The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #76

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    Quote Originally Posted by Hep To The Jive
    Yea, what I mean improvising is not something a rock guitarist expected to do too much or be on the same level as a jazz or jazz/rock player.
    I agree. I think rock (and country and blues) players are more apt to want to play something that sounds good and fits the song than to play something novel. Which is why a lot of such players will play a solo from the record pretty much the same way live. It's not that they can't do anything else; it's because that is now as much a part of the song as the intro, the lyrics, the chorus, etc. It's more of a package deal. They may stretch out later and improvise but it's got to hang together and sound good. When normal people say of a performance, "That was...different" it is not a compliment. ;o)

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  3. #77

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    Swing era musicians used to do that as well btw

  4. #78

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    Quote Originally Posted by christianm77
    Swing era musicians used to do that as well btw
    Yes! And that's one reason I love that music so much. Solos for non-instrumentalists, you might say! We all love Charlie Christian and Prez but so do a lot of non-players who have a visceral response to their tone and phrasing and, uh, "dig it the most." (Same with Wes and Django.)

  5. #79

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    Quote Originally Posted by Doctor Jeff
    I remember Frank Zappa bragging at the time that he had hired Vai, a guy who could out-Van Halen EVH.

    I must say impressive as it is, that type of guitar wankery never appealed to me. Lots of other guitar wankery yes. But not the tapping/whammy bar Strat thing.
    I'm not a huge fan of the tapping but it can be nice in small doses. Van Halen didn't officially offer Billy Sheehan the job of bassist in Van Halen but I suspect Eddie wanted him. VH and Talas toured together in 1980. Sheehan said that Michael Anthony was the right bassist for Van Halen.

    Sheehan was taking tapping to extremes before Van Halen. What a tap fest it might have been;



    Who do I like the most from that late 70's- early 80's phase...
    I find myself listening to AC/DC. They're just so much fun. Angus has an amazing tone and his showmanship is great.

  6. #80

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    Jump blues rates a mention here as it took Swing into a combo context with some boogie woogie.
    Tiny Grimes on his tenor guitar did great things.

    (What I mean is, soloing is crucial to the style but you don't have to be a musician to dig it. ;o)


  7. #81

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    Quote Originally Posted by christianm77
    Swing era musicians used to do that as well btw
    Yeah, in the really early days it was improvised embellishments of the melody rather than improvised solos, and out of that developed the modern Jazz as we know today.

  8. #82

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    Joe Henderson was quite well known for playing more or less the same solo every night.

  9. #83

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    Don't make me post the Steve Swallow/Carla Bley video again (wasn't it on here that I found it?)

    There's nothing wrong with composition as a tool. I do think that a lot of those solos may have coalesced over the course of a tour as well - the musician noticing what went over with the audience and so on.

    If we claim to love jazz, we can hardly dismiss Louis, Miles, Oscar, Wes, and so on who all did this.

    Improvisation is a big deal; but so is music. And in jazz, I would posit that the tool of improvisation should be at the service of the music, not the other way around.
    Last edited by christianm77; 10-06-2020 at 05:56 PM.

  10. #84
    In pop and country some singers insist on same solo every show but some will allow trademarks with improv. Many great players have to do commercial gigs to pay the bills so they can play what want on their own time.

  11. #85

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    Quote Originally Posted by christianm77
    Don't make me post the Steve Swallow/Carla Bley video again (wasn't it on here that I found it?)

    There's nothing wrong with composition as a tool. I do think that a lot of those solos may have coalesced over the course of a tour as well - the musician noticing what went over with the audience and so on.

    If we came to love jazz, we can hardly dismiss Louis, Miles, Oscar, Wes, and so on who all did this.

    Improvisation is a big deal; but so is music. And in jazz, I would posit that the tool of improvisation should be at the service of the music, not the other way around.
    But just because it serves the music, rather than the music being a vehicle for improv, very spontaneous, and creative improv can still be done within the frame of the music as a whole.

    It is not automatically an either or, even though many times, it seems that way.

  12. #86

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    Quote Originally Posted by Lobomov
    Everyone loves Wes, but he was extremely rehearsed too

    Maybe the lesson to draw from this is that "extremely rehearsed is a GOOD thing." ;o)

    Speaking of Wes rehearsing:

    Last edited by MarkRhodes; 10-02-2020 at 10:21 AM.

  13. #87

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    Ensemble riffs! This went from Swing bands to jump bands to rock bands.


  14. #88

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    Edward L. Van Halen, January 26, 1955 - October 6, 2020


  15. #89

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    Music aside, I wonder if it was lung c. I know he smoked like a fiend. What a shame.

  16. #90

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  17. #91

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    Quote Originally Posted by Woody Sound
    Music aside, I wonder if it was lung c. I know he smoked like a fiend. What a shame.

    Throat cancer.

