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Originally Posted by Lobomov
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01-09-2022 03:10 AM
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Originally Posted by Groyniad
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Originally Posted by Donplaysguitar
Where I think we are talking past each other is that I am talking about what happens in my everyday teaching practice, and common issues I see with (so called) amateur players.
(I hear you about the Barry Harris; his ideas make a good ‘system’ and this worries me, because that’s not the only thing made him a great teacher. Any system or syllabus can become dogmatically applied or cult-like. To summarise his legacy as the major6-dim scale would be a shame.)
I think Gorynad’s OP is based on people getting the wrong end of the stick and using this info in the wrong way in a way that doesn’t help them achieve their goals.
This is not a problem with the schools; say Berklee jazz students (it always seems to go back to Berklee lol) are getting a expert input from real players.
This is generally true of good jazz courses, but I get the impression there is a lot of variation with schools both in the US and internationally.
IIRC those students have impressed on them the importance of transcribing every day, something repeated at many jazz schools beyond Berklee. The proof is in the pudding because those guys can all play. As long as there are expert practitioners in the mix at the schools it works out i think, because it offsets the institutional drive towards orthodoxy.
Obviously Jimmy BN is far better qualified to comment these things but that’s the impression I get from peers who have been to Berklee.
(It is possible to talk about a certain Berkleeoid approach to harmony and line construction etc but that’s a separate issue. There are players who sound CST-ish.)
The problem - exactly as you say - is more when you get amateur players or those crossing over from blues, rock/pop who start with theory. (Although it wouldn’t surprise me if this is also a problem with a lot of Berklee freshmen too.)
I deal with these types of players a lot and the main thing they always need is more ear learning. And for a lot of them that starts with Mobley etc. (Also, anyone who wants to be a good rock or blues player needs to do the exact same thing with their favourite players; it’s not jazz specific, of course.)
If we characterise CST as a theory of what notes you can stack on a given chord, it’s plain that it could never teach about language or improvisation and tbf I don’t think anyone who can play makes this mistake.
The thing is there’s money in selling books, courses and so on - just like there’s money in selling gym memberships. It’s an industry. But you can make plenty of gains by using your ears and your record collection. It needs one thing you can’t buy - the courage and determination to make that first step. And if you lack that impetus, get a teacher who will motivate you.Last edited by Christian Miller; 01-09-2022 at 05:45 AM.
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The other thing is that the sort of Aebersold play-along version of CST is very often used in an ensemble teaching and teaching environment with beginners. (The exact ‘strawman’ way it shouldn’t be used according to I think pretty much everyone on this thread?)
This means that a lot of peoples first exposure to playing jazz is accompanied with a ‘play this scale on these chords’ approach to improvisation.
The result of course never actually sounds like jazz improvisation. The assumption is that it is good enough for end of course concerts, gives students a first experience of improvising and that the sufficiently motivated will grow beyond it, but I wonder if we educators couldn’t exercise our imaginations and do a bit better.
We’ve had some decades to reflect on beginner jazz pedagogy. I also have reason to believe some people are actually put off learning more about jazz by these sorts of approaches.
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
This is a subject for an entirely new thread but in short, I and players of my era were brought up in a time when live music was everywhere (Yeah yeah, I was in NY, so that was maybe even more so) but listening to radio, not having the distraction from a visual clip on a computer, having to WORK at hearing, not knowing what you were listening to, hearing and identifying players in the fleeting moment of airplay, that-coupled with being able to see live music all the time and absorbing the vibe (yeah, realizing that BAD nights on the bandstand are part of the music and something you can learn much more from) of music played/spoken for you in the moment... this is a head space that's largely lacking in a generation suckled on countless information heavy/experience light videos that can be clicked on and mimic'd with a different set of playing skills.
What does this amount to? I've seen young students with amazing chops who can't hear root movement. I've seen kids who can play another person's solo in time note for note but when asked to play a simple phrase that gives them a feeling of joy, answer with "Huh?". I've seen students who learn more dismissive prejudice than listening ability. I do see a lot of kids with amazing hand dexterity and no idea of what it means, or can do. I've seen a lot of young players who learn to swagger, pose and act like Miles and play like an exercise video. Because this is a generation of convenience with which a student can avoid the horror of NOT KNOWING. Convenient answers, like a single superficial theory or prejudice are the real culprits. But there are those who can find the real path to being an artist, and that can be done in spite of the "answers".
