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You know how in the original movie a squadron of WWI-style biplanes shoots King Kong down off the Empire State building? Well that's not actually what happened. In reality, they stuck a giant banana on the spire of the Chrysler Building, and King Kong reached for it, missed and fell to the ground. Anybody got a banana?
Originally Posted by KingKong
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11-16-2022 05:17 PM
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I searched this forum and saw this has been discussed before. But some of the replies in this thread How was Joe Pass able to play so good without knowing much theory? are spot on and apply to Bireli .....Personally I just want to hear him play a G13 (or not) or whatever he feels like to in the moment.. He's a Musician....and we all seem to agree that to play Jazz you need to use your ears..... Originally Posted by John A.
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It seems like you are defining theory as a field that concerns itself with explanations. So for example a book that explains Barry Harris concepts, such as 6th diminished scales, family of dominants, playing these dominants into each other over minor ii - V's etc. wouldn't be considered a theory book according to this definition. Am I corrrect? Originally Posted by Christian Miller
If so, I mean it's a thought provoking idea but I don't know if people who actually do not know theory would agree with that definition. I remember seeing a Fareed Haque video where he talked about the "dreaded tritone substitution" as if it's something that would be an intimidating and sophisticated sounding concept to some of his audience (which was probably true since I think most of the people who watched the video were jazz-curious rockers. Lol.) Barry Harris for example goes far deeper into the musical concepts than tritone subs. I think most musicians would consider Barry Harris concepts as some form of music theory applied to jazz and most conventional Jazz theory books don't overly concern themselves with explanations save for a couple of sentences here and there per concept.
Since this thread is about theory vs playing by ear, we should also ask this. Can a musician who studied this imaginary Barry Harris (none-theory) book and applied each concept to 12 keys and different progressions claim to have learned jazz by ear?
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I thought that was clear. Some people name players who report knowing no theory and sound great. Others insist they know theory whether they're aware of it or not. And, then it turns out it's difficult to define the terms. But, I didn't want to get into that. I just wanted the to post the experience of suddenly becoming an ear player - whether I liked it or not. Originally Posted by Tal_175
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Because you have theory knowledge for your ear to work with. Not because you're feral and only using ear is the natural approach. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
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He was also not in New York via a boat fueled abduction as the movie depicts, but to mash up the Jazz clubs of the time. Oh yeah! Originally Posted by John A.
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Joe Pass knew a lot of theory. He gave master classes using theory. Originally Posted by SOLR
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What specifically applies to Bireli? I don't know much about his level of formal knowledge, so I don't really know how to connect his thought processes to Joe P's (who wrote actual books about his thought processes). For sure, Joe Pass played G13, and knew it was called that. Bireli plays G13; I don't know what he calls it. Originally Posted by SOLR
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I listened to a jazz heaven clinic last Sunday. Pianist Richie Beirach told an interesting story about his time spent working with trumpeter Chet Baker.
Chet had requested for him to bring some compositions for the band so he showed up at the next rehearsal with a Bb part for one of his pieces. Chet asked him to play it and then asked him to play it one more time. Then, they played it together, Chet playing playing the melody perfectly, phrased more beautifully than he had conceived it and playing a killer solo as well. Richie couldn't help but notice that Chet wasn't looking at the music so he asked.
Chet said something along the lines of "didn't I mention to you that I can't
read music".
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Theory of any derivation, transcends being so much academic talk when we can clearly connect an idea to sound and a subsequent musical application.
Ear playing becomes meaningful when we can execute our ideas in real time on an instrument in response to whatever musical environment we find ourself in.
It be good to move past these recurring either/or scenarios.
Musical growth by any means necessary.
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I know better than to believe a big gorilla on the internet. Originally Posted by KingKong
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I would guess 80% of guitar players don't even have the theoretical prerequisites to study the Barry Harris method. For example, they wouldn't even know the scales on their instruments well enough (or not at all) to be able to do BH scale applications to tunes (apparently that also includes Bireli).
PS. I should preemptively say that I'm not suggesting that Bireli should study BH method.
