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I disagree here. I think jazz is defined by its rhythm - the melodic/harmonic aspect of jazz is not so characteristic since it encompasses everything from the atonal to the modal to the basically tonal. Strip it of its swing, however, and it ceases to be jazz.
Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
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06-14-2023 05:42 AM
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You're incorrect. Jazz is defined by all 3 components of rhythm, melody, and harmony. If you don't have 1 of those characteristic components, you don't have traditional jazz. Which is where all the offshutes of jazz that you mentioned came from. If it were true that jazz is only defined by rhythm, then you could have a jazz career whacking the triangle. But that's impossible, you need melody and harmony. Or another example, what if there were a jazz album with zero melody, only rhythm and chords? Not even chord melody. Wouldn't really be jazz would it?
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Ahh so you've changed it from jazz to 'traditional jazz'. I was just talking about jazz - which encompasses Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane as well as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
Of course jazz drummers make a career dealing mostly not with pitches.
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Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane utilize melody and harmony. There being offshutes of jazz that utilize them differently doesn't prove that jazz is only rhythm.
You can take away traditional jazz rhythms just as easily and still have jazz, it doesn't prove that jazz is only melody and harmony. Listen to this example of Stanley Jordan playing stairway. This is jazz. He's using zero traditional rhythms but it's a constant flow of rhythm, melody, and harmony over a tune. Jazz isn't defined by its rhythm only.
Last edited by Jimmy Smith; 06-14-2023 at 07:41 AM.
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Jimmy, you've turned this into a strawman. I never said jazz was only rhythm, just that the other aspects were not so foundational or characteristic.
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Understood. That's still false that melody and harmony aren't foundational. The most fundamental form of jazz is a interweaved flow of rhythm, melody, and harmony. While there are offshutes of jazz like modal or free that downplay changes. But they still make the limited harmonies sound jazzy.
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Jimmy, try closely reading my posts. I said aren't SO foundational, not that melody and harmony are not foundational. But I don't think we're going to agree here; we're going to have to try to define these terms 'foundational' or 'characteristic' - my point is that, while concepts of swing may change over time and subgenres, without it the music ceases to be jazz, but the same cannot be said about the pitch or tonal aspects. Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
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Ok. Then you try reading my posts at all. I posted an example where characteristic rhythms and swing weren't used at all, yet it was still jazz. It's all important - rhythm, melody, harmony. Unless one is devoted to modal their entire life.
Last edited by Jimmy Smith; 06-14-2023 at 08:06 AM.
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So this whole discussion is kind of absurd, but with that caveat… Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
Something can be defined by one of its attributes without all the other attributes being completely irrelevant. If there are M&Ms and Skittles on the table, I’ll define the M&Ms by the M on the front but that doesn’t mean that’s the only thing that makes an M&M an M&M. You won’t put an M on the front of a bagel and fool me, and I’d be pretty disappointed if I ate one and it was licorice inside. But I’ll still point to the M on the front to define it and differentiate it from the Skittles.
Whew. That was a dumb analogy.
A few of the earlier posts have said something like this video is only interesting to people who spend way too much time watching jazz videos on the internet. I might say something similar about arguments like this and message boards.
Then again, here I am.
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Then you proceed to write a paragraph of nonsense? Lol Originally Posted by pamosmusic
Responding to the relevant and rational part:If there are M&Ms and Skittles on the table, I’ll define the M&Ms by the M on the front but that doesn’t mean that’s the only thing that makes an M&M an M&M. You won’t put an M on the front of a bagel and fool me, and I’d be pretty disappointed if I ate one and it was licorice inside. But I’ll still point to the M on the front to define it and differentiate it from the Skittles.
Whew. That was a dumb analogy.
A few of the earlier posts have said something like this video is only interesting to people who spend way too much time watching jazz videos on the internet. I might say something similar about arguments like this and message boards.
Then again, here I am.
Yeah, that isn't true though. It isn't true to say jazz is defined by rhythm with melody and harmony just not being completely irrelevant. Jazz is defined by a continuous flow of interwoven rhythm, melody, and harmony. All aspects are fundamental to jazz. Subgenres of jazz that downplay one of those aspects are tangents. No reputable jazz musician besides drummers would base their career on being really good at rhythm and substandard at either melody or harmony or both. They're fluent at everything.But with that caveat... Something can be defined by one of its attributes without all the other attributes being completely irrelevant.
