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There are some people who speak only the language they were born with. Some of them will say all foreigners sound the same. It says more about the person who would make such a statement than any truth that comes from experience.
When I talk to "average man on the street", it's not uncommon for people to say all jazz sounds the alike. I actually listen to it and the deeper I know it, the more I hear. I hear a difference in the eras by the way their swing sense changes, I can listen to early Lester Young and hear a huge difference in his later years, I can hear early Scofield and how he acquired influences that changed his phrasing over 20 years. I also hear how Bill Frisell is the same music as Holdsworth, and why they're different.
Generalizations especially gross generalizations are easy to make. An informed ear is what gives us the tools to love the music the way it was intended and played, and that's as different as the people that play made it and the history they lived in.
Stupid people might say all educated people are the same. I hope that educated people wouldn't apply such prejudices about the uninformed.
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10-23-2024 08:37 PM
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That's standard procedure unfortunately, LOL. But if you stare at sheets you do not have to look the audience into the eye. That is my latest theory.
Originally Posted by AllanAllen
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Yeah and you don't have to commit it to memory either. Originally Posted by Bop Head
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Kreisberg wanna-bes (of which I am one), yes. Clones? Hardly. I can't say I have even once heard a cut on the radio or stream that made me say "Hey, that sounds like JK" without it actually being him. He has a unique voice and a ton of chops that not many are up to the challenge of copping. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
Just my $0.02, YMMV.
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The title is clickbate required by the algorithm that all popular youtube vids have. I think the guy is a music professor and a fusion drummer fwiw.
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But for many people old jazz often also sounds all the same...
what is 'the same' actually? Obviously, people can hear (if they want) that the notes played are not exactly the same))
It is more connected with 'semantics' (much underestimated when we speak about music).
It is approximately like you bring a person in the art gallery and they see for example the paintings of Rothko and for some it could all the same (yeh, they see the proportions and colours are different and for some it creates 'varieties of different meanings', for others it can be just 'one idea' being reproduced (so that the proportions and actual colours and their relations are not meaningful for them).
It can be even with old masters when a person sees a long row of Madonnas with a Child by totally different painters where one would see absolutely different approaches, expression, individuality, meaning... for the other it is just the same picture with slight variations (which are not meaningful).
So people listen to jazz and for they hear: yeh, notes are probably different but this difference does not change the semantics...
if I see the chair as only the thing to sit on, I would not care if it blue or red.
S they are offered a big variety of artistically made chairs (where you can even forget it is the chair originally), but they see only one and the same thing.... a chair and that is it.
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Ha! Originally Posted by starjasmine
Okay fair point.
Aspiring but as yet unsuccessful Kreisberg clones
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To the point of the video, part of the problem is trying to give everything the jazz label. Is Allan Holdsworth even jazz? It's a good question. It doesn't matter, he made good music that was highly influenced by jazz horn players.
Today there are people making really cool and far out improvised music (and not just the "nonidiomatic" idiom of Derek Bailey, et al). You just have to seek it out and decide for yourself if you like it. But they don't sound the same as Holdsworth, Scofield and I forget the third guy. Dude needs to expand his horizons.
Is it jazz? Who cares, many of the old jazz guys didn't even like the term.
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and that's because you actually listen deep enough into the music to know he has a distinctive voice, and that other players aren't clones. Originally Posted by starjasmine
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Tbh ‘sounding the same’ is relative.
It’s easy to see why someone who didn’t listen to a lot of classical music might confuse Mozart with Haydn for instance. They are similar stylistically, but these days I can tell which is which.
(18the century YouTube video - All these Galant composers sound the same! Clearly their music is rubbish and dumbed down. I blame the baleful influence of the Neapolitan school and the decline of the learned style. Endless modulations and not a jot of real counterpoint. Can you believe Durante isn’t even teaching fugues???? bah humbug.)
To me many distortion pedals sound the same, but there’s people who are super picky about them and lots of YouTube videos picking apart the difference.
So ears can be honed.
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They sound similar because that's what they want to sound like.
Hollow body guitars generally share a similar sound - the nuances of this sound are decided by the players themselves.
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Apart from the large number of modern jazz players who don’t actually play hollow-bodies or sound anything like a traditional jazz guitar player… Originally Posted by kris
You know I think the older jazz players sound more similar because they don’t have so much choice of gear.
