whiplash

What kind of Yngwie Malmsteen asshole would choose Buddy Rich among all the jazz drummers he'd surely hear first?

ha this kind of makes sense to me, technical ability is a lot easier to appreciate & approximate than the more subtle (and important) aspects of music, right? and when you haven't been playing long you're a lot more concerned about it, or at least was. that's my excuse for listening to a lot of very silly prog, fusion, and metal (and Buddy Rich!) in high school.

I've never heard anyone ask "who was the fastest jazz drummer ever?" The fastest drummers are the guys who win those "fastest drummer" competitions, and no one ever hears of them.

i haven't seen this. i def knew really talented music students who were really chops-centered as a whole thing. couldn't even tell what it was about music they enjoyed, but i guess they did. they seemed to be hungering for a feeling of being impressed, if not moved in the way that i wanted from music. aside from contemporary jazz players who were technically really amazing, the dudes i'm thinking of were into dream theater and shit

Any type of music degree program that doesn't center itself on developing the technical ability of its students is doing those students a massively damaging, career-limiting disservice.

well yeah, but "developing the technical ability of its students" is a little more complicated than BPM

it's also a movie, and i believe we're led to assume that in the time jumps jk occasionally said something to them other than "not my tempo"

i respect if folks familiar with the drum world are distracted by implausibilities and technical errors, but imo the film wasn't trying to be a documentary about jazz drumming

Well yes, but saying "what type of high-level instructor focuses on chops" seems like a wholly absurd thing to say to me, given the exposure I've had by proxy to music performance programs and the people who have gone through them

I think goole's point was, what kind of high-level instructor focuses on chops to the exclusion of every other aspect of music instruction?

Isn't that kind of the point though? He's not really a very good "instructor".

exactly. he takes a crop of students already good enough to attend a conservatory, and puts them through a death march, believing this will give them the discipline to succeed (and it focuses on an easy-to-grasp aspect of their training, rather than giving a thorough portrait of life in a conservatory, as a thorough portrait of life in a conservatory isn't really the goal). if one's response to this is "woah, that's a horrible way to make great musicians" - congrats! people in the movie agree with you and he loses his job.

I am waiting for someone to make a moving like Whiplash about the Magic Band. That would probably be a great movie.

uh did you see Frank

you should, it's really good and you can completely disregard the fucking terrible article written about it and whiplash that got reposted here a while back

I did see Frank and I thought it was great.

I don't think that's a doc about Magic Band.

oh a doc, jeez, lol

hmmm Frank got pretty grouchy reviews from the crix i follow (as did Whiplash)

Really? I thought it was pretty well received.

I love Miles Teller but have been avoiding this movie bc everything I've seen/read indicates it's a work of pro-abuse meninist bullshit tell me I'm mistaken?

ur not gonna like it if that's your attitude

good to know thx

yeah i'd say it's definitely not an outright rebuke of pro-abuse meninist bullshit

and it's definitely about pro-abuse meninists

*watches "I Am Love" again*

saw the word 'meninist' somewhere else recently but this is the first ilx usage - did someone coin it recently?

srs answer to owen:

i think it's as 'complicated' as it needs to be about abuse without endorsing it. as alfred says its singlemindedness of purpose is a strength, it's really contained within their relationship and there's barely any outside perspective, aside from the dad, girlfriend, and a lawyer pushing neiman to sue, and from the perspective of the two main characters they're all seen as 'just not getting it.' the abuse-ey scenes are fucking harsh but you also get a feel for why people get sucked into that dynamic, the manipulation, the seductiveness. i guess the ending would seem to vindicate simmons' methods, but imo it was more about overcoming his fear of simmons. don't get where 'meninist' comes into it

I think there are a lot of ways to read the end. I don't think it's necessarily a vindication of Simmons' methods. It's definitely a "triumph" for Teller, but I don't necessarily it's one that makes you like or necessarily even respect him more for achieving.

For the record I liked Frank more than I liked Whiplash.

yeah i loved the ending for allowing that critical distance from his accomplishment without denying it from him to make some kind of point

i also love imagining the viral madness that would have followed that performance hitting the interne

t.

WHAT THIS DRUMMER KID DOES NEXT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND

the title tune is such a mediocre piece of music imo

title track = Metallica?

Don Ellis/Hank Levy

I assumed it was the "Star Wars" theme, with the lyrics, "Whiplaash...nothing but whiplaash...drummers get whiplaash...yeah..."

missed opportunity. also i bet it would be an illuminating character moment to see him shedding to Metallica in his parents' basement before heading off to big band school.

xp

I found this quite exhausting by the end, there should be warnings about sustained shots of profuse sweating. Whilst I appreciate this is not strictly about music, this world of technically whizzo players competing in a jazz pageant seems about as high stakes as the X Factor. All I could think at the end was Pah! the Napalm Death drummer is better than this fucker!

I don't think Miles Teller's gotten enough credit; he was impressive in The Spectacular Now too.

I enjoyed this quite a lot. From the interviews I saw, the creators clearly wanted people to not just see the whole process as a worthwhile triumph but discuss if it was really worth it and the validity of that sort of teaching.
I think the lack of women may have been deliberate, along with the homophobia, fat-shaming and perhaps showing that this hostile prejudiced environment excludes a lot of people.
But I'm not too sure. Definitely not boring though.

