More unPC jazz
“It is only by imitating and sounding exactly like someone else that we find our own voices.”
This is prevailing jazz orthodoxy at most jazz camps and schools. The deal is, you transcribe like crazy, get to sounding JUST like the original, and shake and bake, you turn 25 and presto you are you. Probably seems incredibly counterintuitive to non-jazzers. That’s cause it is, and you can go back to early recordings of everyone from Louis to Lester to Bird to Miles to Tony to Keith to Wayne, and they ALWAYS sounded like some version of themselves. Even Trane, who had a heavy Dexter influence, always had something of his own in there, and Sonny was sounding Sonny-like at 18. So what I think is, yes, we all have influences, and do try to emulate phrasing and tone and even melodic/harmonic ideas to a certain extent. But I have NEVER heard someone who sounds exactly like someone else, say a clonetrane, a canned cannonball, a “be like Mike” Brecker or a son of sonny, who has ended up with their own voice. It’s a quick and easy path to competence – after all, who is going to dog you for playing Trane lines? But it can be, unless you are really careful, a stifling dead-end, or as Mingus said, if Charlie Parker were a gunslinger there’d be a whole lot of dead copycats.
“Jazzers are making it up in the moment.”
Well, this one is a kind of depends discussion. Many great players are absolutely in the moment, but a surprising number of even very well-respected and received are doing what we all call running lines –playing preworked out and digested licks and patterns that they have under their fingers. This is very related to the truism one about listening. An easy way to tell the jazzers who aren’t playing in the moment is that there seems to be no dialogue between them and the rhythm section, as they treat the rhythm section as some glorified aebersold play-a-long. I have a pet theory that perhaps one reason there is so little interaction nowadays is because players are so used to playing with play-a-longs or sequencers, where the rhythm section is responding to them about as much as the virtual image of the naked woman is responding to the guy in Topeka with one hand on his mouse at 2 AM.
This is prevailing jazz orthodoxy at most jazz camps and schools. The deal is, you transcribe like crazy, get to sounding JUST like the original, and shake and bake, you turn 25 and presto you are you. Probably seems incredibly counterintuitive to non-jazzers. That’s cause it is, and you can go back to early recordings of everyone from Louis to Lester to Bird to Miles to Tony to Keith to Wayne, and they ALWAYS sounded like some version of themselves. Even Trane, who had a heavy Dexter influence, always had something of his own in there, and Sonny was sounding Sonny-like at 18. So what I think is, yes, we all have influences, and do try to emulate phrasing and tone and even melodic/harmonic ideas to a certain extent. But I have NEVER heard someone who sounds exactly like someone else, say a clonetrane, a canned cannonball, a “be like Mike” Brecker or a son of sonny, who has ended up with their own voice. It’s a quick and easy path to competence – after all, who is going to dog you for playing Trane lines? But it can be, unless you are really careful, a stifling dead-end, or as Mingus said, if Charlie Parker were a gunslinger there’d be a whole lot of dead copycats.
“Jazzers are making it up in the moment.”
Well, this one is a kind of depends discussion. Many great players are absolutely in the moment, but a surprising number of even very well-respected and received are doing what we all call running lines –playing preworked out and digested licks and patterns that they have under their fingers. This is very related to the truism one about listening. An easy way to tell the jazzers who aren’t playing in the moment is that there seems to be no dialogue between them and the rhythm section, as they treat the rhythm section as some glorified aebersold play-a-long. I have a pet theory that perhaps one reason there is so little interaction nowadays is because players are so used to playing with play-a-longs or sequencers, where the rhythm section is responding to them about as much as the virtual image of the naked woman is responding to the guy in Topeka with one hand on his mouse at 2 AM.
posted by Michael Zilber at 12:16 AM
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