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Can anyone put into words some differences in an older style solo vs. a modern solo over a jazz standard?
As far as an older style; I like people like Chet Baker or Ed Bickert. But I also like Mark Turner and Julian Lage.
Differences are easier to describe if you go back to Louis Armstrong and Charlie Christian, but any thoughts between these two later generations?
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11-24-2017 11:39 AM
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Although more of a chord concept maybe the use of quartal harmonies?
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That's an interesting question, and I'm not sure I want to give you any information. Why?
Originally Posted by craigoslo
Well not cos I'm a dick, but because it would be good for you to find out yourself. I can then discuss what you hear with you.
Over my 15+ years of seriously studying the music I have come to a lot of findings that may or may not reflect wider patterns (since I can't transcribe everything) - but one thing I will tell you is the harmonic content is often less important in this distinction than you might think. Metheny sounds modern when he's playing the same stuff that Wes would have used.
Things to pay attention to are tone (obviously) but also rhythm, phrasing, and so on. But be specific in your language. 8th notes, note inequality, use of triplets, and so on and so forth.
However, I think of some players as having fundamentally modern note choices too. One clear distinction to listen out for is whether you think a musician is using more bebop language or some sort of chord scale approach, or a mixture - or a different approach again like Lage Lund (which often sounds like very traditional jazz language that's a bit subverted).
If you want to go deeper, do some transcription - you could also analyse some existing transcriptions, of course, but I prefer to do my own as a I get a better connection with the music. I just like to listen to a phrase, then imitate, and if I don't recognise what's going on right away, do a bit of analysis. Transcription is a good way of honing your ear, which is the main reason for doing it.
So pick a standard - that's a good idea because obviously This website will give you some good info on classic recordings, and then you can search for your favourite modern players doing commonplace standards which they usually do.
Jazz Standards Introduction: Origins, History, Theory, Musicology, Biographies, and Books
Furthermore it's complicated because all the great players were individuals! Also, a player like Lage Lund is capable of playing quite traditionally:
As well as in the much more modern way we associate with him. (Players also evolve - I wonder if Kurt is capable of playing today the way he did on East Coast Love Affair, or the Next Step even? Dave Douglas used to be an incredible bebop trumpeter, but I don't know if he has those chops today, and so on.)
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Django Reinhardt - John Scofield.
I like Django and John.
Differnt style of playing,differnt tunes and different jazz language.
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Not always different tunes :-) Originally Posted by kris
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To my ear, when I hear a player using a certain jazz vocabulary, it sounds older.
Landing on the third of a chord on a strong beat tends to sound older fashioned. Fourths sound more modern
Straying further away from the underlying chord sounds more modern.
On guitar, distortion and sustain tend to be more modern.
One pianist I played with who always sounded modern to me had a trick where he didn't change the chord he was playing on until long after the comping had changed. So, it sounded dissonant but not random.
But, mostly, I think it's vocabulary.
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Nah, it's not so simple. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
Thing is that stuff, fourths and playing outside so on, is certainly in the bag available to you, but modern guitar players don't do that stuff all the time.
For instance, dig out Adam Rogers version of Dexterity, and listen to the first chorus. Now tell me if there any note choices that Charlie Parker wouldn't have made. But it sounds like Adam Rogers and super modern to boot. Why is that?
Now in the next chorus he starts to play what we might think of as more 'modern' language, but he didn't sound any less like Adam Rogers in the first chorus.
Also, listen to Bill Evans play Oleo - his ideas are every bit as 'advanced' as Roger's, but the sound of the music we might think of as classic.
Not so simple, right?
So why does Rogers sound more modern than Bill?
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Not so simple at all. Maybe some of it just comes down to touch and phrasing.
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It's also the conception of time feel and the way the whole band plays. I mean obvious right? Originally Posted by mrcee
If I play in a band that has a more modern feel, I am going to sound more modern than if I play with a group that has an old school feel. If I have a trad jazz rhythm section I will not be able to use modern phrasing. If I play with an Ari Hoenig style drummer, there's a whole different way to phrase.
No rhythm section of Parker's era would play the way AR's trio play, obviously.
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The conception of time feel is a huge part of it.
