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For me the further from Bop the less I like it, with exceptions of course.
Bach is also my favorite composer in classical music and I always felt there was some kind of connection between what I like about Bop and Bach.
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12-08-2020 09:11 PM
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Originally Posted by christianm77
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"...the bottleneck of Bird."
I like this.
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I was also led to believe that bebop is the core language of any style of jazz. I can agree with that, and everybody who plays jazz should have a decent course in it, but it's not everyone's end game.
I mean, I hear criticism sometimes such and such guitarists are not that good at bebop, and therefore their jazz credentials are compromised. Like oh, he's good at this and that style, but can he play bop well. For me personally, it's not a criteria. So bebop is not dated for learning, but dated is a creative output maybe, because a lot interesting stuff going on outside of bebop idioms.
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Originally Posted by christianm77
I realize the towering influence of Bird but I also realize being influenced by someone doesn't mean one is playing in the same style. After all, we don't call Bird a Swing player despite his mastery of Lester Young solos. We don't call Chuck Berry a jump blues guitarist even though he was deeply influenced by Carl Hogan's playing on Louis Jordan records (and T-Bone Walker's playing on his own records). Doing things Bird did does not mean one is playing bebop any more than playing a Charlie Christian lick (or even a memorized solo, as Wes did when starting out) means one is a Swing player. Lots of rock'n'roll (and blues and jump blues) guitarists have played Charlie Christian lines and NOBODY says, "aha, they're playing Swing---same language!"
Anyway, I agree with McBride too: Bebop is a part of modern jazz language but is not the whole of it.
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Originally Posted by Hep To The Jive
I also think if I’d had to study bop at college like most jazz players, I would have ended up hating it. I’m not entirely sure why I got into it; although it is a very satisfying thing to do. I like the music, obviously, but not to exclusion of anything else.
But theres the rub - so much of the subsequent stuff is based on bop, just on a basic level. It’s a self fulfilling cycle.
But anyway the main thing for bop for me is the approach to rhythm, and the way phrases are constructed. If you understand the flow of bop phrases you can do it with all sorts of resources.Last edited by christianm77; 12-09-2020 at 06:13 AM.
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Originally Posted by christianm77
Since recording is available, the not composed music can compete with the classic composed line, so we get jazz, then blues, then rock, then progressive rock (blues was way earlier as folk music)
Since at least 30 years the progress of rock seems to be degraded, nothing really new.
You wrote "do something else"
Why would we suppose the progress of jazz is endless, and there is anything to "do something else", keeping the mandatory prerequisite human enjoyable and understandable? (I mean within a genre what still can be called jazz)
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Originally Posted by Hep To The Jive
Also in the genre rock, and progressive rock, Jimmy Page and David Gilmore and Keith Emerson were improvising, as essential part of their music.
So it seems, that although improvising is a mandatory attribute of jazz, this is not the attribute what really distinguishes it from other genres, with other words, this is not the essence of the jazz.
Maybe the essence is in the feeling (as cloudy it is) If we want to get more precise definition the we can say...the language?
What I would like to say that if something evolves from jazz (or the artist evolves from jazz) and this music is improvised, but has completely other feeling and has completely other language, then why would we call that jazz?
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Bop is a language. I haven’t listen to the McBride talk, or read it. Whatever. But I imagine he’s not talking about the genre but the language. KOB wouldn’t exist without bop. All the players played through the language of bebop. Coltrane, Adderly, Miles, Evans, Kelly, Cobb. Every single one of them. It’s like saying DeGaulle isn’t French because he’s speaking in England. Maybe not the best example. But it’s a language not so much a style of music. You can speak in different accents, in different countries, on different subjects. You can slip it in when you’re using other languages.
But for me and what I hear bop changed the language immeasurably. Even the reworking of chord progressions by using ii-Vs. That’s bebop.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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Originally Posted by Gabor
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Originally Posted by Hep To The Jive
I was searching for the answer what makes jazz to jazz, surely not got a perfect answer, but tried to prove that is closely related to "the language" and also tried to say, if a music has completely other feeling and has completely other language, then why would we call that jazz? (I mean the bebop language roots must be there) Otherwise it could good or bad, but it makes no sense to call it jazz.
Suppose an imaginary listener is sitting side of Bach when he improvising on a church organ, and creates a fuge on a syncopated theme. Should we call this jazz? No because Bach talks a completely different language.
Similarly if an artist evolves so far her/his language that bebop can be found there only in traces or less why would we call it jazz?
