The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #1

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    The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
     
  3. #2
    Quote Originally Posted by Lobomov
    It's behind a paywall, but sounds like a wholesome attitude from John
    Sorry, I don't subscribe & they give you some free views every month. Here an excerpt:

    He has a new album coming out, Liberation Time. The title refers to the past 17 months of lockdowns and restrictions. “I felt my wings were clipped,” McLaughlin says. “I really needed liberation. I was going bonkers, I needed to get that feeling of moving.”

    The album opens with an exuberant fanfare of jazz guitar, a curtain raiser for an alternately vigorous and reflective set of tracks. One is called “Lockdown Blues”, a dashing exercise in jazz-guitar shredding and rhythmic sprightliness. No similarity is intended to the anti-lockdown song that Eric Clapton made with Van Morrison last year.

    “Oh really? Eric? He has a new album?” McLaughlin says when I mention the controversial single, “Stand and Deliver”. “I’m sure he’s playing great on it,” he says in a cheerfully ecumenical fashion on being told of the criticism Clapton received for his stance.

    Liberation Time was made with a set of musicians based in places ranging from Cairo to Los Angeles, who recorded their parts separately. The music has a bustling, improvisational energy, as though McLaughlin and his collaborators were bouncing ideas off each other in the same space rather than operating remotely. The guitarist devised the structure of each track, but encouraged his players to go where inspiration took them.

    “You can hear the chords I’m playing,” he says of his instructions to them. “Don’t play them my way, play them your way. I want to hear how you feel. Especially during the improvisations, just be yourself. Don’t play something you think I might like, I’m not interested. Even if it’s crazy, that’s what I want. So they had no constraints other than the structure of a piece.”

    It was a revelation to me, this music. The freedom of the guitar and this black music — it just blew me away

    Two tracks feature him playing piano, which he has not done on a recording since his 1973 joint album with fellow guitar ace Carlos Santana, Love Devotion Surrender. It returns him to the first instrument he learnt to play. Born in 1942, he grew up in Whitley Bay, a coastal town in north-east England near Newcastle upon Tyne. His mother was an amateur violinist. McLaughlin dutifully tried to learn the same instrument but after scraping away — “a horrible sound” — he asked to move to piano. The guitar came to him as a cast-off from an older brother when he was 11. “I just fell in love with it. It’s still a love affair today, after all these years,” he says.

    “For the last 55 years I have been cultivating the spirit in myself, which I still do to this day, because without that I’m dead,” he says. “The cultivation of the spirit is actually the cultivation of wonder and awe. The gigantic mystery of being alive in an infinite universe.”

    The artistic enemies of his philosophy of connectedness are the purists who insist on keeping different genres of music apart. “I have lived my entire life with these people, scathingly criticising the Mahavishnu Orchestra, for example. ‘This is not jazz!’ But I’m happy to say the purists are disappearing, like the dodo,” he says. “Music is the real force. And if it comes from the hearts of men and women, then it’s universal.”

  4. #3

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    "It was a revelation to me, this music. The freedom of the guitar and this black music — it just blew me away."

    The state of criticism.

  5. #4

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    Quote Originally Posted by Litterick
    "It was a revelation to me, this music. The freedom of the guitar and this black music — it just blew me away."

    The state of criticism.
    how do you mean?

  6. #5

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    Quote Originally Posted by Litterick
    "It was a revelation to me, this music. The freedom of the guitar and this black music — it just blew me away."

    The state of criticism.
    I’m not sure if this is a direct quote by JM. I think he is talking about the freedom that playing guitar in the jazz idiom gave him. Seems to be referring to starting out as a jazz player.

    Otherwise the statement doesn’t make much sense.

  7. #6

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    Funny how everything evolves and changes.

    Some, I can learn to like. Others are a waste of what precious time that I have left since they don't speak to me and my life experience.

    Also, I guess it is different when you are actually playing the music over and over. I can see someone wanting something new and a little different while still being Jazz. I am thinking that is the heart of a true artist - always striving - never satisfied.

    While others have found their thing, and truly don't need anything else.

    To each his or her own is my conclusion.