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I have no idea, I don't have the skill to hear nor the knowledge to analyse what the difference is really. When did this change take place would you say? Could it be before jazz school and after I wonder. I mean before specific jazz education and after? I wonder if old school players play what they can hear, and more modern players use more theory. Some of the modern stuff is very hard to hear and sing back, but no doubt there is a system. I know an old guy who sounds old school to me. He missed Wes in London in 68 as he was playing a gig. He has solid theory and amazing ears, can tell me any chord when I play it down the telephone. i don't think he knows what he is playing when he plays it, but can analyse it after if he remembers what he has just done. It is enlightening for a simpleton like me to pick his brains! Is someone like Bruce Forman modern or old school?
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That's it. That's the biggest part. The concept of time within it. It affects the phrasing, tone, and whatnot. Originally Posted by christianm77
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Also, as far as the guitar- the blues element, in tone and how you phrase... The modern guitar players have almost non of it, with the few exceptions. More prog than anything. Not a bad thing in itself, but it's a trend.
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A lot of it just may come down to "accent". Like a regional speech accent or a way of speaking of a certain demographic or socioeconomic group. I can remember, in the US, in years gone by (30s, 40s, 50s), radio and TV announcers, and some movie actors, speaking in an affected manner. Sort of a variation of what's called The Mid Atlantic Accent. It's immediately recognizable in old movies. It sounds like an overly posh New England accent and you'd even hear cowboy and gangster actors affect a variety of it. The same American English language as today for the most part(not Chaucerian or Beowolf or Shakespearean King James Version) with the same vocabulary etc but it just sounds different and dated.
Accent in music can be tricky. It's one thing to cop a player's or a genre's licks and phrasing and try for their tone but accent is elusive. In language to. I knew a guy who was studying NLP. Neurolinguistic Programming.
It was used quite a bit for training salespeople. It may still be. They taught people to, among other things, mimic the tempo and accent of the person they were trying to influence. Any reasonable person found it laughable. I knew some really great musicians from the Caribbean who loved Jazz. They could solo on Giant Steps and Confirmation and were big bop and straight ahead fans. But they were completely unimpressed and left cold by Parker and Diz's etc forays into Latin music. It just didn't have the right accent. These same guys would at times need to get guitar players to sub. This was in LA and they would use pro African American funk players. These guys were ok on the reggae (which is heavily influenced by RnB) but they couldn't convincingly make the ethnic Caribbean music like Soca and Calypso. Again, it's an accent thing.
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As time marches on in jazz, our ears become more accustomed to hearing dissonance fitting into the harmonic framework of jazz, as opposed to early beboppers blowing people's minds with just a flatted 5th. Even then, Monk was very perplexing to a lot of listeners, including jazzers, because he was so far ahead of everyone else with his own brand of harmonic logic and rhythmic displacement. It took a while for people to catch up with him.
Nowadays, "modern" players seem to look for every harmonic device that allows them to suggest secondary dominant and are creating a whole new roadmap in how it sounds to get from point A to point B.
Rhythmically, jazz has incorporated a lot of ethnic, "straight 8th", and odd time signatures into the canon since the swing/bebop era, so we have more rhythmically diverse feels now than ever.
I also think that beauty was a stronger musical influence back in the early days.
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Originally Posted by cosmic gumbo
great post!..
i think beauty is always in the eye of the beholder..and i think the beholders eye is constantly changing...not a bad thing...
cheers
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Beauty. Maybe the sense of what was beautiful was different, is different as the zeitgeist of each time period changed.
Maybe cliche and the preponderance of derivative voices and voicings became ugly at some point. Maybe the spirit of discovery that drove the innovators of the 30's is that same spirit that drives the best voices of today. Maybe the view from the player's perspective is very different from the view from the audience (jazz was not always "popular" music. Cab Calloway called bebop "Chinese Music" and he was not being complimentary. It was not beautiful to him)
Historians make things convenient for the quantification of artistic and social movements, but to the player, throughout time, the search for beauty in the context of the creative scene is always a noble and elusive goal.
Whether finding a new way to re-phrase the popular dance tunes of the day when quarter and eighth note phrases were expressed in 2 to 4 bar phrases, or a new way to express an arc that stands alone in a larger and at the same shorter framework, the guiding principles are the same.