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Originally Posted by Gabor
Yes the rhythmic language completely defines bop. But it’s not defined by the presence of syncopations, but their nature. Let me try and practically demonstrate why I think this.
I can play a line that uses only note choices familiar from Bach melodies and if I give it the right rhythm it will be bop. But it has to be right rhythm. (And that bop rhythm furthermore will be distinct from prewar swing.)
For instance compare the middle 8 of Night in Tunisia to the way Bach would write a line of running 8th notes in similar harmonic situation; bars 7-8 of the fugue in BWV1001 for example. (Give or take an Ab)
So, Bach does not count as jazz because the rhythmic syntax even aside from the feel is completely different.
Re: ‘syncopation’ in jazz Brad Mehldau puts it well:
Carnegie 06 — Brad Mehldau
this whole page is worth reading as are the others for their analysis but rather long. With regards to syncopations in Brahms music (Brahms for those who don’t know was a fan of syncopation and rhythmic displacement) he says:
Syncopation in classical music operates by confounding our expectations when it withholds the emphasis on the downbeat. Swinging jazz music that emphasizes upbeats, though, is surely not one long act of withholding – the rhythmic pleasure of swing has a deeply satiating effect on the body. The reasons why swing feels good, quite simply, are different than the reasons that that passage of Brahms feels good. To speak about syncopation, as commentators long have done when describing jazz, is even misleading in as far as syncopationis a trope for rhythmic otherness. The accented upbeats so prevalent in jazz are not the Other – they are home base; they are part of jazz’s DNA. In a swinging 4/4 meter, we clap on beats two and four of the bar...
This is really the essence of what bebop is to me. Lester hadn’t quite progressed to this step btw his music still favours downbeats over upbeats to some extent; Parker really perfected this and noone has really advanced beyond him rhythmically. They just play in 7 to hide it haha.
Anyway, there is no jazz feeling or rhythmic syntax in Stravinky’s music at all as much as I love him. Karnatic music is vastly more rhythmically complex than Stravinsky - and has improvisation - and obviously isn’t jazz either.
So if I can to some extent embellish Hep’s argument - Rhythmic complexity and syncopation is not what it is. There is actually an inherent linguistic aspect to authentic jazz (bop) rhythms. It’s not the syncopation it’s the nature and integrality of the syncopation.
(It is a syntax (even if the feel is often different) that is common to other African Diaspora musics such as Cuban and Brazilian traditions. Andrew Scott Potter (bonsritmos) has demonstrated that here with Candomble rhythms.)Last edited by christianm77; 12-09-2020 at 11:26 AM.
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It’s not quite on topic but listen to Peter Bernstein’s intro:
Doesn’t the bar with all downbeats sound, well, syncopated and funky? The reason is because we have had the expectation of the ‘Take Five’ clave set up.
a lot of music seems that way to me. You know those funk grooves where the hippest, funkiest thing is to play on all the downbeats?
It seems to me the feeling of what is an upbeat and downbeat in jazz and funk etc (not to mention Latin American music) is really not based on its position with the regard to a 4/4 beat, but rather with respect to some latent clave or accent pattern. A lot of Bird fits the Son Clave for instance.
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If I push the comparison between Classical and Jazz, I think Gabor made a great point. Music doesn't always continue to evolve. Sometimes a genre evolves as far as it can.
Classical went this with an evolution from the music before Bach to the classical period to the romantic period to atonal music.
I would describe a similar evolution in Jazz from pre-bob, to bebop, to hard bop, to Miles and Coltrane, to today.
Now in both Jazz and Classical, I'm not sure how much evolution is happening. I think people just grab a bit of this and that depending on which eras resonate with them.
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Originally Posted by charlieparker
Bach wouldn’t have known what Baroque music was. He would have described himself as a church musician. OTOH Charlie Parker did not regard bop as jazz, interestingly.
But; really Jazz’s evolution over the past 50 or so years has been geared towards syntactic complexity both in rhythm and harmony. It’s like people are learning to play bebop on a wider and wider range of situations, while Bird just did it (more or less) on Blues and swing standards in 4/4....
But the rhythmic freedom and power of what he did over that limited repertoire has never been equalled and represents the continued baseline for how all that other music is played on a proccessual level... Why does everyone play in 8th notes, for instance?
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Originally Posted by christianm77
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Originally Posted by charlieparker
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Originally Posted by christianm77
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Jive Coffee = Tea for Two.
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Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
I think you missed my point a little bit.
