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Most of us aren’t.
Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
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02-18-2024 11:14 AM
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My experience was that folks were super demanding w American songbook tunes, Charlie Parker, Ellington/strayhorn, and Monk. Fairly demanding w Shorter, Jobim, and some others. And there were a few odd tunes from Joe Henderson, Herbie Hancock, and other jazz composers that got called a lot. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
That stuff is definitely somewhat dependent on what kind of circle you’re running in. And the specific tunes would definitely be.
And *definitely* no reading.
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The one time I got utterly obliterated at a session, the guy called “Serenity” and I didn’t know it … then he called “The Touch of Your Lips” and I didn’t know it … then he was like lol and started playing “Every Time We Say Goodbye.”
I didn’t even have time to unplug so I just hung out up there and listened.
Caveat … he was also a jerk and was definitely vibing me.
Normally the procedure was after two strikes that give you an “aww bless your little heart” look and ask you what you wanted to play
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I remember a London colleague who was more in the shall we say - free, contemporary and eclectic side of things, composition professor - coming back from some lessons in NYC with famous guitarists and saying one of them was ' a very good musician who could really play free' and the other being 'not a very good musician who mostly saw being good at jazz as knowing lots of show tunes' which made me laugh. The players in question shall go nameless, but they are Big Jazz Names. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
I fail your shibboleth? WELL, YOU FAIL MY SHIBBOLETH!
That's the spirt, haha!
Anyway, it all depends on your reference points and as Adam Neely once put it - your Tribe.
Anyhoo, I think the good straight ahead guys in London are the same. It's the buy-in I think for getting booked as a side musician - knowing the tunes the horn player knows.
Not everyone knows everything. It turned out in a lesson once that Barry didn't know China Boy, which was funny because it's a tune I've probably played on 50% of the gigs I've done in the past decade. Worth bearing in mind.
But yes, learning more tunes always good.
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I have very mixed feelings about jam sessions, although most I have attended have been fun in retrospect. I have zero interest in any kind of vibing or negative environment. I want music to be fun. I am happy to play a handful of tunes that I call and then get off the stage. I don't want to be boxed into someone calling something I don't know and having to "fake it." I don't want to do that with an audience present. If charts are cool, I would be willing to play most things, but I much prefer to just know everything that I play. For my own gigs - no charts (with the exception of Christmas tunes for Christmas gigs once a year or so). Originally Posted by pamosmusic
Sent from my SM-S918U using Tapatalk
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Music-culture dominance games are strange and interesting--though not surprising, given that the musicians in question are all primates. Years back on the Usenet jazz guitar newsgroup, I noticed the scorn aimed at having a fakebook on a gig. This was the same environment in which John Pizzarelli was sometimes looked down on, perhaps because he sang, and (as the opinion went) not all that well. So when I started sitting in with some local players--all well schooled and quite competent and familiar with each other--I was relieved to see that the only one without a fakebook or tablet in front of him was the drummer. It was clear that they could get along much of the time without one (especially the sax player, who spent a long time in the Air Force bands, and the keyboardist, who supported himself through college as a lounge pianist), but it clearly made it easy to get from one tune to the next with minimal discussion. Everybody on the same page, so to speak.
Of course, in competitive and intense environments like NYC, with first-call players falling out the trees, the threshold for being taken seriously is probably a few flights of steps higher than in St. Cloud, MN. Nevertheless, in a jam or informal setting, I would think that the goal is more to find pleasure in the music than to secure a place in some notional skills/coolness hierarchy. But then, it's still primate socializing, and art gets to determine who sits where in the tree.
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Jazz standard vs GAS discussed at 11:30
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Ahh nice. Good find. Originally Posted by AllanAllen
Only thing to add is the one that kind of goes without saying, which is that they're written by jazz musicians to be played by jazz musicians.
But all those musical distinctions are really helpful too, because there's definitely a qualitative difference a lot of the time, rather than it just being a bibliographic thing.
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Pedantry alert.
Where taxonomy meets canon formation. Or Venn diagrams. Or what in my teaching days I learned to call "polysemy." I think I'm pretty clear from the original post that "jazz composer" was meant to indicate composers of jazz pieces--or, to put it another way, of jazz practitioners who were also composers. So from that angle, with the addition of the "unavoidable" and "truly non-negotiable" modifiers, a "jazz standard" would be a composition that jazz players are expected to be familiar with and that was composed as jazz.
Which is not the only sense of "jazz standard," given jazz players' tendency to adopt and transform tunes or even whole musical modes to suit the jazz sensibility (whatever that is this week). Jazz isn't the only tradition to behave this way--musicians are aesthetic magpies, always making off with whatever shiny stuff catches their ears. Somewhere in my library is an LP of Beatles tunes bluegrassified by the Charles River Valley Boys. Pretty good album, too.
So jazz players are no less attracted to a pretty tune or a surprising harmonic structure than anybody else, and how better to express one's attraction than by absorbing and transforming the object of one's affection. Jerome Kern might have disliked jazz, but jazz certainly didn't return the disfavor.
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I love jam sessions. For what it’s worth, I did refer to “the one time” I got so vibed. It was such a weird experience because it was very unusual. Originally Posted by Rick5
Most sessions I went to, the end goal was to find something that everyone could play. It was usually quite obvious which person who was holding up the tune selection, so there was that pressure to not be that guy. So usually the guys who ran the session would step in before it got weird and be like “someone pick a blues in F” and then they’d just go.
