The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #126

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    The rational unexplainability of some things made simplest natural phrases very complex for him...
    But if they really are just 'simple natural phrases' they'd be completely explainable.

    graduate from college
    There's his problem right there :-)

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  3. #127

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    You know the old joke?

    BA - MA - PhD - MAD

  4. #128

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jonah
    Many musicians I know are confused when I try to explain what music is for me...

    Strange... and such an academic form convinces people?
    Is it worth efforts?


    I mean it is like saying: we made research between various social group of adult people and found out that 99% of them think that the moon is yellow. Therefore we come to conclusion that blue moon - a very rare meteorological phenomenon - in the lyrics of this song is most probably a poetic metaphor involvong also the meaning of blue in English associated with sadness. Also 56% of interviewed people confirmed that when they cry the moon may seem a little blue through the tears especially in the Northern regions with bright summer nights...


    You see we do not need to interview people to find all this out...
    If people need this to dig poetics they should not get into poetry at all...

    And I believe we (poets!) - if we still want them to be converted - must find artistic ways to get them convinced.


    If we want to know the social opinion and statistics for some weird purposes then yes...

    but not to confirm that hearing goes first.

    If people need that kind of 'scientific' confirmations they would rather do something else... not music
    Haha, you're overthinking it. I have an essay to do, was reading the paper, so thought I'd post up that little quote because it nicely illustrated what I was talking about.

  5. #129

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jonah
    I met a guy - graduate from college - teaching already... nice capable pro jazz guitarist.

    I discussed Pete Bernstein with him... and he said: oh this guy plays such a complex stuff...

    I was surprised.. I never thought of Peter's playing as complex.. genuine subtle, deep - yes, but not complex.. it is actually very clear and relatively simple.
    Holdsworth or Stowell or sometimes Abercombie can be described as complex in my opinion but not Peter Bernstein...

    So I asked him what was so complex in it?
    From his explanation it seemed to me that being musical is already very complex.... and even unachievable. The rational unexplainability of some things made simplest natural phrases very complex for him...

    So these guys do study and then play music professionally and in fact they do not even start playing what I think music is... this is scary...
    So yeah it is complex only in the sense that we try and apply tools which are not appropriate to the task.

    Again, Michael Polyani's division between tacit knowledge and formal knowledge isn't just academic. It's of vital importance. Most sensible educators have some concept of this distinction. Kenny Werner talks about left brain/right brain for instance.

    That said, anyone who finds Peter's lines complex in the formal way hasn't worked out that half of the time he's playing lines directly from chord shapes sliding around chromatically. If anyone tries to relate this to chord scale theory, they are going to get the impression that it's super complicated. It's like that hilarious analysis of Lester Young above. Some people are so dogmatic in their approach. They are like 11th century monks or something.

    There's tons of workshop videos of Peter demonstrating this and explaining his disarmingly simple concept. And yet jazz guitarists seem unwilling to engage with what he is saying. Sunk costs, maybe, intellectually and also financial (what I spent thousands studying jazz and the shit they taught me isn't the real deal?) But actually I don't think it's that simple. It's actually a deeply ingrained thought processes. We are training jazz students to engineers or something rather than musicians.

    Polanyi was a fucking chemist, which makes it more absurd.

    Of course to make what Peter does sound good requires much more than a postivist, mechanical understanding. You have to, basically, be good at playing jazz to pull it off, and this is of course tacit, unexplainable knowledge that comes from, listening to loads of jazz and being on stage every night with the best in the business. So... pedagogy fails. It can't do anything but fail.

    People seem to be looking for pedagogical solutions for things that are best learned experientially. But this is actually really well understood and described in the academic education literature. Much more so than jazz edu materials.

    It is useful to me in my line of work that I can justify this fact (that is obvious to anyone who has been around the music) to people who don't have a clue about jazz. Which is a lot of education people to be frank.

    OTOH for jazz people to reject what has been learned about learning and education just because it is 'academic' is equally dumb. Academics understand the limitations of pedagogy better than a lot of 'practical' jazz musicians. If this stuff was obvious to educators this thread wouldn't be contentious in any way.
    Last edited by christianm77; 06-16-2020 at 11:09 AM.

  6. #130

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    Actually I was having a convo with a friend of mine who teaches improvisation and jazz at a university, and in fact is doing a PhD... and we are both like; screw pedagogy. 'Teacher leave them kids alone!' haha

    The more you learn about education, the more you realise the limitations of your role, and your ample opportunity to mess people up.

  7. #131
    joelf Guest
    I use the horizontal approach a lot:

    I hardly get out of bed...

