“Complete course in modern harmony, composition and orchestration” from 1948

[Jimmy Smith]

I think you're confusing what I said. I said it's both, didn't I? Musicianship and theory. Do you have proof Django and Louis were feral? I doubt it.

[Christian Miller]

I think you're confusing what I said. I said it's both, didn't I? Musicianship and theory. Do you have proof Django and Louis were feral? I doubt it.

TBH I find a lot of what you say to be confusing to me, because I'm not always sure how you are using terms, and what your working definitions are. Theory and Musicianship kind of mean different things to different people. Did someone who couldn't read but had great ears like Hendrix have good musicianship for instance? Some people would say yes, some no.

I added a bit more context in my last post that may have been after you responded, if it interests. It's a little long, so fair dos if not, but it outlines my thinking, where we may agree and disagree, and my points re Django and Louis.

Hopefully I've set that out in a way that's reasonably clear.

Right time for me to stop procrastinating and actually do something.

[James W]

Identifying Parker's motifs doesn't by definition make them all conceived aurally does it? They could have been conceived aurally and theoretically.

'Could have been' is the important phrase here - and that would include conceiving them solely aurally.

Look at the bridge to scrapple from the apple. It is all composed of either chord scales, enclosures/ chromatic approaches to chord tones, or licks composed of chord tones or straight arpeggios.

Bar 1 and 2 are all chord scale. Bar 3 is a chord tone lick. Bar 4 is all chord scale. He literally only went down the bebop scale from the root to the 3rd. Bar 5 is the chord scale and an enclosure. Bar 6 is a chord tone lick including a straight arpeggio. Bar 7 is the chord scale into a chord tone lick in bar 8.

But that's not evidence that he used theory.. Sure.

Once again, you are confusing the analytical concepts with which we now think about the music with how Bird created his music. I suggest you read Carl Woideck's book on Parker, which Litterick quoted above.

[James W]

If Bird was 'using music theory' then, so were these guys.

Your analysis of Bird BTW is similar to what I would do, and ask my students to do. It's a reasonable way to go about it IMHO.

But it's one thing to make that analysis and then state confidentially that that was what was going on on in the players head when they played it. That's a leap. I'm not saying you are definitely wrong in the case of Bird, but it's even harder to make that case for Django (who couldn't read or write music, and may well have been illiterate) or Louis (who probably wasn't learning to improvise jazz solos on changes from a book, given he invented the practice.)

In any case the point is, it is a leap of faith to say 'I'm analysing the notes this way so that must be the way the player conceived of them.' You may be right, but it's not a slam dunk. Some people are just very good at music, and can hear the notes they want to play, that happen to be, chord tones, extensions, scales, enclosures etc etc.

If you do enough practice you may get to this point too.

I do think you switch your defintion of 'music theory' a lot. So you may as well just say music is the same thing as music theory and be done with it. In which case music theory is this Platonic thing that exists 'out there' and every musician intuits it when they play. That's not an uncommon philosophy among players actually.

However, if you want to make a more specific and bounded definition of music theory such as 'a set of tools by which we can analyse music and learn from it' than the statement Bird played using theory doesn't really make sense by that particular definition. Which of course you may not accept.

So to meaningfully use the term 'music theory', one needs to choose one meaning and stick to it. Alternatively, the term 'music theory' may be too vague to be helpful here, so I'll avoid the term as much as I can.

These points seem to follow:
- If you mean 'Parker makes sense from the point of view of music theory analysis' I would say that this is largely, but not completely true (there are some exceptions - take my Celerity/Celebrity example).
- If you want to say 'Parker knew his scales, chord tones, enclosures etc and practiced them' I'm not absolutely 100% but I think that's pretty likely.
- If you want to say 'Bird learned jazz out of a theory book' I think that's probably wrong for a number of reasons evidenced in bios of Bird and musicological literature on his music.
- And I would further say that it's definitely wrong in the case of Django and Louis anyway for the reasons I've given above, and those would be the cases you'd need to address as well.

One reason why I (and most people AFAIK) think Bird picked up jazz from recordings and from hearing it played by great musicians in Kansas City (like Prez) is because to learn jazz of any kind you have to learn to swing and phrase the music in a convincing jazz way. It's the way professional and aspiring professional jazzers continue to learn today. For example, if you give the charts we posted to a classical violinist, they'll read the notes but it won't sound like jazz.