I kind of wanted to argue with Simmons that Charlie Parker wouldn't have necessarily agreed with people who told him that he was merely good enough or that he wouldn't have realised when he wasn't up to scratch (not that I'm saying he wouldn't have benefitted from help).

Maybe Simmons' character says things like that to justify his harshness.

this film was a big 'So What'

I am waiting for someone to make a moving like Whiplash about the Magic Band. That would probably be a great movie.
― One bad call from barely losing to (Alex in SF), Thursday, 15 January 2015 18:56 (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM. Casting would be fun.

zlatan imbrahimovic as zappa

I loved the sticker in the kid's room, something about if you can't cut it as a jazz drummer, you end up in a rock band.

Generally true that there are some great rock drummers with serious jazz chops.

i really enjoyed this movie. there were some real filmmaking 'chops' on display.
kid millions article is OTM though-'drumline' is better.
and as he pointed out, this is really a sports movie, it's not about art at all.

i totally believed that the teacher would torpedo that performance to fuck over the kid, just this once. he cost him a really prestigious job at fake juilliard! that's got to be up there in jobs for jazzbos in 2014.

I really liked it too. It had a certain narrative tension and energy that most other films I've seen recently are lacking.

I don't think it's a particularly deep film however - but I don't hold that against it.

It had a certain narrative tension and energy that most other films I've seen recently are lacking.

OTM. It was somewhat ludicrous but you couldn't deny the momentum of the storytelling. Well-directed too, a very nicely maintained aesthetic. JK a shoe-in for Best Supporting, no?

if chazelle was announced as the new mission impossible movie helmer or something i would be excited. the whole car crash sequence is pretty silly but has a sense of pace and momentum and camera placement that's better than most current action directors.

Neil Peart on Whiplash:

"There is no blood in jazz drumming, and there are no bullies in jazz drumming. My teacher Peter Erskine was saying he feels ungrateful because it's great there's a movie about drummers, but why is it so flawed humanistically and in small technical ways that didn't cost anything? It wouldn't cost anything to have a proper jazz drum set and to show the guy how to use his wrists. And the bloody ice cube jug or whatever? Absurd! There's a Band-Aid on my finger right now – yeah, I bleed. But jazz drumming, no, there is no bleeding."

flappy bird said this on the la la land thread

the depiction of a music teacher as a sadistic drill master

there are no bullies in jazz? there are no sadistic drill sergeant wannabes in music education? what fucking planet are you and Neil Peart from?

i've heard that Buddy Rich tape! bullying in the name of such boring music is unfortunate though.

The hand inspection! So much has happened since then.

One of my students asked me if I had seen this movie a couple days ago. I said yes and he asked what I thought. I replied by asking what he thought about the teacher (since I am his teacher) and I don't exactly remember what he said but we agreed that the teacher was abusive. IIRC he also said that some people with talent "need" that sort of treatment to reach their full potential. I thought about what a pervasive idea this is, that talented people should/might need to be bullied into excellence. I don't agree but is this common wisdom?

Talented people can be lazy as hell

Who's an example of an IRL talented person who required other people to bully them to accomplish anything?

If they are lazy, they need to develop willpower, which bullying isn't great at imo

I can't think of an example because it seems like "wisdom" that comes from excuse-making after someone is bullied rather than a legitimate strategy for achieving excellence. "He needed it to achieve his potential" -- that's essentially what my student said and I found it kind of surprising.

xp to NA - That's kind of a "prove a negative" problem in certain professions I can think of, music education certainly being one.

I think a lot of music educators - not one-on-one instructors much, but definitely bandleaders, conductors etc. use bullying and similar drill instructor techniques as a shortcut to get obedience out of small crowds of geniuses.

I should differentiate between the truly pathological, manipulative shit that JK Simmons does in this movie, and the shouting and belittling that are par for the course in marching bands and military training everywhere

Art Taylor published a book of interviews he conducted with (famous) jazz musicians, and none of the drummers in the book cite "tough love" as a motivator for being creative or improving their craft. The closest they come is one drummer describing how hard he studied and practiced, telling a story about being really competitive about who gets to the equipment for practice in the morning when he lived with another musician. Meanwhile, another drummer in another interview basically says jazz is about feeling and not technique, and a lot of the musicians from the period Art Taylor focuses on describe their experiences of learning to play by listening to and playing with musicians they like.

When I was reading the motivation literature as a prelude to entering a teaching credential program a few years ago, I learned that a lot of the motivation folk wisdom about, e.g., rewards and punishment is wrong, and those things are not particularly motivating and can in fact be demotivating. Even the "conservative" hardliners and dissenters in motivation literature like applied behavior analysis researchers and practitioners or Pritchard, Campbell & Campbell believe punishment is demotivating.

I think people espouse the virtues of tough love because it's easy. If someone isn't doing as well as you'd hope, or if someone seems disinterested, you can yell at them or force them to do something. It's easy to find anecdotal evidence of this having some effect on young people. You hold their feet over the coals and then they do the thing you asked, therefore your tough love made them into the intelligent and responsible adults they become, no credit due to having literature in the home, or to eating with them, or to giving access to the tools they need to think and be creative, or to the daily demonstrations we give of how to live in the world and get along with others.

Yeah, not disputing any of that. Interestingly I've come to realize the structured "tough love" I got in the service did more to bring out my work ethic and confidence than the previous nearly two decades of whatever my parents and teachers had been doing.

I am certain that almost no famous creative person would ever point to a disciplinarian as a prime motivator, though.