But more fundamentally most players from the 50s were dealing with the same musical language. That’s less the case today.
Cootie Williams said everyone sounded the same as Bird after the war, and I kind of see what he meant.
But you can still tell the difference if you know that music
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When someone uses terms like "all" or "everyone" I consider such terms to be clickbait used for strawman arguments and that is an immediate turnoff. But I do realize that often the author isn't responsible for the "headline". Originally Posted by frabarmus
Funny, but whoever comes up with the "headline" does so to increase traffic to the post, but in my case (as well as others here), the opposite was achieved.
Thanks for that clarity on what the post was really about.
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Well, ok, since you've mentioned headlines... same as when going through a newspaper, I guess one chooses whether to read or not an article based on how one is inspired or turned off by its headline. Originally Posted by jameslovestal
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I actually thought Rosenwinkel wanna-bes outnumbered, big time, the Kreisberg wanna-bes! Originally Posted by starjasmine
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P.S. "To wannabe or not to wannabe
That is the wannaquestion"
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Anyway... someone like, say: Thelonious Monk did have tremendous individuality and individuality was common and very much sought after, whereas nowdays, apparently, sounding like your favourite music hero is the coolest thing (is that a trend, or not, nowdays?). I know this may be overgeneralising and, of course we've all been through it (especially when we were young). Still there's the old question: If musicians end up playing like “Jazz - Encyclopedias” + superb technicians across the board (is that, or not, a trend nowdays?) and that becomes the norm, then is there going to be less room for individuality? (Or, if not less room, might individuality/immediate recognizability be harder to find?). “More limitations = more individuality”?
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It’s the filter of time. We only remember the originals
Are you seriously going to suggest that 50s New York wasn’t full of alto players who sounded like Bird? I mean that’s what Bird said to Konitz - “you don’t sound like me and I like that”
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Young modern guitarists often listened a lot and learned from their older colleagues. Perhaps they have the hollow sound in their subconscious, even though they don't play real "jazz guitars". Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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Who are these Rosenwinkle, Kreisberg guys everyone's talking about?
love,
Pat Metheny
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I do the same... I literally want my Stratocaster to sound jazzy... isn't this some kind of trap?
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and Scofield...love Originally Posted by wintermoon
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Good point. When it comes to jazz guitar and the 50s, Jim Hall and Howard Roberts are good examples. Their playing on their first albums sounded like the well-established players like Farlow and Raney etc. But later on, they developed their own unique approach. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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Sorry I haven't seen the video recently and haven't read every reply, but I think there are a lot of similarities in how modern jazz guitarists play. Sure, we "experts" can tell the difference between Metheny, Scofield and Kreisberg and Monder, but can the average listener? Originally Posted by lawson-stone
The way I would put it is that there's a common language to most modern players. Part of it is gear, part of it is recent history--Pat Metheny, John McLaughlin, etc., part of it is background and training like Berklee. Just like during the bebop era most players played within certain parameters, even though of course there were standouts and aficionados can separate out Charlie from Lester from Sonny from Dexter. Though, if I played them for 99% of the people I know, no one could tell who was who.
Actually, I think guitarists are more narrow in their playing than sax players from the 40's-60's.
Not that this is really a horrible thing, just an observation. It doesn't bother me that Malone (RIP) plays like Benson sometimes or Rosenwinkel sounds like Metheny on occasion. If the playing is good, it's good.Last edited by Doctor Jeff; 10-25-2024 at 10:44 AM.
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I'm not an expert on Howard Roberts, but the evolution of Jim Hall is quite interesting. And then to watch how he influenced Metheny and his generation. Originally Posted by jameslovestal
Some guitarists always seem to me "fully formed" coming on the scene, like Wes or Joe. Maybe I'm wrong and there's more evolution there than I realize.
Definitely some guitarists like Benson reach a certain plateau and then stay there. He definitely progressed quickly, probably thanks to playing on so many gigs and records for CTI in the 60's. I don't hear much evolution, other than going more commercial, after about 1980.
OTOH, Metheny and Scofield seem to be always expanding their vocabulary, though they sound like themselves on every record. Part of it is that they keep trying out different genres and compositional formats.
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Neo deal.
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