So it follows
- it's one thing to be able to construct melodies over chords using the resources you identified, it's another thing to be able to improvise jazz.

Just trying to walk you through the nuances of the argument. I've always thought you are right on some points, but make other assertions that either I do;'t quite understand or that I don't think the evidence to support.

Indeed.

[Litterick]

"Scrapple from the Apple" is based on the chords of "Honeysuckle Rose" and those of "I Got Rhythm". Thomas Owens analysed an extract from one of Parker's recordings of the song for his thesis (Owens, Thomas. Charlie Parker: Techniques of Improvisation. PhD thesis, UCLA, 1974), along with extracts from three other Parker recordings. Owens found seventeen motives in these four recordings that are found throughout Parker's music (Owens, p30).

Owens also addresses the nature of Parker's improvisation:

This evidence might lead to the conclusion that Parker's music is monotonous, unduly repetitive, and uninteresting. In fact, the opposite is true. After spending many hundreds of hours listening carefully to his music, I still find his improvisations to be surprising, full of variety, and exciting. To be sure, each piece contains much that is familiar. But no two choruses are exactly alike, even among the hundreds of blues choruses that are preserved. The mix of familiar motives is always different and some phrases, or portions of phrases, are always unfamiliar. Each new chorus provided him an opportunity, which he invariably took, to arrange his stock of motives in a different order, or to modify a motive by augmenting or diminishing it, by displacing it metrically, or by adding or subtracting notes. Such was the nature of improvisation to Parker, just as it probably has been to every mature improvising artist in any musical tradition around the world (Owens, p35).

[Marinero]

"you quoted some things about Barry Harris from dictionaries." Bophead

No, B, in his own words in the video about "Ands." Why don't you watch the video? It's in the first part of the Barry Harris thread.
Perhaps, his words will dissuade you from your subliminal animus and incorrect information.
Marinero

[Marinero]

"'I'm analysing the notes this way so that must be the way the player conceived of them.' You may be right, but it's not a slam dunk. Some people are just very good at music, and can hear the notes they want to play, that happen to be, chord tones, extensions, scales, enclosures etc etc." ChristianMiller

Hi, C,
I was listening to one of Parker's greatest hits albums the other day and tune after tune, I was following what he was doing with scales, chords, inversions, etc. It's what I did, in my own way, when I played the horn. I think your above comment is a bit of a stretch for a knowledgeable musician like yourself who can hear exactly what I hear when Parker plays the horn. To infer that CP did these things , naturally, without any formal knowledge, is simply not believable nor reasonable.
Marinero

[djg]

Also, by analyzing his solos which I will post, it seems likely that he used theoretical guidelines to build his solos since his lines follow these guidelines.

i've been to france recently. you won't believe it. young kids, not older than 5 or 6, totally fluent in french. i checked my grammar book and those kids had all the rules, cases, declinations, adverbs, etc down to a tee. they must have eaten up those books.

[princeplanet]

...
Owens also addresses the nature of Parker's improvisation:

.... Each new chorus provided him an opportunity, which he invariably took, to arrange his stock of motives in a different order, or to modify a motive by augmenting or diminishing it, by displacing it metrically, or by adding or subtracting notes. Such was the nature of improvisation to Parker, just as it probably has been to every mature improvising artist in any musical tradition around the world (Owens, p35).

That is what I always took to be the final word on Parker's mysterious methodology. Not a lot of theory is needed for it, just a really supple musical imagination, a lightning fast ear and some thoroughly practiced chops to keep up with it.

It's not the prefab cells that make Bird a true natural wonder, but how he disguises them in amongst totally unique and spontaneous other material, to create perfect and quite remarkable "compositions" in real time, every time! I've seen dissertations on Getz, Stitt, even Chet Baker, all of them titans in their own way, but Parker was just on another level.

The more we listen to the greats, the more we can appreciate what sets the exceptional greats apart. Rollins, Wes, Hubbard, early Martino, guys like these were frickin' geniuses, in the true literal sense. Freaks of Nature. We're never gonna understand them, just as other geniuses can't understand them. Heck, these geniuses don't even understand themselves! And I'd just like to add that it's precisely evidence of such genius that I have any respect at all for Humankind (that and a handful of books, a few paintings and a coupla films ) ...

[princeplanet]

i've been to france recently. you won't believe it. young kids, not older than 5 or 6, totally fluent in french. i checked my grammar book and those kids had all the rules, cases, declinations, adverbs, etc down to a tee. they must have eaten up those books.

