by Rob MacKillop
Here's a thread: Sean Levitt
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This is an excellent discussion!
In the application of "vocabulary" to specific tunes, I find that vocabulary has two aspects or levels of implementation.
The first is the actual pitches of the line or phrase as it unfolds with the harmony of chord changes. The second is the rhythmic integration of the line or phrase. The first is more like the way the piece of vocabulary is generally abstractly filed in memory; the second is more about discovering, recognizing, and choosing how to specifically lay down the line or phrase in order to sound "authentic" to the character of the tune.
For example, I found a nice element of vocabulary that you would recognize having heard hundreds of times. I figured it out from a ballad where the execution of it was kind of straight and deliberately lyrical. Specifically, it flows over four chords:
Bm7 - E9 - Am7 - D9
The line alternates going up and down; up Bm7, down Abdim, up Am7, down F#dim... so it suggests a nice overall descending chromatic feeling, and for this tune it sounded just right the way I was playing it.
Later, when working on a faster swinging tune, I found the same four chords and discovered that getting this bit of vocabulary to sound right ("authentic") was not happening. It sounded mechanical and contrived.
As always, I sought help from Wes and Miles... they make everything sound right. What I found was that it is all about the second aspect of vocabulary - the rhythmic way it is specifically played for a tune. This includes leading into bars early, sometimes out late, stopping a phrase for a moment and resuming, how to ornament phrase changes in direction as the chords change, etc... basically a rhythmic refitting of the pitches so that they "push" or "accent" with a little different time feeling.
I have found that acquiring a general piece of vocabulary is just the first step toward specifically using it ; there is a "meta-vocabulary" that determines whether the same pitches and harmony have an authentic feeling or a contrived feeling... same line or phrase laid down differently for different tunes with different feel.
Hope this helps
Last edited by pauln; 07-12-2017 at 02:23 PM.
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Cheers, Paul. I did vary time and rhythm, and, yes, it sounded in a sense authentic, but it still felt like I was putting it on, so to speak.
We haven't really mentioned style. Some people focus on a particular style or period, and licks and cliches can help provide an authenticity in that regard. All well and good, but I'm referring to another kind of authenticity, one that comes from within the player. It's still possible to play within a style and have this level of authenticity, but that would - I imagine - takes years of dedication. Without that background it is much more difficult to learn a few licks and make them sound as if they were created by someone steeped in the tradition.
Talking of Julian Lage again, there is someone who knows the tradition, I'm sure, yet has found his own voice. His ideas and lines seem new and fresh, devoid of any cliches or licks, yet are totally authentic as the emanate from a brilliant musician of the highest level. It seems one is left with either doing something that is stylistically appropriate, or coming up with something new that somehow sounds just right.
I repeat, I'm not frustrated by this, just thinking out loud.
Destinytot - Sean Levitt is excellent!
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hey guys,
long time no see.
Hal Galper said something along the lines of (paraphrasing): The phrases you hear that strike you most, and presumably those are the ones you would want to copy, isn't building a vocabulary by copying someone else so much as teaching you about what you already wanted to say but didn't know how. self discovery; it's art
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Good point. I'll chew on that for a while.
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Sometime he sounds to me like he uses bop ideas but in an extended way in a litteral sence .. he is like extending it wider in intervals and longer in musical space...But I would say what marks out their styles as distinct is their almost avoidance of bebop language, especially in Lage's case. I don't think it interests him.
takes more space harmonically both vertically and horizontally... I dont know how to describe it better... bop players also outline harmony of course but they do it very locally in a very dense way
when Julian plays it sounds like the harmony is spacious.
But rythmically and by the directions the line takes it often reminds bop
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I agree, Jonah.
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I love that quote. Originally Posted by joe2758
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I wouldn't be able to say how much straight up bop language Lage has copped over the years, but if I was told 'very little' it wouldn't surprise me at all. His influence from bebop (as pointed out by Jonah) is much more sidelong... I think of Lage as the archetypal process oriented player - what he takes from his studies is a idea or essence rather than just notes. Because of that he might be a good person to emulate to some extent? Originally Posted by Rob MacKillop
I think when talking about Lage it my be relevant to mention his mentor, Gary Burton.