Those graduates who have something extraordinary in their playing, most of them didn't get it in music school. They came in with it and got a free ride so the school could use them as proof of their validity. Some WILL go on to advance into self realization, and that comes after years of playing with peers, being around thoughtful mentors, and for a large number of successful ones, finding small cells of peers who find their way into the NY/Brooklyn scene and starving for more time than they spent in music school. But this is where they find the real love for the music, and the respect for themselves that comes through hard work, humility and perspective.
Blame the zeitgeist, not the toolbox. Know where the obstacles really lie.
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Originally Posted by Jimmy blue note
Which is why it’s so important to note that many jazz educators who are highly critical of institutional jazz education (something that comes up again and again.) These are larger societal forces - it seems everyone would rather have the old apprenticeship system, abundance of performance opportunities, learning on the gig etc. but jazz isn’t that thing anymore and the world turns whether we like it or not.
Some thoughts.
Firstly is actually from my research it does seem as if educators are doing their best to create communities of practice within the schools and teach a broader social context. This varies from place to place, of course; and there is also some dogmatic teaching although it seems less common.
Secondly, it’s the young musicians themselves who drive a lot of the general culture; peers are at least as important as teachers. Plenty of jazz conservatoire teachers in the 00’s muttering darkly about ‘Kurt bloody Rosenwinkel’ lol. I’m sure they’d have loved more connection from students to the older music and values of swing, standards etc. (which Kurt himself has plenty of.)
Incidentally, I’m younger than a few people here I think - I started with the Aebersold/jazz weekender thing in the 90s. The live music world of the 1960s is somewhere between ancient history and Homeric myth to me ;-) (sorry guys) My world was institutional jazz edu. Music was still a cultural force when I was growing up, for sure, but you had to seek jazz out.
And because my background BEGAN with all that CST stuff (I was taught the way everyone says you shouldn’t teach CST) it took me a long time to realise what was actually important; partly because the theory appealed to me as a intellectual exercise in itself, which I think was a really unhelpful thing actually.
(For me the impetus to change approach was not being able to play these bloody rhythm changes tunes the horn players insisted on calling. Community to the rescue!)
So I am taking partly about my own experiences and how CST kind of didn’t help at the start. I’m not blameless here - I should have sought out expert teachers earlier and I have been much too resistant to feedback, but my general experience has been there’s a lot of the type of thing Groyney describes in the OP.
When the penny drops, this can manifest itself in a certain way - ‘I was lied to!!!’ (Later a more synthetic understanding hopefully.)Last edited by Christian Miller; 01-09-2022 at 09:25 AM.
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I have no idea what CST is so tried googling "jazz cst" but google corrected it to did you mean "jazz cat"?
I guess google doesn't know either.
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Originally Posted by frankhond
On the D7#*]^{>}!? chord play the D demented half arsed scale, but be careful about the F double sharp because that’s an avoid note.
that type of thing
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Originally Posted by frankhond
It's a system of thinking of a chord, not merely as 4 notes indicated by a chord symbol, but also offering 3 more notes derived from a full set of notes derived from an underlying scale. This gives a player an improvisational guide where there is less of a duality between chordal thinking and diatonic (melodic) thinking. In this system, chord extensions are logically derived from some scale (a minor chord scale built on the second degree would follow the notes of the dorian orientation, and one built from the sixth degree would follow the underlying ordering of the aolean system).
Different colours and textures (altered and chromatic extensions) can be achieved by building chords and melodies from Melodic and Harmonic minors and Harmonic major scales. This gives a system where a player who has internalized the relationships of these scales and their parent scales can have a very articulate control over the uses of chordal textures and options.
It's a layered way of learning harmony but essentially it offers harmony with an extended, relatable and logical context, once it's internalized.