  8. #132

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    Quote Originally Posted by christianm77
    Actually I was having a convo with a friend of mine who teaches improvisation and jazz at a university, and in fact is doing a PhD... and we are both like; screw pedagogy. 'Teacher leave them kids alone!' haha

    The more you learn about education, the more you realise the limitations of your role, and your ample opportunity to mess people up.
    I am prejudiced against any academism...the best teachers I knew were pushed out and ostracized by the system because of that: they did not make publications for the sake of publications, in their (sometimes fantastic) essays they did not follow the conventional academic form, they did not know up to date method books and terminology teaching from personal experience....
    The only way for them to keep on was to gain authority which seems to be just a matter of luck...

  9. #133

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    Yes. It's worth being skeptical of what gets published... but that's what they are meant to teach. Be skeptical of everything. Read critically.

    In practice it's not quite like that in reality, there are bandwagons people like to jump on.

    Also, after sitting through many a tedious lecture on what's wrong with education and how to fix it, I find myself thinking, it would be nice if more education experts actually embodied their beliefs.

  10. #134

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    Actually I loved languages and linguistics, I was at the best university in the country, I was promoted by professor to the second year without exams after 2 months in my first year, I never learned anything, it was very easy for me... and in my 3rd year I quit for the army... and never came back. I just stood up in the middle of the class, went out and never returned. I did not even collect the documents.
    I just could not stand it.

    And until now I am not sure if it was a strong (and stubborn) character or a terrible compromise?

  11. #135

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    So, at risk of triggering Jonah again, this is a quote that I think sums up why dogmatic approaches to learning jazz have been so terribly successful:

    "If educators as a group have an inferiority complex about their professional status, then music educators, who work in a field of “soft” knowledge in an era of shrinking budgets and disappearing programs, seem to have even more to prove. Unfortunately, professional aspirations that manifest themselves in this manner push the music education profession toward a mistaken view of knowledge as unified and discoverable in its entirety."
    Music Education’s “Legitimation Crisis” and its Relation to One-Dimensional Thinking, J Paul Louth (2018)
    http://act.maydaygroup.org/articles/Louth17_1.pdf

    In this quote I think I can really see the difference between someone like Reg, who uses chord scales as improvisational Praxis, and what chord scale theory has become - a unified and discoverable body of knowledge that can be applied to the analysis of music.

    This unified analysis approach is, of course, not in fact always helpful (again see the Lester Young analysis above) because improvisers historically have used a diverse set of approaches, but it doesn't matter, because it helps legitimise jazz as a serious field of study, rather than an open ended creative pursuit. As Rick Beato put it 'they had to come up with a syllabus.'


  12. #136

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    Quote Originally Posted by christianm77
    So, at risk of triggering Jonah again, this is a quote that I think sums up why dogmatic approaches to learning jazz have been so terribly successful:

    "If educators as a group have an inferiority complex about their professional status, then music educators, who work in a field of “soft” knowledge in an era of shrinking budgets and disappearing programs, seem to have even more to prove. Unfortunately, professional aspirations that manifest themselves in this manner push the music education profession toward a mistaken view of knowledge as unified and discoverable in its entirety."
    Music Education’s “Legitimation Crisis” and its Relation to One-Dimensional Thinking, J Paul Louth (2018)
    http://act.maydaygroup.org/articles/Louth17_1.pdf

    In this quote I think I can really see the difference between someone like Reg, who uses chord scales as improvisational Praxis, and what chord scale theory has become - a unified and discoverable body of knowledge that can be applied to the analysis of music.

    This unified analysis approach is, of course, not in fact always helpful (again see the Lester Young analysis above) because improvisers historically have used a diverse set of approaches, but it doesn't matter, because it helps legitimise jazz as a serious field of study, rather than an open ended creative pursuit. As Rick Beato put it 'they had to come up with a syllabus.'

    In the US the accreditation agencies push relentlessly for schools to turn every single educational claim or aspiration into a quantifiable objective. I consider clergy training not unlike musical training. There is indeed a body of knowledge, historical, literary, etc. and a body of "technique"--public speaking, leading public worship, etc. But none of this alone makes for a genuine clergy person who will engage a religious community and lead them toward a richer faith and deeper life. The unifying element of "formation" is the real goal of an institution like mine, and that is impossible to quantify and assess. But the pressure from accreditation bodies is so enormous that we invest most of our energy into the quantifiable things.

    I've often said our mission statement might be "This school exists to be assessed and to conduct self-assessment. In order to do this, we must offer a few classes..."

    Maybe music programs have been under the same pressure. It's not just social pressure, it's economic and institutional.

  13. #137

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    Quote Originally Posted by ragman1
    You know the old joke?

