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I would probably say that this statement would apply more to Wes and Charlie Christian.
Originally Posted by mrcee
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06-11-2015 10:49 PM
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Yeah. I think you're right.
Thanks
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Unless they play solo, unaccompanied, right?
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I'm interested in this idea that an artist could be obsolete.
There is a sort of inbuilt narrative here, isn't there, which is common in older classical music histories, seems to have been held over into jazz.
e.g.
Charlie Christian < Wes < Pat Metheny < Kurt Rosenwinkel
Or whatever. Of course each artist took something from the last and developed it, but crucially also missed something. Everyone's different and hear different things, so music advances by omissions as well as developments.
Kind of like in European music the way Monteverdi is rhythmically in some ways more interesting than Bach, but his harmony is a lot more static. In general I would say, European music gets less rhythmically interesting and more harmonically ambitious as time goes on. This was a natural cultural tendency that has now been enshrined in the histories as 'progress.' Proper 19th century imperialism and industry type thing.
I'm sure modern musicologists would shy away from it, but it surprising how old fashioned many musician's outlooks are, even jazzers!
This narrative mo' better harmony = mo' better music is inbuilt into the music academies even now. And yes even on jazz courses.
Anyhow, Joe Pass was never a vanguardist like, say Charlie Christian or Django, but did serve to sum up a particular tradition of jazz - I'm thinking the 30's chord/melody masters such as Dick McDonough, the single line brilliance of Django, the bebop vocabulary of Bird, and of course the electric tradition of Charlie Christian. In this sense he encapsulates the complete tradition of jazz up to that point - much like Oscar Peterson.
If you main interest is innovation you might then overlook him. In a sense he was 'obsolete' in his own time, but then the exact same could be said of JS Bach, who perpetuated and in a sense crowned the traditions of Medieval/Renaissance polyphony well into the early Classical/Rococco era. 250+ years later, we really don't give a sh*t :-)Last edited by christianm77; 06-12-2015 at 12:03 PM.
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Pat Metheny on Joe Pass:
it is always a pleasure for me to remember and talk about joe pass. he was a real favorite for me from the first minute that i heard his record "for django" that he made in the mid to early 60's. his playing on that record is some of the greatest, freshest, most original bebop guitar playing ever. it seemed like every line was carved in marble, each little arc and detail was so inevitable, even at breakneck tempos. every note he played on that record was so deliberate, so weighed and measured for its impact on the entire shape of the solo. he does a version on there of "limehouse blues" that is one of my favorite guitar solos that anyone has ever gotten onto tape - i can still sing it my head as i type this, and i haven't gotten that record out in a long time - it is that memorable to me.
and as if that weren't enough - joe did something that i think really eluded everyone until he figured out a way to do it, and that is to find a way to play solo, REALLY solo, that was as effective, entertaining and OPEN-ENDED the way a great solo piano concert can be. i know for me, until i heard him do it, i couldn't really imagine how one could just sit on stage all alone for an entire concert with a focus on the complete jazz guitar tradition and make it happen to the degree that joe did. my favorite of this aspect of joe is his record "live in akron".
i think when you talk about joe, you have to mention his unique sound and touch too, he really had a kind of attack that i don't think any of the many people who have been influenced by him have ever figured out how to emulate - he played so firm, yet it was still so light in a really good way, so swinging: he really avoided that heavier, stiff thing that can happen with the very precise articulation that he favored. and of course, he had AMAZING time - his stuff just grooved like crazy - you can really hear it when he played solo; there was just so much forward motion and momentum at work there.
to top it off, he was an incredibly nice man. we met a number of times over the years and he was always very supportive - and very funny. i really miss him. but i am happy that he left behind a pretty well documented view of music. i'm gonna try to get a copy of "for django" right now!
Pat Metheny : Question & Answer
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Hard to argue with that. That said, there's something quite tradition oriented about most of the players I have heard take this route - Martin Taylor, Ted Greene, Earl Klugh etc. Perhaps because you have to know what 'jazz' sounds like in order to do it - when you play a walking bass you imagine Ray Brown, when you play the melody line you imagine and try to imitate Charlie Parker etc. My feeling is that you cannot simply 'play the guitar' because what you are doing is very very hard and is based on the idea of putting a jazz band on the guitar. Originally Posted by fumblefingers
I suppose Joe was one of the first to truly attempt this, especially in improvisation. The difference is clear when you compare his approach to the early, block-chord guys (always good to have an excuse to post some Dick McDonough):
Exceptions to this very welcome. Can't think of any off the top of my head. Perhaps Ralph Towner?Last edited by christianm77; 06-12-2015 at 12:17 PM.
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He completely raised the bar for guitar players and changed the way solo guitar is played and evaluated, forever.
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Joe had a way of finding the obvious. C jazz minor? Eh, just a C scale with a flat 3. Any extended C6/9/#11 was "just a C chord". He knew theory very well, but in his own language. He was also a jazzman in the classic sense: night owl, comfortable in cities, and not unfamiliar with the dark side. One of the great members of a time past, a product of his time, in fact. I presented him several times in the 80s, and took a couple of late-night after-gig lessons, with serious attention paid to the ratio of vodka to grapefruit juice as well as to the use of passing diminished voicings.
Obsolete? Never. Just a stone bebop master, doing that thing.
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Has anyone ever written a biography of Joe Pass? It saddens me to think that with Joe's death we lost the treasure trove of memories and accounts of his experiences in the jazz world working alongside the greats.
I never got the opportunity to see Joe play live, perhaps especially because I was living in Europe for most of the late Seventies and Eighties. One of my regrets.
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I don't believe there is a biography. Originally Posted by targuit
This DVD is very good - probably the nearest thing to seeing him live.
http://www.amazon.com/Genius-Joe-Pas...us+of+joe+pass
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