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
These are the intuitions I was offering in the op
I think it is a big deal - because it is SO far away from the spirit of the music
I also mentioned that the key feature of standards-harmony is constant forward motion - precisely the feature given up when we throw out the changes and replace them with much slower transitions between sounds
it is very helpful - if you want to play songbook tunes - to focus hard on beats 4-1 - on 'the change' rather than on the static sounds between which changes take place
I must say I find the idea that 'playing changes' becomes very restrictive enormously hard to accept. Bill Evans and Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins and Hank Mobley and Dexter Gordon and Bud Powell (among many others) seem to demonstrate that this isn't so. None of these players seem at all hemmed-in by constant harmonic motion. the deal - it seems to me - is to learn to hang properly - really hang - with that constant motion: not to abandon it for something allegedly more 'open' and 'freeing'. Parker is no more inhibited by Gershwin's changes than Shakespeare is inhibited by iambic pentameter and rhyme.
the problems I hear in good but not stella playing seem pretty consistently to be problems which have to do with not being able to find all the sounds that are there to be found in the tune - and so the issue of how these sounds are used doesn't get a chance to be addressed.
I was never anywhere near as into Coltrane's early playing as I am into Dexter's or Sonny's (or Miles') - I've listened to those last three constantly for thirty years - but even early Coltrane I find less compelling. THere's a stiffness and a seriousness to it that I don't like - its as if he puts up a big flat screen of sounds with every note occupying the same sort of 2d space as every other. Sonny, Dexter, Bill Evans, Bird - these guys' notes are positioned in a 3d space with foreground - mid-ground and background, giving the phrasing real depth.
I feel like C's style tends to appeal in a very intellectual sort of way - to people who have ideas about how important radicality or originality are - and about what it is to break with established conventions etc. Lester Young did that hugely of course - and Billie Holiday (where's the bloody tune?) but I don't get the sense that they were trying to do something new....
obviously these issues are hard to pin-down - I'm just trying to articulate consistent impressions I get from listening.
Barry Harris' 'system' is not important because it is a system - picking up one of Christian's posts: the great thing is that it describes the music effectively without deploying the same fundamental concepts as I/ii/iii/IV/V/vi/vii-half - harmony. that helps you to appreciate that many different systems can be used to describe the music - and that how good a given system is might be assessed in terms of how well it serves the purpose of offering a sort of way in or introduction to the music (for those poor buggers who didn't get to grow up with it flowing into their ears from their Dad's piano or the radio etc. etc.)
but the perils of being introduced to the music through a verbal description of its essential structures are great indeed (one of these is that it stimulates and appeals to one's discursive or critical intelligence and that is a whole different trip - not a musical one at all - it is just the thrill of finding that something which seems very complex has an essential structure that can be described - verbally - quite simply. that is not the thrill of e.g. hearing Billie Holiday's phrasing of 'A sailboat in the moonlight - and you'....)
no question but that it is better for these descriptions to come along after the fact as attempts to say what one finds works well
and that the only real way into playing musically is careful and enthusiastic copying of music one lovesLast edited by Groyniad; 01-09-2022 at 12:02 PM.
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Well in the sense you can take the A section of Softly as in a morning sunrise, look at it as a thing in Cm and with surprisingly little messing about play arpeggio lines based on the Cm6-dim scale and it will not only sound good but like honest to god bop?
The way Barry’s concepts, rules and patterns turn quickly and semi-magically into authentic jazz language is not a quality CST shares. This is what Aebersold style CST would love to be able to do, what it claims to be able to do….
which is not to say I think CST is useless. In fact Barry’s ideas are pretty compatible with it once understood; there exists no better way I know to turn scales into jazz than Barry’s various rules and there’s no reason you can’t use them with whatever mode or scale you like.
But a CST pitch set by itself has no preferred direction in time (except for ‘avoid notes’ that is, which demand resolution). The notes can be reordered in any way you like. It’s functionless; a classical theorist might talk about pandiatonic harmony.
Which is not a bad thing of itself - it’s a colouristic resource- but a doesn’t really help with understanding music beyond the instant. Barry’s stuff is grounded in forward motion and functionality, but it also extends it.
(Bearing in mind a friend - a swing clarinettist and sax player - derived the Cm6-dim scale himself from listening to Lester Young. He didn’t know Barry’s teaching.
This stuff is on the records, and I don’t think I ever heard Barry claiming to have invented any of it. He’d have given the credit to Chopin or Bach no doubt .)Last edited by Christian Miller; 01-09-2022 at 12:49 PM.
