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Originally Posted by Litterick
Here's a food for thought question...are these old tunes better for turning into jazz, or is the FORM of them better?
Or another way of phrasing it-- when pop music switched to using verse/chorus/verse more often than AABA structure, is that when jazz widely abandoned using popular music as a jumping off point?
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03-07-2022 04:51 PM
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Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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My thought is that the emotion of the standards relates well to the jazz rhythms. And this has made a good tradition. I think something about new tunes has a different sort of emotion and if you try to jazz them up it sounds different than the tradition we're used to. I still think it's possible to either write new jazz tunes in the old style, or play jazz in a new style, but something about the standards' emotion and melodies lends well to being jazzed up in the rhythmic and melodic style we're used to. Nothing wrong with going for a new style though. As long as the performer is playing harmonically fluid melodies over the changes then it's jazz imo, and this can be done in styles other than what we're used to with swing etc.
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Wow, the arranger in Wes' Day In The Life was really inspired. WTH was the guy thinking?
Guitar was nice enough.
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I found the guitar lifeless. It all sounds like lobby music to me.
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I dunno, it has Wes' usual groove. Take out the joke string arrangement and it would probably be listenable, if forgettable.
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Originally Posted by Litterick
When I say I think history etc is important it's not because I think we should literally repeat it verbatim. That really doesn't follow. It also doesn't follow that those who aren't interested in history necessarily make innovative music.
OTOH, the repertoire side of it is - well, you need a repertoire to function as a musician. That's the first step at least.
As far as vocal standards go, people tend to play those. I think there's good reasons beyond 'it's tradition' and it's not like Bill Evans plays the original sheet music. That's a form of original composition too; you know how classical composers will sometimes take a theme from somewhere else and make a piece? No-one thought Benjamin Britten was trying to be an Elizabethan when he wrote Nocturnal on a theme of Dowland.
Anyway - I'm more interested in why the 'jazz' term remains so important to people.
So, drawing those things together, if I was to in turn, massively unfairly strawman your position - let's say someone wants the right to identify as a 'jazz musician' without internalising the jazz history, repertoire etc etc.
Or, maybe (more likely and less of a strawman) someone who is trained as a jazz musician has a project that is in no way conventionally jazz to mainstream jazz listeners but gets upset when those people say it isn't jazz.
So I might say, OK, sure, why not? I'm not the boss of jazz, who cares? Do what makes you happy.
BUT - the question is then why? Why is it then important to that person to be a recognised as a jazz musician in this context? What is that word doing there and what does it mean for that person? Because clearly that person has a different meaning in mind to many others.
So, why not substitute another word there - 'improvisation' or 'original music' or something? What is significant about the J word here?
I'm genuinely interested to know.Last edited by Christian Miller; 03-10-2022 at 08:48 PM.
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
This is the "Jazz Guitar Forum". A place for fans of Jazz, guitars and forums. Some play jazz on a Tele, some play country on an archtop, some play the trumpet and some just hang around. "Jazz guitar" has different meanings:
1 (noun), a big hollow box with f-holes.
2 (genre), jazz played on a guitar.
We understand there's room for certain ambiguity. Let's make things even more complicated (!)
i, The electric guitar led the rock n' roll revolution that put an end to the era of Jazz as pop music. The man with the electric guitar was king of the world, especially the man on the "lead guitar", playing guitar solos for a cheering crowd.
ii, Rock 'n roll, in particular "arena rock" is powered by large amplifiers that over time cause back pain and hearing loss.
iii, some "jazz guitars" are purely acoustic (have no pickups). No electricity needed for busking.
iv, "Jazz" is a broad church that spans 100 years of music development.
v, strange people listen to bizarre music. When music is impossible to understand it's probably "classic" or "jazz". Whatever it is, it's not pop chart mainstream.
vi, Jazz guitars are collectible
This creates a polynomial equation with multiple solutions to your questions:
1, When the rocker gets old and tired he likes to chill unplugged. But he still sees himself as the king of the world and wants to rip a solo once in a while. Jazz is a haven where solos are still allowed.
2, The acoustic archtop fanatic is a firm believer in the sound projection of a hand carved top. He doesn't need no amp, nor did Freddy Green....thump, thump, thump.
