Can Someone Help me Understand Jazz?

[stevejazzx]

Originally Posted by IndianaGeo

Great idea Jeff. I don't know too many jazz tunes but here's one I found that I like that and that you all probably know as it seems to always be listed on lists of definitive guitar jazz tunes.. here it is.. Autumn Leaves:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAsEfhU2Ehg

IG

Shameless self promo here - sorry - but i just spent a lot of time inside Autumn Leaves recently - here is my version

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eQl5...fkIggc5FA_CdeA

I took inspiration for the phrasing and voicing from Eva Cassidy, Stole an octave lick from Joe Pass, used a half whole scale ala Django, the rest of the ideas were my own.....

/shameless self promo

[trion12]

Originally Posted by JanVigne

Seems we still need to see those flatted fifths, ninth's, eleventh's, etc as sourced from somewhere other than a PHD student's dissertation.

Yup, it's called the harmonic series - a natural physical phenomenon of a vibrating string or air column. That's where all our notes come from.

Aaron

[TomiPaldanius]

Originally Posted by stevejazzx

Shameless self promo here - sorry - but i just spent a lot of time inside Autumn Leaves recently - here is my version

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eQl5...fkIggc5FA_CdeA

I took inspiration for the phrasing and voicing from Eva Cassidy, Stole an octave lick from Joe Pass, used a half whole scale ala Django, the rest of the ideas were my own.....

/shameless self promo

That was great. Very musical. I am not usually (after very long classical education) too big fan of songs played with too much rubato. But this one has its purpose and works.

I usually start with rubato and add the rhythm at least at some part of the song.

You can see what I mean with Luis Bonfa's Morning of The Carnival.. I kind of take the same approach you did but not too long. It is like changing gear.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2QUk4Jkqnw

I don't consider my playing jazz at all but thread made me start learning more. I try the Autumn Leaves (=Still got the blues)

[stevejazzx]

Originally Posted by TomiPaldanius

That was great. Very musical. I am not usually (after very long classical education) too big fan of songs played with too much rubato. But this one has its purpose and works.

I usually start with rubato and add the rhythm at least at some part of the song.

You can see what I mean with Luis Bonfa's Morning of The Carnival.. I kind of take the same approach you did but not too long. It is like changing gear.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2QUk4Jkqnw

I don't consider my playing jazz at all but thread made me start learning more. I try the Autumn Leaves (=Still got the blues)

Thanks Tomi

Fabulous arrangement of MDC there.

Steve

[JanVigne]

"Seems we still need to see those flatted fifths, ninth's, eleventh's, etc as sourced from somewhere other than a PHD student's dissertation."




"Yup, it's called the harmonic series - a natural physical phenomenon of a vibrating string or air column. That's where all our notes come from."






Strangely, that response sounds as if it came from some PHD student's dissertation.


I believe my point has been missed.

[mr. beaumont]

Okay...so here's leaves...just kinda went for it and painted myself into a few corners...tried to just be in the moment...OP, take a listen, and if there's parts you dig let me know the times...I'll post an "afterthought analysis" later...I did almost no thinking here, just a lot of hearing, seeing, reacting...which means there's some CLAAAAAMS

Anyway, enjoy, and like I said, I'll break it down too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBN4...e_gdata_player

[IndianaGeo]

Originally Posted by mr. beaumont

Okay...so here's leaves...just kinda went for it and painted myself into a few corners...tried to just be in the moment...OP, take a listen, and if there's parts you dig let me know the times...I'll post an "afterthought analysis" later...I did almost no thinking here, just a lot of hearing, seeing, reacting...which means there's some CLAAAAAMS

Anyway, enjoy, and like I said, I'll break it down too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBN4...e_gdata_player

Well Jeff, I'm pretty speechless here. Wonderful playing. I mean, I couldn't begin to ask what parts I dug most... because I dug the whole thing really. I suppose, though, I'd like to know at some high level what the chord progression is and how you go about chord substitution and those sweet melodic fills between the chords. What you've played there, again, I can't really get my head around it. It all looks so impossible.

What training have you had? Are you self taught? Were you in jazz band back in high school? What inspired you to focus on jazz guitar? Anyway, thanks a ton for putting in the time to play Autumn Leaves and share the video. You've really gone above and beyond the call. Much appreciated.