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I was very lucky to discover a real jazz-scene in my large home town in the nineties and 00's - a few great older piano players - a bunch of bass players who could play any tune in any key - a few really exciting horn players (young ones from jazz families and older ones brought up in military bands and dance-bands in the fifties). all were rooted in mainstream jazz.
I did two years of solitary practice and then 12 years or so of more or less flat-out gigging in mostly drummer-less trios.
The CST approach came to me through Ted Greene's books - but the sheer exposure to good playing on the bandstand gradually showed me how limited and even dangerous that approach was. I sounded so bad for so long - perhaps it ought to have put me off for good.
Rhythm-tunes played a key role in my conversion to something else too....
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I agree with your comments Christian about Barry - and the crucial role of 'true' minor sounds in the music
My ear tells me that there is no real sense of invention in anything Barry offers - just a real knack for unearthing crucial patterns at the heart of the music
his actual playing I find totally compelling - and incredibly consistent - he always plays wonderful stuff. You might criticise him for sounding too much like Bud Powell - but I think that just gets the whole point of everything wrong (the point is to sound great, not to sound different)
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Originally Posted by Groyniad
I try not to be too binary about what is or isn’t jazz… but when people don’t know what to play on a blues, I struggle.
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Oh as chance would have it this interview was reposted
Pertinent to the thread
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yes I listened to this a while back when you posted it - super-interesting.
the lovely alto-player I worked with most nights of the week (he played out of a sort of Paul Desmond mixed with Art Pepper bag) would only ever say one thing about learning:
'you just listen and listen and hope some of it rubs off' (he had grown up with the tunes on the radio I think)
to my ear that sounded so demoralising because I was trying to learn scales/arpeggios and then string them together somehow - none of that was 'rubbing off' - it was just hugely hard slog (to sound crap)
(he had no real idea even of 'transcribing')
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Originally Posted by frankhond
I don't know why this says 2015, the copyright is 1997. It's the same book that I have but has a different cover.
As you can see, it's foundational influence was wide just like the traditional four (4) freshman/sophomore harmony/theory classes, but this was for jazz/contemporary school, not classical school. (You can find Nettles' real class materials out there on the internet somewhere. Pinterest? Can't remember. Anyway, it was not this book, which was published separately.)
As I frequently point out, harmony and theory classes are not instumental lessons, improv class, ensemble class, arranging class, or composition class, as such. Those were/are all separate classes for music majors. Each of those - improvisation being the controversial one in this discussion - takes years of separate, subject oriented, specialist study.
https://www.amazon.com/Chord-Scale-T.../dp/389221056X
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
1. Bebop was old hat - Miles showed us,
2. Modal was it - Miles and Coltrane showed us,
3. Fusion was the new wave - Miles and his proteges showed us,
4. Fusion fused everything - jazz/funk, jazz/rock, jazz/R&B, jazz/Indian, jazz/free, jazz/ECM, jazz/pop, jazz/muzak, disco/jazz
At the risk of over generalizing - with modal the chords are held longer to invoke moods. What one should/could play expanded exponentially - per the above. The pros experimented quite a bit, styles spread way out.
So, how do we make a rule set for "anything goes", when anything goes is the antithesis of rules? We could certainly follow Trane and his sheets of sound, but how far? Assuming that we're not talking about free jazz, about the only common rule beyond the chord itself was the chord scale(s). After that is was free game.
In the 21rst century we look back at the late 20th century and surmise that a lot of what transpired in the 70s and 80s was temporal. Not classic, just passing through to something else, whatever that is.
Schools?
The schools follow industry overwhelmingly, as opposed to the other way around. Berklee was more progressive than UNT and other jazz programs. Schools feel a resposibility to teach the students something that can be applied in industry, so that they have gainful employment. Jazz gigs really fell off after the Beatles hit it big. I was in jazz studies in the 70s, pretty conservative ones. Bird and Diz were taught but weren't the sole focus - by ANY stretch of the imagination. We were listening to Wes, Joe, Dexter, etc., but also Miles, Trane, McLaughlin, Corea, Weather Report, Benson, Metheny, CTI, ECM, you get the idea.