Hehe, post of the day

[Jimmy Smith]

it's one thing to make that analysis and then state confidentially that that was what was going on on in the players head when they played it. That's a leap. I'm not saying you are definitely wrong in the case of Bird, but it's even harder to make that case for Django (who couldn't read or write music, and may well have been illiterate) or Louis (who probably wasn't learning to improvise jazz solos on changes from a book, given he invented the practice.)

I'm not trying to state my opinion as a fact, but I think I provide pretty good evidence for my stance. Such as when Bill said he used theory to make his jazz. That isn't a leap.

In any case the point is, it is a leap of faith to say 'I'm analysing the notes this way so that must be the way the player conceived of them.' You may be right, but it's not a slam dunk. Some people are just very good at music, and can hear the notes they want to play, that happen to be, chord tones, extensions, scales, enclosures etc etc.

I'm saying I think that is the more likely scenario given the research I've done, including talk to the most prominent living jazz organist specifically about it. However, I acknowledge that I don't have proof - and neither do you.

I do think you switch your defintion of 'music theory' a lot. So you may as well just say music is the same thing as music theory and be done with it. In which case music theory is this Platonic thing that exists 'out there' and every musician intuits it when they play. That's not an uncommon philosophy among players actually.

I think you purposely try to be confusing about the definition of music theory! How could you not know what theory is? It's guidelines about making music that can be communicated in language away from the instrument. While musicianship is music language.

However, if you want to make a more specific and bounded definition of music theory such as 'a set of tools by which we can analyse music and learn from it' than the statement Bird played using theory doesn't really make sense by that particular definition. Which of course you may not accept.

No, I absolutely do not believe theory is only post hoc, although it can be. I think it's obvious that theory existed in all time periods in question even though there would be varying degrees of use between individual players.

So to meaningfully use the term 'music theory', one needs to choose one meaning and stick to it. Alternatively, the term 'music theory' may be too vague to be helpful here, so I'll avoid the term as much as I can.

I have stuck to it. It isn't necessary to try to break down basic terminology. For the purpose of discussion, if someone wants to refer to different parts of theory such as post golden age pedagogy or working knowledge that the golden age players used, then that's totally fine!

These points seem to follow:
- If you mean 'Parker makes sense from the point of view of music theory analysis' I would say that this is largely, but not completely true (there are some exceptions - take my Celerity/Celebrity example).

Agree

- If you want to say 'Parker knew his scales, chord tones, enclosures etc and practiced them' I'm not absolutely 100% but I think that's pretty likely.

Agree

- If you want to say 'Bird learned jazz out of a theory book' I think that's probably wrong for a number of reasons evidenced in bios of Bird and musicological literature on his music.

I think he probably learned some theory out of a book that helped with his playing given what he said about schooling, but a lot of it was his musicianship development or picking up oral knowledge.

- And I would further say that it's definitely wrong in the case of Django and Louis anyway for the reasons I've given above, and those would be the cases you'd need to address as well.

I think they probably knew something along the lines of music guidelines but I wouldn't make any claim given I've done no research on them.

One reason why I (and most people AFAIK) think Bird picked up jazz from recordings and from hearing it played by great musicians in Kansas City (like Prez) is because to learn jazz of any kind you have to learn to swing and phrase the music in a convincing jazz way. It's the way professional and aspiring professional jazzers continue to learn today. For example, if you give the charts we posted to a classical violinist, they'll read the notes but it won't sound like jazz.

I agree. I've always said it's musicianship and theory. I have NEVER said it's only theory.

[Jimmy Smith]

i've been to france recently. you won't believe it. young kids, not older than 5 or 6, totally fluent in french. i checked my grammar book and those kids had all the rules, cases, declinations, adverbs, etc down to a tee. they must have eaten up those books.

Humans lose that ability to pick up a language solely by rote around school age. Are you saying all musicians learn jazz by age 5?

[Jimmy Smith]

'Could have been' is the important phrase here - and that would include conceiving them solely aurally. Once again, you are confusing the analytical concepts with which we now think about the music with how Bird created his music. I suggest you read Carl Woideck's book on Parker, which Litterick quoted above.

Once again, I'm not confusing anything. I don't have proof of what the musicians were thinking, and neither do you. However, I've asked my teacher who is the most prominent living jazz organist, Tony Monaco, if he thinks his colleagues use theory and he said yes. Some learn their guidelines more academically and some through a more natural process.