IG

[mr. beaumont]

Hey, Geo, thanks...

actually, I lose the form a few times and a lot of the playing is slop! Still getting used to "pickless" playing.

So, my background...started playing at 12...rock stuff...took lessons for 6 years...did a little classical. Took theory classes in college, played in pit bands for musicals...jazz training mostly on my own, with a great mentor, who wasn't a guitar player, but a piano player. Ran the studio where I teach lessons two days a week...I'm a full time high school art teacher, and I run the school's small jazz/r&b/gospel band. Most of the jazz stuff I know I learned "on the job," sink or swim type stuff. I read music pretty well, but do a lot by ear.

This tune...pretty straightforward...a mostly diatonic tune...kind of.

I'm playing it in E minor...it's also common to hear in Gm. The original and gypsy jazz key is Em. Gm is more the standard for boppers. Gotta know both.

Generally, I'm using diatonic extensions on the non-dominant chords...the Em can be an Em7, 9, 11...same for the Am. The beginning suggests more of a G major sound, so I use the #11 on the Cmaj when it pops up (always cool on a IV chord).

The B7 chord is the fun one in this tune...most charts will say B7b9...any time I see an altered 9th, I try all other alterations too...b5, #5 (b13), and #9 too...chances are, they sound good too...really opens up options.

here, I'm using mostly arpeggios and chromatic passing tones. On that B7 I use both harmonic minor and melodic minor ideas-- both from E...but instead of visualizing a melodic minor scale I really see a B7b13 chord...

that's a start...feel free to ask about specific stuff...I'll try to figure out what I did

[trion12]

Originally Posted by JanVigne

"Seems we still need to see those flatted fifths, ninth's, eleventh's, etc as sourced from somewhere other than a PHD student's dissertation."




"Yup, it's called the harmonic series - a natural physical phenomenon of a vibrating string or air column. That's where all our notes come from."






Strangely, that response sounds as if it came from some PHD student's dissertation.


I believe my point has been missed.

I don't think I missed your point. You asked where "those flatted fifths, ninth's, eleventh's, etc" come from.
I answered that they come from real world physics, (just like octaves, 3rds 5ths and 7ths do).
There is nothing inherently special about "flatted fifths, ninth's, eleventh's, etc." It's just that jazz players tend to make use of them more than most other styles (at least since the 1940's).

I don't have a PHD, but I do have a music degree.

Aaron

[mr. beaumont]

They also come from simple extended harmony and basic voice leading.

just sayin. If we make jazz a mystery, it remains one. But it's pretty concrete.

[Howard Klepper]

Originally Posted by JonPR

But the main thing that separates jazz from other western music is the governing role of improvisation. Improvisation is not just one element of jazz, it's really the whole point. Without improvisation, it isn't jazz. (Although there's a valid debate about big band jazz...)

Classical music - in the baroque era - also included improvisation, and of course folk music of all kinds is partly improvised. But in traditional western music education (esp of the classical kind) improvisation was practically outlawed. You weren't supposed to take a Mozart or Beethoven piece and just jam on it, make up new tunes to the chord progression; that was emphatically NOT the point! The Genius-Master had a Vision to impart to us lesser folk, and woe betide anyone who thought they could mess with it or improve on it.

Actually, improvisation was an integral part of classical music performance up to the mid 19th Century and continued into the 20th Century. It currently is enjoying a comeback. It is emphasized far more in jazz, but I think you may be overstating it being the main thing that distinguishes jazz from other western music. And most big band jazz is written out; usually with some solos that are improvised, but not always.

Originally Posted by JonPR

Quote:
Originally Posted by Howard Klepper View Post
"Regarding rhythm, the essence of jazz is that it swings, and that means that it's based on eighth notes with the note that falls on the beat (the downbeat) getting a longer time than the one that falls off the beat (the upbeat) even though both are written as eighth notes. This also generates movement--it has a kind of loping along feel. Many people think that the swing feel is what sets jazz apart from other music, more than anything else. Whether music that does not employ swing rhythm should be called jazz is a subject of semantic debate. Don't worry about it."