One interesting reality is the progress that has been made in the analysis and explanation of jazz language by jazz educators. (Bergonzi, Ligon, many others). It's 2022 and look at what Chad LB is teaching. I wish we would have had that level of clarity in 1970. Look at the renaissance of bop via Barry Harris' teachings. Regarding CST "controversy", one irony is that John Mehegan was an early Jazz Education pioneer and was teaching the great American songbook and straightahead stuff for the most part, not modal and fusion, yet his explanations of jazz lines didn't go much deeper than scales and arpeggios.
Put another way, our ability to teach bebop jazz improv in a clear and accurate way took decades after the style went out of vogue. That's why imitation was and is critical. The trick for the practioner is successfully understanding/internalizing it wihout some level of assistance from those who understand it better than we do.
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Originally Posted by Jimmy blue note
Should NFL bound quarterbacks skip college football because college football didnt "turn them into" Tom Brady? Did college football turn Tom Brady into Tom Brady?
You get the point. It just seems a little strange to me that people look at music school and say "well, if it's not going to turn me into (name your favorite big shot) in 4 years then it's not worth it. Music schools sucks!"
The truth is that it is always up to the individual. They have to; (1) have talent, (2) apply themselves, and (3) gain experience, and there is a wide spectrum for each of those three.
The other truth is that a music career is a tough row to hoe. You can hang around your town and not have much success, you can be wildly successful but live on the road - and may hate travel. A few can have it the way they want. It's not for everybody, that's for sure.
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Originally Posted by Donplaysguitar
Besides which there’s an awful lot of bop vocab on those modal and fusion records….
Chord scales - or any material you might use as an improviser - should be liberating, not box people into a narrow set of permitted ‘good sounding’ notes.
My experience has shown it’s necessary to be able to play already to make good use of them. You need a good ear for jazz, at least. Some have that early on; others need to develop it.
So if you can’t make your playing sound good, it’s not the fault of chord scales. On the other hand neither will chord scales make you sound good. I can tell you for a fact that not everyone realises this. I’m talking mostly about players who are stuck with their playing, or just starting out.
I daresay Berklee students will be just fine without me lol.
Also, I don’t think people always realise Barry Harris was teaching as far back as the 1950s. He was young; still at school.Last edited by Christian Miller; 01-09-2022 at 03:42 PM.
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If I had to go into it I would say the problem with the Aebersold weekender/amateur jazz noodler thing I identified above is not in fact the chord scales…
It’s the fact that we expect the student to be able to improvise in an idiom they have yet to internalise. Most importantly rhythm.
There’s probably value in getting beginners to give it a go - even it sounds noodly.
However sensitive musicians in another genre will know it doesn’t sound right. Not everyone is happy to fill the air up with their inconsequential noise like I was as a teenager - some have spent a lifetime playing things like Bach. They may very well be thinking ‘this is bullshit and I can’t see what this will achieve.’ (and they are CORRECT.)
(we then say these people ‘aren’t improvisers’ because we are shit teachers.)
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
I mean... what's the point of learning to survive a tune if you don't have some musical reason to do so?
Please note that I'm not trying to say 'theory' or going to school is useless, or that you don't need it, or that playing by ear is the only way etc, etc. I think in the end you need all of it. And a lot more.
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I feel like C's style tends to appeal in a very intellectual sort of way - to people who have ideas about how important radicality or originality are - and about what it is to break with established conventions etc. Lester Young did that hugely of course - and Billie Holiday (where's the bloody tune?) but I don't get the sense that they were trying to do something new....
The individual voice has been highly valued among jazz musicians of
both inclinations. So much to learn from the rich musical lineage and so much yet to be revealed. Much respect to all the cogs in the wheel.
It is valid for you to react to Coltrane however that happens.
The above is pure speculation based on your own biases as to why someone could like something that you don't.
My first Coltrane exposure which was also the first jazz music that really caught my attention was the album Sun Ship. The cross rhythms of Elvin, with McCoy and Jimmy plus the suspended piano chords created a mystical feeling. Coltrane's saxophone wailing above felt like pure human emotion.
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Just wanted to add that I think music schools now are maybe more important than when I started 50 years ago. How else are these youtubers going to find people to play with? Especially the ones growing up in out of the way places like Victoria BC.
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Originally Posted by grahambop
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Elias Prinz -- young talent from Munich
Yesterday, 10:24 PM in The Players