Jazz for aficionados
The Santana I remember. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDLLXUaqZxg I am reluctant to post this, cause I sure don't wanna put the OP into Cardiac Arrest! Cheers |
First, @O-10 - I agree with you on Lee Morgan. One of my very favorite jazz trumpet players. Such a shame that he died so young. Ok, @Rok - you still seem to have a fundamental misconception about how musicians work, despite our best efforts. There are many things incorrect about your post. Let's start with the classical side. There is indeed a "selection process" to get an orchestra job. The audition process is very grueling indeed, and that is a subject for an entirely different post, really, but to grossly abbreviate: in these auditions, we are indeed playing all by ourselves, with no one accompanying us, unless there is some playing with the section in the final round of auditions. We are all playing the same excerpts from the orchestral repertoire. Everyone is playing the same thing, and behind a screen, so it is anonymous. Here is where your misunderstanding comes in. Despite the fact that we are all playing the same thing, no two of us will sound the same. No two people will play each excerpt exactly the same way - there will be individual interpretations, and every musician's sound will be different. There will be a wide range of skill level, unless it is an audition for the very top orchestras (top fifteen or twenty). In such a top level audition, everyone there is absolutely capable playing the job. The committee listening to the auditions are trying to pick the person that they will be most comfortable playing with, quite probably for the rest of their careers, which could be decades. A very important decision, indeed. Yes, everyone there must be able to "read the music and play the notes." That is just the bare beginning - you have to be a WHOLE lot better than that if you ever expect to get even the worst of orchestra jobs. This is not like some sort of reading test, or driving test! Your whole musical soul is bared in these auditions, and we are judged as players far more critically than a jazz musician is. The same is true of our performance on the job, once we are lucky enough to win one. Learning the part before the first rehearsal is a must, yes! Again, that is just the bare beginning. And even this bare beginning often involves hours and hours of practicing weeks ahead of time before those rehearsals start, because that's how difficult the music is. It's not like everything we play we can play perfectly after we have done it once. A very great deal of the repertoire must be practiced very hard every single time - like an actor doing a role such as Hamlet. It isn't any easier the next time. And we have to maintain this extremely high technical standard - batting .300 may be great for baseball, but it doesn't cut it in any kind of music, especially not classical. Every single time you play a piece, it is different, even if it is the exact same musicians and the exact same conductor, in the exact same three or four concerts that weekend. Though the conductor shapes the overall conception of the music, there is a tremendous amount of leeway for the individual musicians in the orchestra, especially when they have a solo, or the section has a unison solo passage. And I am not just speaking of concerto performances, I am speaking of any performance of any symphony in the rep. It is a myth that the conductor is controlling everything that happens, or that the musicians are playing everything exactly the same way every night. This would be incredibly boring, if true. We must connect with our audiences every bit as much as a jazz combo must connect with theirs, and in our case, the audience has many more expectations, both because many of them know the pieces very well themselves, and also the technical perfection expected is much higher. Recordings have made the standard even higher yet, really to an almost absurd level nowadays. There is so much more pressure on a classical musician in performance, precisely because the audience is usually at least somewhat, and often extremely familiar with the music being performed. Now for the jazz side. You seem to think that a jazz combo is making up every single thing they are doing every single night, and that they do this magically with no training. Both these things are simply not true. Jazz musicians study their instruments and learn how to improvise in school, working just as hard with private teachers as classical musicians do. In jazz studies, there is less emphasis on sheer technique, however, as the emphasis is more on learning to improvise. But they take the same music theory courses, both written and aural, that we do. They take the same music history classes we do. They practice just as much as we do. They also practice the standards - just the same way we classical musicians do. In fact, they must do much more memorization than we do! Which leads me to the other point about playing jazz. These musicians do know the tunes they are playing ahead of time, almost always. Very rarely is an entire set made up on the spot, and even then there is much talking about it ahead of time, and a little rehearsal first - Miles Davis KOB comes to mind. But the vast majority of jazz gigs consist of tunes that the musicians know and have played many, many times. There are huge volumes of what are called Fake Books, that have all of the standard tunes, the standard forms that are used in them, and the standard chord changes in those forms. This is what I meant when I said the jazz musician must have a tremendous amount of music memorized. Almost never is any of that ever made up on the spot, including the main tune in the song. What is being improvised is the solos based on that main tune, and the rhythm section will improvise variations on the basic rhythms of the tune. Jazz is much more highly (even rigidly) structured than you seem to think it is - this is exactly why people who have never played together before can get together in a small combo and make it work - they have memorized a common blueprint, similar to the scores we classical musicians are playing from. And these blueprints are known and studied by all jazz musicians. They are necessarily much more simple than the scores we are playing, because there has to be the freedom for improvising. This is why the technical demands are nowhere near as high as in classical. Often, especially if there is an unfamiliar musician in the group, there will be a Fake Book handy for quick consultation, to make sure everyone is on the same page (literally!). If you have ever seen a musician in a combo consult a piece of paper or a book, that's what they are doing. When you hear an album of newly written jazz, the players were not making everything up on the spot in the recording sessions. The blueprints were worked out ahead of time, and yes, rehearsed! Even if a small combo really is trying to make something up on the spot, there is still a hurried discussion of a basic chordal and rhythmic framework before they start playing. Otherwise it simply wouldn't work. I am not trying to diminish the creativity of the best jazz artists, but you need to understand that everything they are doing is indeed done within a very strict framework, which they do not deviate from in the moment, unless they are playing with a very familiar group which could handle a sudden deviation because of that familiarity - and there will always be some sort of verbal or visual communication of the deviation. They would not do this is there was a new guy that night. Ok, I think I have rambled enough, and I am sure Frogman will want to expand, if he has not had a heart attack from your post after reading it.... :) |
Well he was a highly talented musician that some call eccentric, others creative and some a nut job. His sheer technical ability makes him astonishing to listen to even if you don't care for the end product. In no way am I qualified to make any intelligent commentary on Gould . But to say what I think, which is ONLY what I think, I don't like that he skips all repeats, plays in a staccato manner with heavy accents no one else makes etc, its like he is trying to make an musical x-ray of Bach before he starts to operate. I had his famous Goldberg Variation/s recordings I gave them away so I guess I did not care for them.To me he's a non-starter compared to the great Bach keyboardists like Hewitt, Tureck, Schiff and Perahia. But it well may be I just lack the acumen and background to recognize the genius of Gold. |
Learsfool, as a Shakespeare buff(I assume) I wish you could have heard what I would call a "double suite "arranged by Vansca and played tonight by the Minnesota of Sibelius's "The Tempest" . Prospero lines were read by the Guthrie Theatre Director in perfect Oxbridge with Heather Johnson singing the Ariel lines. Absolutely magnificent ! |