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Yes i offer this as one possible definition (one I personally like) but I do say that most people don’t use this definition iirc. The definition of theory depends on person to person. Originally Posted by Tal_175
in this case I use it to distinguish the aims of the exercise. I’m not trying to knock explanatory theory, just pointing out the ‘why’ questions maybe as much use to the aspiring player as simply getting to grips with the material.
i would say anything outside of the ‘why?’ is really about labelling aspects of your craft. craft is something anyone acquires in order to play. Everyone does that.
In the case of Birelli he clearly knows a g13 grip and knows what it sounds like. So the matter of ‘knowing what it is’ is simply a matter of labelling it, which is actually trivial; the other aspects are much more important for using the chord, alongside learning lots of tunes which use it, of course. If we are to take Birelli at face value, knowing the label for it had never been particularly important or relevant.
Hard to believe perhaps for many, but when you are raised playing music in an aural tradition it’s not like you need to learn Dinah from a chart. In the same way he probably just learned Teen Town and so on by listening.
We’ve also seen a trend towards more ‘scientific’ or ‘proper’ sounding terms. Calling something a ‘mixolydian’ instead of ‘dominant scale’ or an ionian instead of ‘major’ or ‘transcription’ instead of ‘ear learning’ or ‘lifting’ adds nothing, but sounds clever. Anyway, there’s a great Richard Feynman speech about that sort of thing… the names don’t matter, but you may as well use the ones in common use I suppose.
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Well this is a side issue which is that the guitar is hard to map like a piano. If you want to learn from pianists (and I do) you have to be able to apply their stuff on the fretboard, which takes a lot of fretboard mapping as you say. This is as true of Mick Goodrick as it is of Pasquale Grasso or George Van Eps. Lots of what most people would identify as theory. (Although it’s not according to my very specific and narrow definition). Drawback is that sometimes it seems like you are trying to dominate and break the instrument. Originally Posted by Tal_175
most Manouche players are ears grips and licks guys. Not doing them down, some of my favourite guys play that way. They follow the logic of the guitar more, work with the instrument. Drawback is it can be hard to get out of guitar logic and guitar stuff.
you have a lot of people who are kind of in the middle of course.
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I can't resist the urge to inject a bit of semantic rigor. (It's OK, I'm a certified English teacher, retired.) In every environment with which I'm familiar, "theory" comes after practice or observation--it's a way of organizing observations, of modeling phenomena. Eventually, a theory will be used to predict what else might be observed or as a means of devising extensions of practice. Then the observation/practice-theorize-extend cycle can continue indefinitely, adding detail or elaborating on basics., extending the model of the system under observation.
There are clearly unschooled musical masters--Django was one, and Gabby Pahinui was another. Neither could read a score, and both were able to sit in with an ensemble and pick up enough by ear to play along and solo. (I got the information about Gabby from my interviews with the three of his sons who worked with him.) As has been suggested upthread, this does not mean that Django and Gabby had no personal system for thinking about their musical practice--and both spent plenty of time working with schooled players, so they very likely picked up bits of terminology and systematic understanding along the way. Nevertheless, practice preceded theory.
(FWIW, the Hawaiian players I encountered did have ways of describing their chords and names for the tunings they used--it's probably an inevitable development in any oral musical tradition. And the schooled players--Dennis Kamakahi, Keola Beamer, Peter Medeiros--all could operate in folk or schooled modes.)
I've, um, observed this in my own home field of literature, as well in other artistic environments. (So I have a theory of theories.) What seems to be under discussion here is the role of organized description of a field of practice--how much organized understanding is necessary to achieve some given level of competence and/or to extend it. And what I'm getting (and what I've observed in literature and my own musical efforts) is "It depends."
In drawing/painting, the theoretical framework of perspective applied a set of rules and procedures from geometry to drafting. It did not, by itself, produce great art, but it offered an organized approach to generating more spatially representational pictures. Similarly, rhetoric and prosody and linguistics and semiotics can explain much of what goes on in, say, a Shakespeare sonnet. And despite my decent grasp those fields, I can't produce much more than a mediocre sonnet--though I'm quite good at technical analyses of great poems. (And fifty years along, I have a handful of mediocre-plus non-sonnets.)
