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I don't know if this will help or confuse you further or just bore you but here's an old blog post i wrote - warning: long!
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Let me tell you a story.
I was 20 years old and had been taking classical guitar lessons for since I was 14. I was in a bar with some friends and the barman had put on a John Coltrane CD. JC was playing a solo over ‘My favourite things’ and it sounded so obtuse to us that a friend asked “you like Jazz don’t you? “Well can explain what all that noise is about?” I couldn’t. For me it wasn’t beautiful then, it was only confusing. Coltrane’s tenor sax was ripping up the floorboards between the chords, something was going on but I couldn’t tell what. You see classical guitar study, at the formative years at least, is largely diatonic. Also, it’s hard with a solo instrument play out of key in such a way that the boundaries between what is dissonant and what is diatonic become fudged. The bulk of 19th century guitar composers were all schooled very much in the Classical Viennese tradition and as a result were all largely tonal. Consequently I played sweet little guitar miniatures from the likes of Fernando Sor and Francisco Taregga. I had been trying to get into Jazz but couldn’t quite make the transition. One part of me felt like I should find it easier as I was supposed to be a musician but another part of me sensed that I was missing something. I mean Billy Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis were all great, those old blues/jazz crossover legends that became the first well known Jazz artists were what we’d probably describe today as easy listening rather than mean, straight ahead Jazz. It took Charlie Parker in the mid 40’s to mix things up a bit. From this point onwards Jazz would become, in part, progressively more difficult to listen to. But that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, it was simply evolving. By the time Miles Davis was laying down the backing tracks for Kind of Blue he already felt that there was degree of over complication creeping into Jazz. This accounts for the relative chordal simplicity of Kind of blue. Davis wanted to improvise, he didn’t to perform the kind of gymnastics that Parker had been up to a decade before and in some ways he felt inferior because fast bebop was out of his reach. By the time the 60’s had come jazz music was already accommodating some very avant garde sounds. Ornette Coleman was making his way towards a free jazz movement and consequently, if inadvertently yet albeit inevitably, towards increased sophistication and complexity. I’m still coming to terms with a lot of his music!
By the time I was 25 I had taken Django Reinhardt, Wes Montgomery and Pat Metheny under my belt; gravitating towards guitarists in order to simplify the process. The latter 2 would slowly ease me into understanding more modern Jazz and looking back I realize I caught a lucky break. Wes’s music was always beautiful even when it was complex. He had a way of handling music that transcended the fussiness of the Jazz ‘sound’ yet retained its purity. Again here was a very lyrical musician who felt he wasn’t good enough for heavier jazz. He turned down an offer to join Coltrane's band because again, he thought he wouldn’t have the necessary chops. For me the calculation was starting to get easier. I realised all that the stuff Wes wasn’t into was the kind of stuff other players were stuck in. But did this make all other players somehow ‘bad’? Not at all, it was just that I hadn’t reached that understanding yet, my ear was still slowly tuning in that complex sound. It never came naturally to me; everything was a slog but the point where I fell in love with Wes’s music was the point I knew I’d fallen in love in with Jazz as a whole. It was like they had purposefully given me the easy stuff to get me hooked...if Wes was cocaine then there was only the Heroin of Coltrane, Monk and Coleman to come. Metheny’s music threw a bit of curveball at me to be honest. He offered such a mixed bag of jazz fusion crossover that I would regularly forget that I was listening to a guitarist. He could go from a real jazz sound to a cheesy acoustic piece with soulful slash chords, you know those big major 11th’s and 13th’s the kind of sound you might hear in good pop music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn5Nri-HMnE
I went back to Coltrane again. I started listening to some random songs. Yeah something was clicking with me but I wasn’t sure exactly what. I was bit lost from time to time and some of it just sounded out of key, not outside playing but actually off key. I felt that I would just never get it; not like the anoraks’ who hung around the outside of jazz clubs in the 60’s and 70’s scatting and humming their favorite bits. Not like some of my jazz colleagues who I had recently started to pay the odd gig with. Not like the guys in jazz magazines (the real ones :-) who didn’t even play yet lived only for Jazz. I was resigned to taking a back seat in the world of Jazz appreciation. I felt somewhat defeated.
During the years until I hit 30 I had a real love hate relationship with Jazz because I had started to play it in earnest. I thought of myself as a reasonably accomplished musician but I had no idea how far I needed to go. During a long break in period of about 5 years I eventually got there. There were moments of awe from me as I witnessed my fellow musicians play complex heads for the first time just by following the sheet music, music they had never seen before that moment. After hitting every note cleanly and evenly from a difficult bop head the solo was easy, at this stage they were flying. For me however, soloing still presented great problems. I was very much stuck in a mode, excuse the pun. My early training on guitar was converting what had previously been good habits into bad habits and the shapes and phrases that were natural for me all needed to be forgotten. I had to really concentrate to get by when other guys could really play with the tune and still sound great. I guess they were just talented that way, I was never jealous as such only curious to reconcile my difficulty with their ease. A lot came down to ‘ear’. Have you ever heard anyone say ‘I play by ear’? Most of the time that means they don’t read music but in the case of bonefide jazzmen it simply meant that they ‘listened’. Listening for them was natural; it meant understanding everything that was happening in really comfortable way. The sounds went in and were immediately and without difficulty understood, analyzed and enjoyed.
Despite my inability to play at a very high level with these guys I was at least starting to hear more of what was going on. The bassline really resonated with me and told me where the song was during a long 32 bar solo I could hear still the opening phrasing echoing around there somewhere and somehow, even though the chordal motif was just repeating, the music was moving forward, it was getting to a head and all with me at the helm soloing. That’s an incredible experience and it makes you feel like you can really do something interesting.
I went back to Coltrane once more. I downloaded My Favourite Things, about six different versions of it. I listened.
It blew me away. What he was doing there was special, I finally understood. I could hear the drummer grooving, the bassist was moving and John was blowing ferociously all the sounds of a man with some longing in his bones. There it was this beautiful noise but not as before. Now really I could really understand when he was in key when is out, I could see where he going with certain phrases, if was leaning towards a bridge or signalling for one more round of chords to finish. I could hear the chords between chords the constant leading tone, the Mokesque chromaticism and those driving Parkeresque arpeggios. The notes, slightly out of tune, purposefully against the beat, syncopated yet always moving forward, following the progressions furiously with such intent and passion that I often wonder now how I ever heard it any differently.
Some things are worth the perseverance and this was definitely one of them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kotK9FNEYU