In a 4/4 bar we have a hierarchy of strong beats (1 and 3) and weak beats (2 and 4); (at least in classical music)
In 5/4 that simple heirarcy is broken. What's an off beat in 5/4. What's an up beat in 5/8?
This came up today in Konnakol practice. You put a 5 beat cycle in quarter notes against a 5/8 meter. So, We get
1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5
Now which of the bold notes are on down beats and which are on up beats? In fact it depends how you divide the bar, and how you feel these cross rhythm notes as upbeats or downbeats is a really subtle internal thing. It messes with your head. 1 is obviously a downbeat, but what about 4?
So, with our Western 3+2 division, we have:
D U U U D
1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5
But if use the traditional Karnatic subdivision 2+3 (Kanda Chapu Tala) we get this:
D D U U U
1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5
It's the same rhythm but feels very different against the differently group pulse. According to my teacher if you can flip from one to the other, you can basically play in any meter... but making that adaptation from 2+3 to 3+2 seamlessly is much harder than you might think.
Anyway what has this got to do with bebop? Well, in the same way I think rhythms that are in common time (4/4) in jazz as well as in cuban and Brazilian music are subject to the same thing. So accents that fall on the grouping (say 3+3+2 for example, for a simple 1 bar clave or Tresillo) feel like downbeats and ones that don't feel like upbeats. Although most claves in jazz are two bars. This is my understanding of what Brad said above. It's not that all upbeats and downbeats in jazz have equal significance, it's more that the basic resting accent patterns - the equivalent of downbeats - in jazz are combinations of upbeats and downbeats.
(Which might also be one reason why straight 4 rhythm guitar and unembellished walking bass swings - in this sense it's actually syncopated, provided the horns and drummer understand the accent patterns.)
This is more familiar perhaps from Cuban music as the clave is well known; but it is also true of Brazilian samba, as those rhythms also have a directionality or chirality to them. A lot of those Candomble rhythms are two bars and compatible with various claves - Opanije fits with the 2 3 clave for example, and also with a lot of early jazz and swing, and in this case it's part of the structure to feel the '2+' and '4' as strong downbeat-style accents in the second bar. You can also line up some of Bird's heads with this matrix, albeit with more complex embellishments than we tend to find in Lester Young, say... Anthropology for instance. This is one why Parker was able to play with Cuban musicians so effortlessly, and maybe why the Cuban/bop crossover was so successful musically, and later of course the Bossa Nova rhythm guitar was found to be compatible with American jazz.
There are other rhythms such cascaras and so on that can be helpful. Billy Hart talks about some jazz drummers having a cascara feel in the ride cymbal and so on.
Over the top superimposed you have various 6/8 and 12/8 nuances as well as one bar figures as well, that add depth to the phrasing.
And of course you can just feel all this stuff (most jazzers don't analyse it), but if you have trouble getting cool bebop phrases, try finding and singing the clave for a bit, and then start improvising again. It might open up a lot of ideas you hadn't thought of.
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Dutchbopper said:
"McBride was not talking about tunes. He was talking about the improvisational language. Most of the solos on the tunes you mention are played largely in a bop style. That’s what he is talking about. The solos on Kind of Blue are all deeply rooted in bebop. Everything is."
This is the central idea of the video. Everyone else was projecting their own interpretation of it, all of which is a different topic.
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The language IS the rhythm.
Why do I feel I can say that? Well it's not the pitch choices; the pitch choices are the same triads, scales and neighbour tone patterns that had been around for hundreds of years, and certainly not much different from what swing players had been using by and large. So what then?
What made it bop language was the rhythmic energy, accentuation, style of swing and phrasing.
That's why you can do it with modes, pentatonics, whatever you want.
Conversely, Dizzy could take dance steps and turn them into lines.
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Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
can you help me with this ....
im feeling
12312
12312
12312
12123
am I on the right track ?
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Originally Posted by christianm77
I always had trouble with the
'Parker and Dizzy and Bop changed everything' trope
i don't WANT to disagree with it ,
because so many fabulous jazz players say something to that effect
I just couldn't hear it ....
the Bop harmonic language sounds just like the Straight-ahead
or Swing type language to me ....
(I thought/think it was me , i.e. I just couldn't hear it)
It's faster , a bit more tripletty , and maybe slightly more chromatic
but as we know when the tempo goes up
you can get away with more 'out' stuff ....
anyway carry on
fascinating disscussion folks
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Originally Posted by christianm77
Enharmonics
Today, 09:59 AM in Theory