  8. #7

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    Quote Originally Posted by Doctor Jeff
    I’m not sure if this is a direct quote by JM. I think he is talking about the freedom that playing guitar in the jazz idiom gave him. Seems to be referring to starting out as a jazz player.

    Otherwise the statement doesn’t make much sense.
    No, it does not. Those seem to be words of the author. It is the trend for journalists to interject with their own responses, but I did not expect to see it in the FT.

  9. #8

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    Quote Originally Posted by Donplaysguitar
    how do you mean?
    These words seem to be the writer's, not McLaughlin's. I would expect more from a Financial Times journalist.

  10. #9

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    This is the full excerpt:



    The youngest of five, he supplemented the classical music he learnt from his mother with Mississippi and Chicago blues records acquired by his siblings. “It was a revelation to me, this music. The freedom of the guitar and this black music — it just blew me away. So the record player became my favourite teacher.”

  11. #10
    Thanks for clarifying this for others, BWV. I might have messed something when I pasted the except as I didn't want to include the whole article because of copyright etc. But yeah, that was a JM quote, not the words of the article's writer.

  12. #11

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    Yes, thank you for the clarification. The statement sounded like it was probably something from JM but it was utterly out of context with nothing around it to clarify the meaning. The full quote makes sense.

  13. #12

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    It is in fact amazing that so much music made by these unschooled and (mostly) self-taught musicians--Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Rodgers, Charlie Christian, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, etc.--have influenced so many great artists over the years.

    The seeds sprouted into great trees.

  14. #13

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    I'll get my coat.

  15. #14

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    Quote Originally Posted by zdub
    Thanks for clarifying this for others, BWV. I might have messed something when I pasted the except as I didn't want to include the whole article because of copyright etc. But yeah, that was a JM quote, not the words of the article's writer.
    well real jazz guitarists don’t have Financial Times subscriptions (but I do)

  16. #15

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    Quote Originally Posted by Litterick
    These words seem to be the writer's, not McLaughlin's. I would expect more from a Financial Times journalist.
    It's everywhere.

  17. #16

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    Quote Originally Posted by Lobomov
    I don't know .. Is playing every night with lots of other musicians really self taught?
    Christian had a teacher.

    But having a teacher is relative. How long did the lessons last, what was taught, etc.

  18. #17

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    I’m not sure any of the greats were jazz purists. Miles changed things. Trane changes things. Christian, Wes. Ornette. The purists seem to reject change.


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  19. #18

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    Quote Originally Posted by dlew919
    I’m not sure any of the greats were jazz purists. Miles changed things. Trane changes things. Christian, Wes. Ornette. The purists seem to reject change.


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
    I think there’s room for everything. Let the listeners decide.

    It doesn’t have to be about rejecting change, it can just be a preference for something established. One could even deem something “classic”.

    Those who want to move forward can do so, and those who don’t can remain with something that they prefer.

    It’s not some kind of moral choice. Big whoop.

  20. #19

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    I didn’t mean to imply that. Sorry. You’re right people like what they like. I was building on McLaughlin and his idea that the purist is dying out. Much of what we would call pure was dangerously revolutionary at the time.


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  21. #20

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    John McGlaughlin has always been a seeker of the highest form in my book. He maintains his individual voice no matter what genre or musicians he plays with.
    And the fact he can adapt to so many genres of music,is pretty incredible in itself!

    I really admire those who can follow their own voice, and aspire to such true musical heights. There aren't that many, especially these days!

  22. #21

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    Purists will always be among us.

  23. #22

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    Quote Originally Posted by Litterick
    Purists will always be among us.

    Hello, purist here. Did you need something?

  24. #23

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    I guess I'm kind of in the middle purity-wise.

    "Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
    Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."

    --Alexander Pope

  25. #24

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    I guess there have always been "purists" of some sort around. Those who thought Jazz itself would lead to moral decay. Louis Armstrong called Bebop "Chinese music," people thought Coltrane was anti-jazz, that Miles sold out when he started playing fusion and in my lifetime, Wynton Marsalis and the backlash against anything that he felt didn't swing. Wynton and that attitude really wiped out 70's and 80's jazz and brought back the more traditional sound. That's what McLaughlin is commenting about. I have to agree with him there: I don't need the Jazz Police telling me what is acceptable.