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So maybe an interesting thought experiment …
So many jazz standards come from the American songbook—film and movies etc. So would Stella be jazz when it shows up in The Uninvited? Is it jazz when Miles plays it again?
Mike Moreno has been been doing his standards from film thing for a while and he’s suuuuuper intense about using the correct original changes and being faithful to original scores and stuff. So what makes one jazz and not the other? Or are they both jazz?
But most of this conversation seems to be between two people who disagree mostly on the definition of “defined” … which is an amusing irony
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I consider the original standards as part of jazz, but I see what you're saying, and wouldn't argue anyone on that point. They really became jazz once they got 'jazzed up' by enhancing the rhythm, but also the melody..
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And to this point … that’s totally fine, but people learn differently and imposing artificial or exaggerated limitations on things is a great way to learn. Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
I took a jazz pedagogy class in college and we all had to rotate instruments and my girlfriend (wife now) sat down at the piano. She doesn’t play jazz but she happens to be pretty good at piano so when we started playing together she played lots of stuff. The teacher stopped the band and walked over to her and closed the lid over the keys.
”Now play.”
So he made her just play rhythms on the wooden lid for a minute then opened it again. Sounded a lot more like jazz the second time.
No one would suggest that that is actually the way jazz piano is played but it was a great teaching tool. And for what it’s worth, I say wild shit like that to adult students all the time because they’ll know I’m being figurative. It’s the ten-year-olds who tend to take things more literally actually.
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I agree, but how hard is it to say focus on rhythm instead of notes don't matter? What's so defensible about false and inaccurate guidelines?
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That it worked. Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
I’ve been practicing the stuff in this video for two weeks now. Didn’t work for you, which is fine.
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Actually I’ve been doing this with my bebop tunes.
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I am actually focusing on rhythm and feel because I think that's my biggest weakness and I could improve the most from upping that. But I'm not disregarding my melody and harmony and playing random notes, that's bs.
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I posted a video of myself doing something like this on the modular licks or whatever thread. It’s over the changes to Come Rain or Come Shine. Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
Which is to say … I’m not disregarding my melody either. But I got a great practice idea from this video and I’m an adult so I’ll use it however I feel like it’s relevant for me I guess.
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Trouble is, there are plenty of other music e.g. classical music that feature interwoven rhythm, melody and harmony, which is a problematically vague description. So what in your opinion distinguishes jazz from all the other kinds of music that feature interwoven rhythm melody and harmony? I say it's swing and improvisation. Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
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I agree. That was a truncated description. I was just saying all 3 aspects are fundamental to jazz.
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Truncated. Almost like you were simplifying things for rhetorical effect. Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
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And I think to put another spin on things, as I’m thinking about it, note choice and harmony probably have more to do with differentiating style-periods within jazz than they do in differentiating jazz from other music.
In terms of note choice and harmony I don’t think Louis Armstrong was all that different than a ragtime pianist. He didn’t play extensions or pull from much other than straightforward diatonic harmony, and the pianist probably improvised too. So the difference would be … something else.
Note choice and harmony differentiate Bebop from The Allman Brothers but also Bebop from Kind of Blue. It doesn’t really distinguish In Memory of Elizabeth Reed from So What. But the ride and hi hat patterns in Kind of Blue are at the end of a straight line that goes back to 20s dance bands.
To the extent note choice really is foundational to jazz, I think it’s probably in the shape of the line more than in the actual notes being played. A jazz line has a different contour than a rock or blues line but it doesn’t need to have different notes.
So it’s interesting.
EDIT: I suppose a lot of what Im talking about here is harmony. Note choice in jazz is different more, I think, when we’re thinking about melody. Half-step chromaticism being the main thing. Then again, Chet Atkins plays jazz tunes with half step chromaticism and he improvises, but it’s country. Jazz too if you ask me, but anyone listening would call it country without batting an eye. Or a blue grass player throwing all those half-step passing notes in.
EDIT EDIT: And if we’re really splitting hairs here, what differentiates jazz from something like ragtime or country probably isn’t even rhythm. It’s probably time-feel. It’s not that Louis Armstrong even played different rhythms than a ragtime pianist, it’s that his quarter note sat in the pocket differently and his eighth notes dragged against the time in a way the ragtime dudes wouldn’t do. But to be fair, the video here is talking about a rhythmic vocabulary, which is different than a time-feel, though it’s hard to separate the latter from the former.Last edited by pamosmusic; 06-14-2023 at 11:44 AM.