    There's an RIP thread in the Chit Chat section above

    RIP Eddie Van Halen

  18. #92

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    "Back in 2000, Eddie underwent treatment for tongue cancer. He subsequently had part of his tongue removed, and was declared cancer-free in 2002. Despite being a heavy smoker, the Van Halen icon blamed his cancer diagnosis on metal guitar picks that he kept in his mouth while performing"

    rip evh

    cheers

  19. #93

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    Such sad news. Killer band and player...

  20. #94

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    Dammit

    This year...

  21. #95

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    Very tragic.

  22. #96

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    Quote Originally Posted by Hep To The Jive
    Wow, I forgot how bad Sammy Hagar was. I was enjoying that until he started singing.

  23. #97

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    wow, RIP Ed

    I was on a long train ride yesterday, like 9 hours, and I was re reading Running With The Devil, VH former manager memoirs. Fantastic read btw, highly recommended, a lot of shocking (but not really) revelations about the band and show business. So I woke up today thinking I gotta check what is EVH up to these days... Well, it's a very sad answer.

  24. #98

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    Posted on FB by guitarist And Black:

    Virtuoso. Visionary. Revolutionary. Tinkerer. Inventor. Sonic assassin. Showman. Hit maker. Off-the-boat-Immigrant, the American Dream made flesh. It's impossible to sum up this man's contributions to music in a stupid post like this but I'm gonna try.
    First, and this can't be stated enough - there was simply nobody like Edward Van Halen before he arrived. Easy to forget when you think of the droves of followers who made cliches out of his inventions. But make no mistake, Ed was numero uno.

    His band were wildly popular and they made loud party music, so the critics were never going to get behind them. But Van Halen's work deserves to be studied and analysed, poked, prodded and puzzled over for another century at least. And Eddie was the engine of it all.

    He made it look easy - the ever-present grin, the casual onstage acrobatics. Behind all that was an all-consuming devotion and discipline. Countless hours not just practicing his instrument, but trying to reimagine the instrument itself: tinkering with gear, mad-scientist-style, tearing things apart, blowing shit up, forcing conventional equipment to submit to his will. He needed the perfect tonal delivery system for his entirely new six-string language and he attained it. Boy, did he ever.

    Even guitarists occasionally forget the primacy of EVH. The decades after his official bomb-dropping arrival in 1978 have been strewn with fretboard wizards who, standing in his impossibly long shadow, absorbed his tricks, his tone, his innovations. Some played them faster, added new techniques, broke the land speed record. Some of them were innovative in their own right. But without Edward's blueprint, they just wouldn't have existed. In electric guitar history, there is pre-Eddie and post-Eddie.

    And those packed arenas? They were packed because the man could write SONGS. Songs that appealed to people who aren't guitarists. Van Halen music is irrepressible, reckless, dazzling, drunken, daredevil shit with melodies you hum all the way home. There is a white-knuckle vitality to the music that grabs you by the lapels and forces you to deal. Ed's virtuosity was just a way to throw some extra adrenaline into the party - a party to which EVERYONE was invited.

    EVH's influence on me goes without saying. If you play electric guitar, it's inevitable. But he's so much more than a guitar god - the albums, the songs, the crackling incandescent energy of the music are the likes of which you only get to witness once per lifetime. I'm grateful to have had Van Halen in my formative years. Thank you, Ed.

  25. #99

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    As said elsewhere, the thing about Eddie is that he was a brilliant, very flashy and highly individual rock and roll guitar player who liked to write and play songs in a BAND.

    Do we see many of those these days?

    Already when I was learning, the rock players I was hearing weren't influenced by EVH, but more hearkening back to the 60s and 70s, excepting maybe Tom Morello (who I regard as EVH's spiritual successor on the instrument.)

    Back then even if you could puzzle it out, you simply couldn't do the EVH stuff in public....that and the snapping of my cheap vibrato arm put paid to any direct influence... if you wanted new 'wanky' guitar playing you had to go to special guitar oriented albums like Passion and Warfare (and carry them around in a brown paper bag hoping none of your indie mates would see), or to metal.

    Above all EVH represents for me the very individual approach to learning the instrument people had back then, teaching oneself, peicing it together, coming up with ones own approach. As a teacher having to take students through syllabuses and the grades etc, I do wonder if we are squishing the creativity out of guitar playing. The 'shred' thing seems to do that to me, producing players who can 'do it all' but invent nothing new the way Eddie did, and without any of that connection to popular culture.

  26. #100

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    Quote Originally Posted by christianm77
    ...Above all EVH represents for me the very individual approach to learning the instrument people had back then, teaching oneself, piecing it together, coming up with ones own approach...
    That's what I see. EVH was one that burned his own candle and realized that the flame had some beauty to it. He said that although in his early days he was a Clapton freak, he really never listened to anyone else's music. He didn't need to do that for influence, or inspiration, to get what he wanted. I think the question for me is if his work had much depth beyond what some people recognize as their favorite VH songs. Then again he went pretty deep with what was his so maybe it isn't disappointing that he just stuck with it.