Agreed again.
Hal Galper makes good points about jazz rhythm - ie where it comes from:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2XnB5G6oSc

Speaking of jazz rhythm, here's a worthwhile way to spend a minute. I saw Duke do this routine at a performance around 1971. What a charming man.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBeHQtJm5UI

Originally Posted by JonPR

Quote:
Originally Posted by Howard Klepper View Post
"Another thing, not needed for hearing jazz: there was/is no blues without the dominant 7th chord, which comes from white guy music."
Not sure what point you're making here about hearing jazz, but I disagree on the other part (maybe I'm misunderstanding you?).

I was responding to the comment (apparently since edited out--I can't find it) that jazz theory is a bunch of intellectual white guys talking about why the blues works. And I said the comment was NOT about something needed for hearing jazz.

Originally Posted by JonPR

Of course it depends how we define "Blues", but IMO it exists quite happily without the dominant 7th chord, indeed without any chords at all.
I agree (of course) the chord comes from "white guy music". But blues - or at least its essence - existed before they thought of adding white guy's chords to it.
Naturally, blues as we know it now is hard to imagine without its collection of dom7s. The dom7 chord does happen to express something of the blues sound - it was certainly a useful add-on to the "black guy music" it began as.
Here's some blues with no dom7 chord:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI2CK1u2wu8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIaPkunqSWs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH4metotdRk

- of course I guess one can argue that these aren't "blues" as such, but "folk" or "gospel" or some such: examples of the kinds of music that evolved into "blues". I'd be OK with that. One could actually define "blues" as "a music employing non-functioning dom7 chords" - ie, no dom7s? it ain't blues, it must be something else - and solve the question!

I don't think its a matter of arbitrary definition to say that work songs and field hollers that go back to the 17th Century, and were being transcribed by the mid-19th Century, are not blues, although they are among its precursors

Originally Posted by stevejazzx

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.]

Not so. Miles was a great bebop player and played with the great bebop players. Then he led a band with great bebop players in it, before going to a more horizontal style. It's unlikely that he spent a minute in his life feeling musically inferior.

Originally Posted by TomiPaldanius

Only thing I know about jazz (well almost) is that it is basically the first American music art form and was developed by ear players who modified ragtime tunes by jazzing them up. Basically all great things have been developed by ear players who were considered "low class" for the highly educated music readers and composers.

One of the myths about jazz is that it was developed by musical primitives who learned everything by ear. It was developed by skilled musicians, most of whom had formal training and read music very well.

I'm reminded of the character Coalhouse Walker in EL Doctorow's historical novel "Ragtime." He is a proficient, classically schooled pianist who can sightread anything, but pretends not to read music because white people don't want to believe that black people can understand music that way. There is a good kernel of truth in this.

[stevejazzx]

Originally Posted by Howard Klepper

Not so. Miles was a great bebop player and played with the great bebop players. Then he led a band with great bebop players in it, before going to a more horizontal style. It's unlikely that he spent a minute in his life feeling musically inferior.

Huh?
On what do you base your reply?
These are Miles' own words.
They are on the liner notes for kind of blue version I have.
Miles said (slightly paraphrasing): Kids keep coming to me with these crazy charts and complex progressions - I'm not into that I just wanna play.

Miles did feel inferior asking other players how they played so fast.
Whether or not he should have felt inferior is open to debate of course.

Check the facts before commenting.

Steve

[JanVigne]

"I don't have a PHD, but I do have a music degree."


And during your education they did not explain how "The Devil's Note" or "Devil's Interval" came to be banned from liturgical music? Of course mathematics - not physics per se - dictates how musical notes are defined - not created. The existence of, say, a "C" note is a manmade creation as defined in the Western world dating back (mostly) to the Greeks. The note between a "C" and a "D" has been mathematically defined by the frequency of vibrations per second which we experience at our ear drum. Under perfect circumstances the wriggling of our ear drum is in unison with the number of sinewaves which compress and rarefy the air in response to a string being struck, plucked, bowed or a formed tube being excited by our breath or even a percussive surface being excited into movement. We can measure those vibrations and declare a signal to be "this" musical note, or "that" musical note - but we have no such definition for those "none of the above" frequencies which exist between "this" note and "that" note.

It is the "none of the above" which I was referring to when I said, " ... we still need to see those flatted fifths, ninth's, eleventh's, etc as sourced from somewhere other than a PHD student's dissertation."