    BA - MA - PhD - MAD
    BS = Bullshit
    MS = More Shit
    PhD= Piled high and Deep


    John

  14. #138

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    This unified analysis approach is, of course, not in fact always helpful (again see the Lester Young analysis above) because improvisers historically have used a diverse set of approaches, but it doesn't matter, because it helps legitimise jazz as a serious field of study, rather than an open ended creative pursuit. As Rick Beato put it 'they had to come up with a syllabu
    Who needs legitimize jazz as a serious field of study? A bunch of avademics who earn their PhD's, compete in the faculties, hunt for grants...

    Same thing happens on HIP... you find the topic, overemphasize it, overload it with scientific details and frame properly .. and you own it and establish a trend ( like it was with tacitus or partimenti). Mediocre players eat it because it is easier for their meritocracy than open ended creative pursuit.
    Early music musicologists seek for I known average composer of baroque and try to convince everyone he is forgotten genius...
    Even gifted people seem to get stuck in scientific approach

  15. #139

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jonah
    Who needs legitimize jazz as a serious field of study? A bunch of avademics who earn their PhD's, compete in the faculties, hunt for grants...
    This is what happens when there aren't enough gigs, maybe? But - there are many fantastic educators in formal education. The interesting thing is that their teaching is poorly represented to the wider world.

    No it's easy to blame the people. There's something about academies, books and so on that shapes the way people frame their thoughts. I remember exactly when it was in a Barry Harris class that the full weight of jazz as an oral tradition, a community, a shared memory hit me.

    Same thing happens on HIP... you find the topic, overemphasize it, overload it with scientific details and frame properly .. and you own it and establish a trend ( like it was with tacitus or partimenti). Mediocre players eat it because it is easier for their meritocracy than open ended creative pursuit.
    Early music musicologists seek for I known average composer of baroque and try to convince everyone he is forgotten genius...
    Even gifted people seem to get stuck in scientific approach
    You can be the king of your own little corner of performance practice because you have knowledge and pull down others because of it. I see a lot of this actually. I find it mean spirited and egotistical, and all too tempting...

    Anyway, we are stuck with these formal education institutions, jazz in particular is intimately bound up with them now. The path forward is find ways to make them better.

  16. #140

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    Quote Originally Posted by christianm77
    This is what happens when there aren't enough gigs, maybe? But - there are many fantastic educators in formal education. The interesting thing is that their teaching is poorly represented to the wider world.

    No it's easy to blame the people. There's something about academies, books and so on that shapes the way people frame their thoughts. I remember exactly when it was in a Barry Harris class that the full weight of jazz as an oral tradition, a community, a shared memory hit me.



    You can be the king of your own little corner of performance practice because you have knowledge and pull down others because of it. I see a lot of this actually. I find it mean spirited and egotistical, and all too tempting...

    Anyway, we are stuck with these formal education institutions, jazz in particular is intimately bound up with them now. The path forward is find ways to make them better.
    I do not dig the problem, Christian...

    Probably I would prefer to stay alone and away from it all, rather than trying to find paths in the system...

    Academies of Greeks or Renaissance and Baroque made sense...
    but today it is just dead formalist routine hostile to creativity and spirit of living art...

    I guess I am not interested.

  17. #141

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    Quote Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
    My experience is that my lines come out differently when I actually sing out loud. Rhythm and melody. I can get close to the same thing by focusing on the idea of singing, but without actual vocalization. If I don't do either, my playing is more likely to fall into well worn patterns.
    This is something Herb Ellis stressed. That the way you sing (or grunt or hum or whatever) is YOUR VOICE. Even you do that while playing scales it will feel different to you than playing those scales without doing it. It somehow enlivens what you play, even if it is a familiar phrase. (Think of the different ways the phrase "I love you" can be sounded, and make you feel.)

    Frank Zappa once said of Elmore James that he played the same slide lick in every song but Frank felt like he meant it. Which was a way of saying it worked rather than sounding rote even though it WAS rote. ;o)

  18. #142

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    Quote Originally Posted by christianm77
    Anyway, we are stuck with these formal education institutions, jazz in particular is intimately bound up with them now. The path forward is find ways to make them better.
    Shades of Heidegger and ‘In der walt sein’ (for you academics). No need to be stuck. Some aren't stuck or tied up by theory. I always rejoice in the fact that some people are fortunate in that they are almost intuitively very good at what they do and love doing it. Sometimes they can make a living from it. I know a lawyer who has a fearsome reputation as a cross-examiner – a concept he tends to take literally – but he was happy to tell me that he is almost always just winging it, with no preconceived plan or strategy and had no interest in learning more about what underpins his technique. A first-class sax player who I have been very lucky to have played with has no academic or theoretical knowledge of improvisation and doesn’t want to know either. He is also pretty much useless at everything else. A head-teacher once said of him, ‘Marvellous player but once he puts that sax in the case, he is of no further use to mankind’. He was fortunate to have stumbled upon music.


    I see no harm in delving into the theory of anything. You never know, we might stumble upon something we can actually do relatively intuitively at a high level.