So I wonder--if I were to ask, say, Ira Gershwin or Larry Hart or Johnny Mercer about the prosodic and semantic machinery that drives their lovely, memorable lyrics, what would they say? (Stephen Sondheim, I suspect, might know exactly how to name the machineries he deployed.)Last edited by RLetson; 11-16-2022 at 10:59 PM.
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Good post. This bit seems to get to the heart of how I think of music theory:
It allows room for the less organized, personal kinds of theory outside of the Music School type of theory. Like Birelli knowing a 13 chord but not being able to name it to Music School type standards. Originally Posted by RLetson
So think about the above Chet story. He has theory. He listened to the tune, was able observe how it related to his own modelling, and could predict what would sound good before he tried it.
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Theory is also knowledge that is used beforehand.
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Did the 1st musician even know she was playing music?
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« Sol treize » peut-être? Originally Posted by John A.
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From the interview I posted yesterday and not many seem to have listened to: Originally Posted by bako
Bob Mover: “Gerry Mulligan said about Chet Baker once […]: ‘Chet knows everything about chord changes except their names.’”
BTW Bob Mover also names a theory book from 1941 that non-ear-only jazz players learned from which might at least partly answer a question that recently came up in the analysing Charlie Parker thread.
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Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
Your playing by ear would be informed by your previous reading: you were not simply responding to what you heard, but playing within a structure. Even if you were to wake up and find yourself in a band (like Dr. Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap), you would have all your knowledge and experience of playing to assist you, consciously and otherwise, in the musical choices you make.
Besides having a theory of music, we each of us also have a theory of mind: the human ability to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them. Notes on a stave are not just instructions for the musician, they are marks of the composer's thought. The musician plays them knowing the audience will hear them. The audience members will each have their own understanding of music, a theory – however crude or sophisticated it might be. We are none of us simply ear players or ear listeners.
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Good examples of complicated music genres that don't really use a theoretical approach are Gypsy Jazz and Flamenco. Most players there don't read music, have no idea about anything theoretical (especially Flamenco players, I've met some that didn't even know where one is on the rhythms they play, but.. could they play!).
As in the old days, their music gets learned by playing, singing, dancing and personal interaction. However, if you don't have that, say you are far away, you can't really learn.
As a teen, playing rock and Jazz, I tried to study advanced classical harmony. I learned a bunch of rules, but the playing and hearing part was never really there, so I never got something musical out of it. Hence I think theory is only useful when it follows hearing, and playing the material.
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you should give Partimento a shot. Very practical. Originally Posted by Alter
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The reciprocal is also true. If most musicians try to only ear things without any understanding or theoretical knowledge, they won't get anything musical out if it either. :P Originally Posted by Alter
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If we're being precise: the analogies between learning to speak and learning to play an instrument are just super weak. Barring a disability, we were built to speak. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
It is much more akin to learning to write, which does require more than a good ear and immersion because you have no innate ability to operate the instrument.
And even among very uneducated people simply speaking, you will find them correcting each other's "grammar". It may not be articulated in the way one would learn it in formal education, but everyone learns the "rules" to some degree.
Everyone systematizes their knowledge. Ear players know the norms of what they're playing. MAYBE they learned by repeated bouts of sifting through "That works" and "That's shit", but they eventually came up with a rule for themselves.
I think the issue with theory is that so much of it is useful for analysis, but it is treated as if it is to be used for "rules" or even that the method of analysis is the same one that the people creating the music used to create and perform, which it's pretty fair to say it was absolutely not. It's treated like orthodoxy and dogma.
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These are all solid points Originally Posted by LankyTunes
That's what I suspect. I am not certain it is the case and by it's nature it's hard to verify,Everyone systematizes their knowledge. Ear players know the norms of what they're playing. MAYBE they learned by repeated bouts of sifting through "That works" and "That's shit", but they eventually came up with a rule for themselves.
Indeed.I think the issue with theory is that so much of it is useful for analysis, but it is treated as if it is to be used for "rules" or even that the method of analysis is the same one that the people creating the music used to create and perform, which it's pretty fair to say it was absolutely not. It's treated like orthodoxy and dogma.
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