3, The troubadour strums a flattop acoustic while singing songs of Dylan or the Beatles. Since there's a guitar, most people think of it as "country". If it's not country it's got to be jazz. Most things acoustic that's not "Classic" or "Country" got to be "Jazz". Anything non-mainstream is strange, hence qualify as "jazz".
4, The prog rocker likes himself an archtop, because so did Steve Howe. Prog is strange, hence qualify as "jazz". Besides an archtop is a "jazz guitar", can't argue with that. Ted Nugent played a Byrdland, meaning "Cat Scratch Fever" probably qualify as a jazz song, right?
5, The guitar collector likes guitars! He owns jazz guitars that never get played because he wants to preserve the nibs, besides action is too high anyway, making fingers hurt. But he likes to strum a flattop acoustic while singing a Dylan tune. And he can recognize Louis Armstrong! Who am I to say he's not a jazz man?
6, Miles Davis turned jazz into arena rock. It was electric! and there were guitar solos! and Telecasters! Miles is Jazz, can't argue with that, so whatever he did we could do too; Drums and bass and CST! But some people just fail to understand/are totally uninterested in where Miles came from. -Does it matter? it does, to me. I like Miles, but most of all I love the same history and repertoire as he did and that every jazz musician acknowledge; the standards.Last edited by JCat; 03-11-2022 at 07:49 AM.
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Originally Posted by JCat
Drums and bass and CST is all my body needs
Theres often some bloke who comes up after a gig and says ‘I didn’t think jazz guitarists played telecasters???’ Lol. Usually the same person who stares at my pedal board on an electric gig and looks a bit disappointed.
Prog? Yeah, prog is often jazz adjacent, overlapping with fusion of course. I think the difference for me is that Yes or Genesis is actually really hooky. Revisiting some of that stuff with my jazz-buggered ears I was really stuck by how pop it all is, really grounded in the Beatles etc. It’s all about the songs. Rock people on both sides of the prog/anti-prog divide would probably find that a bit mad, but it’s interesting what you don’t notice from inside a genre. It’s probably the same for jazz.
Anyway; I suspect one thing that’s changed is that back in the 40s and 50s playing mainstream jazz lounge and dance stuff was probably a bit like being a top 40 covers band musician. Popular entertainment.
So when you did your own music you were keen to get away from that baggage. Bird did not regard bop as jazz for instance, which is funny given how he is now the defining artist pretty much. It was a labour of love of course for the musicians, but it happened within popular culture which was at least jazz adjacent.
I also think that’s maybe where Bill Evans was coming from when he defined jazz as a process - he didn’t need to talk about the raw materials of his music because it’s the same popular songs that were everywhere.
Today you have to make a quest to be a jazz musician, seek out recordings, performances and so on largely disconnected from popular culture (maybe less so recently with Kendrick etc.) So I think people have an emotional (and financial) investment in it as a specific genre. That changes the relationship.
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But of course if we did only write 'em like they used to we'd still be back in the cave :-)
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What do you guys mean by 'History and repertoire'? This way all music with history and repertoire is Jazz?
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Originally Posted by ragman1
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It wasn't a put-down, it was a lightly humorous philosophical observation on the inevitability of musical evolution.
Personally, I'd choose many of the old tunes over the modern stuff any day of the week. They seem to have no real ear for melody these days. Rhythm and feel, yes, melody no.
I've seen so many musicians describing really dull, functional melodies as 'beautiful'. Beats me. Their ideas of beauty are definitely not mine. I'm not even sure they know what 'beautiful' really means. I blame it on technology, myself. Changes the brain.
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I was joking.
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Young whippersnapper, keep your modern humour to yourself
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Originally Posted by ragman1
Now I appreciate it more on its own terms.
what is beautiful is highly subjective and to understand beauty is not something someone’s born with, it requires cultural acclimatisation. For instance I might be poorly placed to understand the aesthetic values of Traditional Chinese music.
In some cultures the major scale is considered extremely ‘basic’; I remember when I first started really hearing quarter tones in Arabic Maqam and a whole world opens up.
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A couple of folks mentioned tunes from the '20s that have come into the public domain. Here's a good resource for finding great tunes that now belong to all of us.