The big difference was the absolute hard line against having books or apps on stage.
and honestly I like that bit
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I like the combo of no books and the willingness to keep things moving with blues. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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Madness. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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I've had Road Song called by non-guitarists a few times. And of course 4 on 6 is common (except people insist on calling it "Summertime" for some unfathomable reason). Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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Just got back from a brilliant concert by Samara Joy and her 7-piece touring band (piano, alto, tenor, trombone, trumpet, bass and drums). New arrangements by the band of a couple of originals along with pieces by Jobim, Horace Silver, Mingus and -- get this -- Sun Ra. So maybe the canon is expanding a bit. Two nights, both sold out, at a large concert venue (Koerner Hall). Sadly tonight's crowd included very few young people. Samara is 24, the average age of the audience must have been late 60s.
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i can throw any song at band in a box and it can change key 12 times..what would happen if i turned up at a jam session with it....shock horror...
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Ugh, I know. They even came up with words for it. Originally Posted by John A.
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How could they!? Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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Word is that Bill Evans, not Miles, wrote Nardis, just as he wrote Blue in Green, also credited to Miles. They certainly sound like Evans compositions. Originally Posted by grahambop
Who Really Wrote Nardis? - Music Savvy
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The first recording of Nardis was in 1958 on the Cannonball Adderley record ‘Portrait of Cannonball’, where the producer Orrin Keepnews stated on the sleeve note that the tune was specifically written for the record date by Miles Davis, at Cannonball’s request. Originally Posted by Mick-7
This was also confirmed by Bill Evans in 1970 during this interview and performance (see Bill’s comments at 20:30 here):
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I believe the story is that it was named for Bill Evans. Someone asked him to play something he thought was lame and he said “I don’t play that stuff, I’m an artist” and with the accent it sounded like “I’m a nardis” and miles thought it was funny Originally Posted by Mick-7
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Nice story. I always suspected that the title was 'Sidran' backwards. Journalist and keyboardist Ben Sidran did interview Miles in the '80s but he would have been only in his mid-teens at the time the tune was first recorded. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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o.k., pardon me for spreading a conspiracy theory, but it sounds like the tune would have been neglected if Evans hadn't interpreted it.
From early 1958, alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley was a member of Miles Davis’ group together with John Coltrane. When Cannonball went into the studio to record his album “Portrait of Cannonball”, producer Orin Keepnews brought a young white boy named Bill Evans to play piano on the session. Cannonball’s boss, Miles, wrote a song for the session called ‘Nardis’.
It was a strange piece, modal (rather than chord-based), a concept Miles was just beginning to dabble in. This means that the music remains within a scale, rather than being based on shifting chords. Think ‘Fever’. Think ‘You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover’. Think ‘Kind of Blue’ (SoTW 079).
No one has succeeded in guessing what the name ‘Nardis’ meant. Bill Evans was a fan of anagrams. His song ‘Re: Person I Knew’ was derived from ‘Orrin Keepnews’. ‘NYC’s No Lark’ comes from the name of fellow pianist and junkie Sonny Clark. Dinars? Drains? Nadirs? Ranids? What’s a ranid?
No one even understood it musically. (“Eastern-sounding” was the best anyone could do.) Cannonball’s version is pretty embarrassing – awkward, stiff, thoroughly a flop. Evans: “You could see that the other guys were struggling with it. After the date, Miles said I was the only one to play it the way he wanted.”
By the way, Davis’ authorship has often been disputed, probably due to the fact that he never played the song and that it was so strongly absorbed by Evans. But Evans himself stated on numerous occasions that it was Miles who wrote ‘Nardis’.
From: Bill Evans, 'Nardis'
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Why do you gotta ruin everything with facts? Originally Posted by grahambop
It's a lot more fun making it a conspiracy theory. We could construct some BS theory that the Prince of Darkness had the poor nerdy pianist under his
power with drugs, prostitutes, whatever... This is supposed to be the post-truth era, and it would be much more fun if we could go by what that Music Savvy idiot said, and launch a completely meaningless investigation about Miles stealing yet another song!
We have two meaningless clues which mean absolutely nothing:
1) Miles never recorded it.
2) Spelled backwards it's Sidran- did the pianist Ben Sidran have anything to do with this mystery? We could interrogate him and find out!
He's 80 years old, and it would be easy to beat some kind of confession out of him, whether it's true or not.
Here are some other conspiracy theorists on the interwebz:
"In an interview, Bill Sidran asked Miles how he came up with the name Nardis. He didn’t know. When Sidran told him it was his name spelt backwards, Miles wouldn’t acknowledge that’s where he supposedly got the name… probably because Bill very likely wrote and named the song. Wish I’d asked Bill when I met him in 1979."
"If you have ever watched the video of the trio playing at someone’s house in Finland, Bill says he was there when Miles wrote it. LOL
You will NEVER convince me that someone plays a tune like this all of his life and it’s not his.
I’m not anywhere near as talented, but I play my tunes to death.
(I don’t read anywhere near as well as a real musician, but I just can’t believe you can be that much into someone else’s work to play it that long, that many times night after night.
NEVER will I believe Miles Davis wrote “Nardis”, he was infamous for stealing tunes. INFAMOUS."
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"We could construct some BS theory that the Prince of Darkness had the poor nerdy pianist under his power with drugs."
Well, Evans was an addict most of his life and it ended it prematurely... if he really did write Nardis, than why did he let Miles take credit for it?
And as I recall, one of Miles' wives said he could be mistaken for the Prince of Darkness at times, and Wayne Shorter wrote a tune by that name (was it dedicated to Miles?), so you may have the makings of a fine conspiracy theory there - I've certainly heard worse ones.
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Ben Sidran was 15 years old and apparently living in Wisconsin in 1958, difficult to see how Miles Davis would even know of his existence when he wrote it! Originally Posted by PMB
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