Burton claims never to have transcribed, but as a teenager he already had (it seems to me) a perfect command of bebop language. (He also has perfect pitch, but people with pitch can't necessarily play everything they hear verbatim like a computer - at least this is what they say.)
Anyway, this seminar by Burton outlines his thinking, which may be of interest if you haven't seen it.
Here is Lage on the subject of improvisation, also posted elsewhere. There's an obvious influence in approach:
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Originally Posted by christianm77
What is close to Gary Burton that Julian often describes his approach in terms of chord-scale ideas - not in the method book sence - but his excercises are often about modes related chords.. voicing excersises are also modal in character rather than functional... at the same time his playing is more functional than many modern players...
He reminds more and more Bill Frisell - not like exact imitation - but essentially... combination of very old style feeling of tension release, phrasing and modern sound in harmonic vocabulary
Also he is definitely influenced by folk styles - not only last years - but it seems he always had this interest
But.. besides that... I think he mentioned a few times that he studied be-bop.
And also this
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cliche's are for winning
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Love that last video - it somewhat sums up what I've been inching towards, though sadly without that mountain of talent. Is that from a DVD?
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Not THAT video, the one above
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What, the American dad one?
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Nah, I have very little talent also. But it's way better to get cheered for the hard work than talent. And in music and arts in general, hard work will show in time. At some point it can even turn into easy work. Then fun and games. I've seen "hopeless cases" doing brilliant things when years have passed. Originally Posted by Rob MacKillop
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Ooch.... I hate hard work... everything I manage to do was thanks to talent or luck... Originally Posted by emanresu
If somebody said about my playing: I see you worked hard i would be really disappointed...
I am not at the coal mine to be praised for hard work...
The rose should not represent gardener' s toil, it should look like it comes from nowhere nice and easy...
?????????? ? ????? SM-G570F ????? Tapatalk
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I don't know, Rob... it looks like some homemade video (if you mean the one with Julian's lesson in my post)... Originally Posted by Rob MacKillop
I also think that Julian had not only great talent but a great luck to study with many great players - not only from the bandstand but taking real lessons - Gary Burton was mentioned, Randy Vincent, he mentioned lessons with Pat Metheny and Tuck Adress... I am sure there's more...
And all this mostly at the age when a man absorbs new knowledges quickly.. plus his natural curiousity and interest in investigating guitar in different styles... so we see the result.
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One more note on licks...
recently I tried bluegrass guitar (using heavy strung full-size jumbo guitar)... I did not master it of course but I learnt some bluegrass standards and began to variate them using also traditional bluegrass licks and phrases...
And I noticed that in this style I do not have problems with using licks..
I just throw it in here and then and feel it's like fun without caring much about building up a solo as a development of an idea etc.
maybe I take jazz very seriously?)))
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As Ted Greene showed, JSBach is mostly about "licks". The musical meaning is embedded or brought out using those. Um, well - he explains it better:
I played the fugue from 1001 for a year. Learned for 3 months and then tried to get a clean run. It happened exactly 3 times during that year. My tech wasn't good enough and I was pretty frustrated. But I know for sure it had a heavy influence to my own inventions. Here's a demo what happened, I mean.. it's sounds far from Bach but a lot of stuff came from the endless playing of the 1001.. cliches :
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Please, don't throw Bach into it... Bach used language,As Ted Greene showed, JSBach is mostly about "licks". The musical meaning is embedded or brought out using those.
It's much more complex and elaborated than using licks... licks are much more idiomatic and fixed and much less meaningful and flexible.
Besides using Bach for it as refernce is like using Rimbrandt for drawing comics...
There were plenty of baroque composers who used the language of the epoch in much more conventional way.
If we want to attract baroque style into let's really get into it. Let's take a piece and analyze... and not Bach's fugue but some Vivaldi's Larghetto will be enough...
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