List of Public Domain Music
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Originally Posted by Christian Miller
I think of jazz as a community and as a practice. Its history is part of that practice, but the community allows innovation. When Wynton Marsalis described Miles Davis as "a general who has betrayed his country", we all laughed, didn’t we? The community, for the most part, welcomed the new way of doing jazz.
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Originally Posted by Litterick
But your history skips the thirty years from post-bop to fusion, when jazz was largely innovative.
My history? I'm not sure I presented any historical narratives.
EDIT: I think my mention of 'contemporary compositions' above may have got you to think that. OK, I also think it's harder to reinterpret Wayne Shorter tunes than standards for similar reasons; not impossible at all, but trickier. Standards are quite open, it's not like they generally have the hippest chords to start with. With standards you have the melody to hang whatever you want on.
Wayne's tunes have really strong melodies though, but they also have very cool chords, and both form part of the identity of the song. Monk, too, but Monk for me is basically classical music. But these guys are some of the best jazz composers EVER. Most people writing now are obviously not up to that level, but even beyond that, compositions don't necessarily function well as common repertoire even if they are really good. Musicians can produce great records but the compositions don't necessarily translate beyond that context. I've been listening a lot to 'At Night' by Monder/Bleckman and those compositions are brilliant, but I can't imagine covering most of them. Maybe "Animal Planet." What you need very often, is a SONG.
Not that the aim of playing standards is always to radically reimagine them, but I want to make the case for standards as a vehicle for modern music, which is why I don't buy this originals progressive/standards conservative dichotomy you seem to be hung up on.
Another reason - your account seems ahistorical to me. Original jazz composition predates the use of jazz improv as a vehicle for improvisation (usually attributed to Louis Armstrong) by a decade or more; not in the 50s.
Some people do seem to think people didn't write originals before the post-bop era for some reason and only played standards? I do wonder how they can possibly think this if they have any familiarity with those eras of music, but it is a myth you come across from time to time. Versions of popular songs always existed alongside original jazz compositions since the late 20s.
Harmonically, a lot of that music was based on changes similar to 'song book' harmony, and blues, it's true (early on it was all march style harmony) but not entirely. There's this fella called Ellington, obviously.
I think Britten was at least acknowledging the history of English music, both Dowland and Vaughan Williams – for his Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis.
That is very different from playing a standard, which is acknowledging the other jazz musicians who have played that song. The original, often a song from a forgotten Broadway musical or Hollywood movie, is not so important. Jazz musicians do not go back to the original every time they play a standard; they play it in the shadow of the jazz greats who played it before them.
I am not. I might be a little interested if you provided examples. I struggle to think of someone identifying as a jazz musician. It is not like gender. Being a jazz musician means having chops and being accepted by one’s peers. A jazz musician who plays something else would be a fool if he were upset by his peers rejecting it.
If you aren't playing much with straight ahead players you can possibly afford to have a sketchy knowledge of standards. I know a few players on the jazz scene who basically know very few tunes but sight read fly shit and sound great on modal changes, so they are always working in various originals projects - I dunno. That said in NYC everyone seems to know hundreds of tunes. It varies.
Among my colleagues and peers, often the 'J word' controversy manifests itself in clashes over programming with venues etc. Some people who play straight-ahead feel a bit pushed out by the money going to more contemporary projects etc so there's a bit of backlash to that as well. I'm not going to mention names because either you won't know who they are, or you will and its a bit unprofessional. Read about in Facebook or whatever. It's boring shit.
I think of jazz as a community and as a practice. Its history is part of that practice, but the community allows innovation. When Wynton Marsalis described Miles Davis as "a general who has betrayed his country", we all laughed, didn’t we? The community, for the most part, welcomed the new way of doing jazz.Last edited by Christian Miller; 03-12-2022 at 08:37 AM.
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Oh another thing - if copyright law worked differently we might today think of bebop heads not as originals but shout choruses on standard tunes, or part of an arrangement.
The only person I’ve read who mentioned the central importance of intellectual property law and how it directly affects jazz and our perception of it was the late Conrad Cork. Very interesting stuff.
I don’t think it’s always possible to draw a line between standard tunes and originals. Sometimes I’ll write stuff based on a standard but the changes etc will be so altered no one would pick up on it and it may as well be an original tune. I am obviously far from the only person to do this.
Jack Wilkins passed a year ago today.....
Today, 09:40 PM in The Players