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I like what Branford Marsalis has to say on the subject
All music contains melody, rhythm, and harmony. So to say that melody, rhythm, and harmony are fundamental/foundational/essential/whatever to jazz is to say nothing. What makes more sense is to cite what distinguishes jazz from other genres, and I think Marsalis comes about as close to doing that successfully as anyone can. Where definitions run into trouble is that jazz is also inherently multicultural, and jazz musicians tend to be eclectic and adventurous, so within the ambit of jazz there's lots of rhythm other than swingtime, lots of melody without flat 3's and 7's, and lots of cross-pollination leading to things that don't necessarily sound like jazz.
So I'd broaden Marsalis's definition a little and say that Jazz is his definition + whatever other music is also played by musicians who do that. Listening to Stanley Jordan's version of Stairway to heaven purely on its own without any context as to who he is and what else he has done, no it doesn't sound like jazz to me. It sounds like an instrumental version of StH. But knowing that SJ also plays tons of music that's well within the Marsalis definition, I can see calling it jazz.
Taking it back to the original question ... I think it's fair to say that a lot of people over-emphasize study of "what pitches to play" at the expense of "how to play them" (i.e., phrasing, relationship to the beat, and articulation). This is especially true online, I think mainly because it's much easier to talk about and formalize pitches. It's a bit hyperbolic and click-baity to say pitches don't matter at all, but most of the time the difference between interesting and uninteresting playing and between people who sound like they really know what they're doing and people who don't is in phrasing, time, and articulation, not in pitch collections. You really can play random pitches from outside the the tonality of a tune and have it sound good if you apply the right phrasing and articulation, and I often hear people do this. But it doesn't really work the other way around.
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I am probably not the guy best suited to chime in here (not a reader, not a linear soloist), but I do have ears and six decades plus of pointing them at jazz--and a few decades of watching teachers try to get a range of players to get a "jazz" sound. So, a handful of observations.
Since "Autumn Leaves" has been mentioned, I wonder what makes one performance of it sound like jazz and another not. Since it's a song, I tend to start with a vocal performance, and the first thing I notice (as I do with verse) is how a "prose" performance of the text would sound, and what happens to that performance when it is married to a melody whose metrical shape does not exactly match ordinary-speech metrics. (This operation also works when deciding how to perform, say, Shakespearean verse--very little natural speech falls into the blank-verse pattern of iambic pentameter. It's the tensions between the theoretical de-DAH de-DAH pattern and the pitch-stress-juncture shape of natural English that sets up tensions and offers interpretive options.)
I can image (though I can't recall hearing) an "Autumn Leaves" that follows a strict, square-rhythm rendition of the melody's score, and I can also imagine a performance of the text that follows such a rendition. Ick. But instrumental, dance-friendly performances swing quite a bit--what this unschooled listener (and occasional dancer) hears is a regular pulse that nevertheless includes syncopations and hesitations--what I might call rhythmic elasticity.
Add the words (Mercer's, since I wouldn't want to take on the machineries of the French version), and you get even more interesting rhythmic tensions, as the natural-language patterns interact with the danceable melody. And when a singer starts to mess with the options on offer for rhythmic variation, some of those options easily wind up sounding a lot like jazz. And that's before we get to what singer and players can do with the harmonies, melody, tempo, and pulse, while still making sure that "Autumn Leaves" remains recognizable.
About the teachers: One of the how-to-solo exercises I've seen teachers offer already-trained instrumentalists is to play one note, but to vary where it's played. It's interesting how quickly some will discover a jazzy feel without having to worry about what a linear "jazz" solo sounds like.
And a final thought, floating up into the Magic 8-Ball window: I learned "I Can't Believe that You're in Love with Me" from a Duke Robillard recording (on "After Hours Swing Session"), and when I tracked the tune back to its beginnings, I was surprised at how square the 1920s fast-foxtrot recordings were.
A decade later, Billie & Co. did this to it:
Unpicking Billie's transformations would be instructive.
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Isn't he playing double time swing (swung sixteenth)? Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
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