Where did the Devil's Note come from? Where else? The Church. Those notes which create an emotive response, not a mathematical equation, in our perceptions are what the Devil's Note was all about. We, as humans, respond not to the mathematics of the signal but to the context of the musical note which comes now, and now and now ... The emotional connection to these auditory inputs are so strong, the Church felt it necessary to delete it from existence. Which, of course, is impossible.


As I understand the history of blues and jazz, the musical styles are most commonly associated with and grew from the slave history of the US. African slaves unfamiliar with Western style music were denied the use of musical instruments since it was assumed the "odd sounding" music they created would be used as a subversive tool which might overthrow their "owners". Left largely with only their voices, the slaves sang songs which came from somewhere other than Western music. Whoops, hollers and yells, done in call and response were common to this language. Polyphonic rhythms were employed which, when combined with the notes not found in Western music, formed the strange "blue notes" which caught Mr. Handy's Western educated ear on that train platform. Specifically, what attracted Mr Handy's attention was the slide guitar technique being used by the player. Many "authorities" feel the slide guitar (with its origins in mostly Pacific nation traditions) is the closest Western instrument to the human voice due to its ability to create notes which are the "none of the above" frequencies which are the essence of blues, ragtime and jazz music. Listening to the historic recordings of early blues/jazz artists provides an excellent example of notes which have no definition in traditional Western music. Neither sharped nor flatted but not "natural", they are the Devil's Note/Blue Note we accept as the basis for the blues scale. Yet they are more than that and they are not a single musical note nor a single frequency. They are those notes in between which, when Mr. Lomax first brought his original field recordings to the general public, stirred a frenetic response in music educators and critics to explain what they were hearing. Blues and Jazz existed long before some college professor or music critic called it either name. To ultimately understand blues or jazz, you must begin long before the names were stuck to them by Western educated ears.

To my knowledge - and I stand to be corrected here - there is no agreed upon definition of the individual notes which have made a music originating in other than Western voices as either "this" or "that". They are simply "none of the above". Unable to be reached by most fretted, stopped or beaten instruments found in traditional Western music, they are the creation of the performer seeking to emulate the emotional effects of field hollers and whoops originating in a voice unfamiliar with Western music's mathematical restrictions.


At least, that's the story I have grown up with. I'd say though, every time that story was related to me, the qualifier was added, "This is the best I can explain it ... "

[iim7V7IM7]

Miles definitely was a bebop guy in the mid-late 1940s. As I recall, I think he replaced Dizzy in the Parker Quintet. I used to have some old Norman Granz LPs where he definitely was playing bebop.

Originally Posted by stevejazzx

Huh?
On what do you base your reply?
These are Miles' own words.
They are on the liner notes for kind of blue version I have.
Miles said (slightly paraphrasing): Kids keep coming to me with these crazy charts and complex progressions - I'm not into that I just wanna play.

Miles did feel inferior asking other players how they played so fast.
Whether or not he should have felt inferior is open to debate of course.

Check the facts before commenting.

Steve

[Howard Klepper]

Originally Posted by stevejazzx

Huh?
On what do you base your reply?
These are Miles' own words.
They are on the liner notes for kind of blue version I have.
Miles said (slightly paraphrasing): Kids keep coming to me with these crazy charts and complex progressions - I'm not into that I just wanna play.

Miles did feel inferior asking other players how they played so fast.
Whether or not he should have felt inferior is open to debate of course.

Check the facts before commenting.

Steve

I just looked at my CD version of Kind of Blue and it had Bill Evans' original liner notes, which said nothing of the sort. My original LP is buried pretty deep in a closet. Perhaps you can quote what Miles himself said about feeling inferior and not being able to play fast bebop? If it's in his own words, I'll apologize. But since Charlie Parker had Miles replace Dizzy in his quintet, and Miles was a part of the NYC jam scene with all the bebop greats in the late 40's, since he led a group with John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly as his sidemen, etc., it would come as a shock to me.

Miles was once quoted in the Jazz Review in the late 50's as saying that he thought chordal complexity was getting "too thick" and that guys gave him charts and "I can't play them." I think he meant he was disgusted by them. I've never seen anyplace where he was quoted as saying that bebop was too fast for him to play, or that he felt inferior to anybody.

But as I say, quote me Miles, as you say in his own words, saying he felt inferior or that he couldn't play fast bebop and I will apologize. Sources required, not just your paraphrase. If you can't, well . . .