[James W]

Humans lose that ability to pick up a language by rote around school age. Are you saying everyone learns music by age 5?

No he's saying some supremely musically gifted individuals can spontaneously and intuitively invent, improvise and play melodies around chords without having had access to theory that specifically deals with that topic.

Also I would question your comment about acquisition of foreign language - I knew people who started a language at uni and became pretty competent with a few years - and rote learning is an unavoidable aspect of that at whatever age.

[Jimmy Smith]

No he's saying some supremely musically gifted individuals can spontaneously and intuitively invent, improvise and play melodies around chords without having had access to theory that specifically deals with that topic.

I understand that. But most don't.

Also I would question your comment about acquisition of foreign language - I knew people who started a language at uni and became pretty competent with a few years - and rote learning is an unavoidable aspect of that at whatever age.

In addition to their academic learning of memorizing vocab and verb conjugations, for example.

This is a basic fact about human development.. that kids' brains change and they lose that ability to just assimilate a language only by rote.

[James W]

I understand that. But most don't.

Good, we're getting somewhere.

This is a basic fact about human development.. that kids' brains change and they lose that ability to just assimilate a language only by rote.

Seems like you need to look up the word 'rote'.

[princeplanet]

...

I agree. I've always said it's musicianship and theory. I have NEVER said it's only theory.

Oh don't be such a bore, I liked these threads better when we were disagreeing with you.

Let's try a fresher angle, ok, how's this - Parker wasn't great because because of theory, and he wasn't great because of his musicianship.

It was the heroin.

[James W]

Once again, I'm not confusing anything. I don't have proof of what the musicians were thinking, and neither do you. However, I've asked my teacher who is the most prominent living jazz organist, Tony Monaco, if he thinks his colleagues use theory and he said yes. Some learn their guidelines more academically and some through a more natural process.

Looks to me like you've moved the goal posts in this debate. We were discussing Charlie Parker, now you've drifted onto what your teacher's colleagues do...

[Jimmy Smith]

He came up in the 70s and played with some of the greats. I asked him if they use theory and he said yes.

[starjasmine]

Please forgive me for jumping in without having read the entire thread, but in answer to the original question, I've always heard that Diz taught jazz theory to a lot of the guys in his band. I can't recall the specifics but there have been interviews - maybe even one with Bird himself - where more than one player stated that Diz taught them jazz harmony, that he would hold "school" for his band after hours, after gigs.

SJ

[Jimmy Smith]

Oh don't be such a bore, I liked these threads better when we were disagreeing with you.

Let's try a fresher angle, ok, how's this - Parker wasn't great because because of theory, and he wasn't great because of his musicianship.

It was the heroin.

[djg]

Humans lose that ability to pick up a language solely by rote around school age. Are you saying all musicians learn jazz by age 5?

i learned to speak another language fluently as an adult when i lived abroad for a few years. never looked at a grammar book in my life. it's not a big deal. there are so many ways to learn.

[Christian Miller]

Please forgive me for jumping in without having read the entire thread, but in answer to the original question, I've always heard that Diz taught jazz theory to a lot of the guys in his band. I can't recall the specifics but there have been interviews - maybe even one with Bird himself - where more than one player stated that Diz taught them jazz harmony, that he would hold "school" for his band after hours, after gigs.

SJ

yes me too, I mentioned that somewhere in the bowels of some thread no right thinking person will have read. Mike Longo talked about this for instance. Along other things Diz was a big fan of getting horn players to play piano iirc. (Good idea for guitarists too imo)

bear in mind if you are hanging with Diz you certainly can already play… it sounds like this would have been advanced training in the new chords and ideas bebop was making commonplace.

[Litterick]

Budd Johnson recalled Tadd Dameron as one of Gillespie's visitors in early 1944:

Tadd Dameron at that time was one of Dizzy’s students. Tadd would say,“Well, Dizzy, I’m making an arrangement for so-and-so and look... and I’m doing this. Dizzy would say, “Look, don’t use these chords. Lemme show you what to do.’’ And Tadd would get up from the piano. And Dizzy would sit at the piano and show him the changes. Actually, Tadd would have never been able to write the way he did if it hadn’t been for Dizzy Gillespie.

Combs, Paul.
Dameronia : The Life and Music of Tadd Dameron.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012, 39.

[Bop Head]

In an episode of Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz you can hear Dizzy explain some things on the piano and hear him play ’Round Midnight. The whole episode is worth a listen.