But remember, modern players, good modern players have done their homework. They should know history from Don Byas up to Chris Potter or David Binney. If they don't, their duty is to know it. There's a much larger canon informing the modern player, and there will surely be things you won't understand, that historians and critics won't understand until the "tradition" catches up.
If you want someone to describe "old" and "modern" to you, you'll get lots of different explanations. But take a tune, take Out Of Nowhere or Nostalgia by Fats, and then use YouTube and listen to a time line on these tunes.
Learn the staples of improvisation, phrase, accent, harmonic embellishments, the contributions of Fats, Morgan, Shorter, Dolphy, Kirk, Binney, Potter... and I'm not being dismissive on this... answer it yourself.
I had lots of books that adoringly explained the history of jazz movements, but as a player, each struggle I came against in finding "beauty" in the face of boredom gave way to revelations and real understanding that often flew in the face of criticism and reviews.
One notable exception, Paul Berliner's Thinking in Jazz rang true and strong for me. But still if you want to understand the real music, understand the social context of each era, listen to artists blindfold (without the pedestal) and play a lot.
It takes longer this way but it's the truth.
David
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Originally Posted by cosmic gumbo
I couldn't agree more. I also think pursuit of beauty was more apparent in many other artforms in the past, particularly the visual ones, such as painting, sculpture and most particularly architecture.
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I think modern artists are driven more by truth and honesty than beauty, but then of course that can also be one's definition of beauty...so yes, each must define beauty for themselves, for today.
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What, Monk isn’t still perplexing harmonically?
I find a lot of the present jazz to be very beautiful, sometimes a bit too pretty....
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we have look at all history of jazz...music marketing...bisnes...new trends in jazz etc...
electric bands...there are a lot of them...new sounds with new technology/computers,softwares etc/...audience like news...
In early 70/s a lot of bands in Poland played "free jazz"-very modern staff I think...
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I said modern jazz guitar takes after prog rock and got a real mouthful for it haha. Originally Posted by Hep To The Jive
I like Dave Gilmour etc though, so hey. Actually Gilmour was pretty bluesy. Although all those yanks are into Rush? I know Kurt was. But the ambient sounds, all that delay and reverb.
And of course it goes without saying that the big TONAL influence on all these modern school players is I think Metheny, specifically early Metheny. This is still perhaps the most influential tone in modern jazz.
Now, transcribe Metheny (bearing in mind the progression of the song is not trad functional changes) and you will find fairly straightforward note choices. But Metheny is not such a bluesy player perhaps - more country?
One contextual aspect is Methney often plays a Grant Green/Wes blues lick which is 3-4-b5-4 (you know the one) but plays it as a modal lick 1-2-b3-2-1....
On this Joni tune:
Pat plays a lot of Chuck Berry/Charlie Christian style stuff but it still doesn't sound like them at all, it sounds like Pat. Also check out the tritone triad lick that finishes his solo - very common in modern jazz, but I played a lot with a clarinetist who uses it all the time in a swing/Benny Goodman setting.
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Superb question. I wonder if it makes a difference that when an "older" player uses, say, bebop language, he's using language that was edgy, new, fresh at the time. He was playing out on his own edge of musical growth. But the later player, using the identical vocabulary, is consciously playing in a tradition, he's deciding to play like Bird or Diz, or deciding to sound play like Miles. That player's "edge" is farther out, in a different direction. They embrace and include the tradition, but they also try to go somewhere else with it. Originally Posted by christianm77
Take octaves. When Wes did it, it was explosive, dangerous, fresh. Now anyone who can't play a decent line of octaves is missing part of the toolkit.
What was a conclusion for the older player is a presupposition for the later one. So playing the same ideas, something else is going to come through, something different.
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this is very good point... Originally Posted by cosmic gumbo
only I would change the parts...
In old days they just were just true and honest and that made it pure beauty
Today they try really hard to make pure beauty (whatever it may be?) and they sound like they are just true and honeste true and honest...
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That reminds me: Originally Posted by lawson-stone
With many solos there is an aspect to which they sound like a potted history of jazz. My favourite example of this is Dexter’s Second Balcony jump which is a better history of the saxophone than one you could ever read - takes us from the Blues through Prez into Parker and then into Trane a little.
Not all solos are like this, but there is certainly an element with the Adam Rogers solo. It ends with the blues though, opposite to Dexter.
Something about rhythm changes tunes?
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