What's with that constant cymbal tapping in jazz drumming?

suzy and nick are USING THEIR POWERS FOR EVIL to take the piss out of me on the other board, so i must defend my honour...

i like the sound of a good ride cymbal. i like hearing it in jazz. as for why it became so common, one could ask the same of the guitar in rock or folk music, ie there are a lot of explanations, but ultimately the jazz ride pattern is so much a part of jazz that it becomes part of the definition, even if there are exceptions. i mean, you wouldn;t ask "why are there so many singers in choral music?" or "why are there so many synthetic sounds in synth-pop?"

[Incoming fire:] as for why it became so common, one could ask the same of the guitar in rock or folk music, ie there are a lot of explanations, but ultimately the jazz ride pattern is so much a part of jazz that it becomes part of the definition, even if there are exceptions. i mean, you wouldn;t ask "why are there so many singers in choral music?" or "why are there so many synthetic sounds in synth-pop?"

I think you gave some sort of technical explanation earlier in your message.

It's probably not a question with clear-cut answers. Fair enough. I think the comparison to the place of the guitar in rock or folk makes some sense, but surely jazz is not as defined by the ride cymbal sound as choral or synth-pop are defined by group singing and synthetic sounds, respectively. There has been enough jazz made that is not dominated by it (or doesn't feature it at all even) that it's certainly possible to imagine jazz being made without it.

kate are you being serious or sarcastic?

Playing on the ride also gives the drummer the opportunity to be more flexible with his or her other limbs. With the advent of bop, the bass drum was also gradually freed from most of its responsibilities, allowing it to be used for accents along with the snare drum. Also, many drummers, especially Tony Williams, who played with Miles Davis, use their left foot to crash the hihat, which becomes another accent. The more precise term in the context of bop and post-bop drumming would be comping as opposed to accenting. comping is a skill that can't be learned from a book, but rather involves years of practice and listening. a good jazz drummer will comp along to a soloist, and work at the same time to guide the soloist. a typical was of comping would be to play more notes on the drums with greater frequency in order to egg a soloist on, or to build up to a climax. gradually lessening the amount of strokes helps to bring a soloist down. the best bands in jazz are considered as such primarily because of the ability of the members to cohere into areal group and aid each other with their solos. What makes Miles Davis' quintet from the late 60s so amazing is to hear is that one can really feel a certain telepathy between the members of the rhythym section as they build in intensity or as they coast or as they decrease the energy of the music.

umm I hope this helped a little bit. I can go get out my drumming texts if you would like.

If nothing else, this is making me interested in listening to more early recordings to hear how the sound of the rhythm section changed over the years.

regarding the evolution of the rhythym section, it is definitely an interesting progression. in the 60s the rhythym sections start to become very agressive, and become more advanced, though each era had its own innovations and excellent players. if you want to hear a great ensemble without too much ride cymbal, get one of the Bill Evans records from his 1961 dates at the Village Vanguard with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. I also like John Coltrane and I love his album "Live at Birdland." on the track "Afro Blue", the rhythym section of Jones, Tyner and Garrison bang multiple time signatures at the same time. the song is 3/4 but there are some improvised unison parts of them playing a slower 4/4 over top. very nice.

Also, saying all jazz = crap is so very, very retarded. Considering what a huge, huge, HUGE genre it is.

An interesting counterpoint to this is New Orleans brass band music, in which cymbals aren't emphasized and the snare and bass drums are definitely the primary instruments, and there is still a large degree of rhythmic flexibility and interaction. This still lends itself to a certain sound though, blues and New Orleans standards (and transfers over well to rock and hip-hop), it just wouldn't sound right for modern jazz. As Aaron said, it was more a case of drummers changing the way they play to fit the needs of the music rather than some arbitrary or tradition-based decision.

I have this. I'll have to listen and see if I can hear what you are describing, but I probably either won't or it won't do anything for me.

I'm unlikely to blindly buy any jazz CDs for a long time to come, but I might be able to borrow that Bill Evans recording.

(I still say that the problem with keeping time with the cymbals is that you then have to constantly hear them, which for me is a negative.)

(cecil taylor p'haps the greatest free jazz drummer ever?)

Aaron's response that it's about time and the switch to cymbals in the bop era to free up the snare and bass drum more creative use is absolutely OTM as far as it goes. But at the same time the function of primary timekeeper in modern jazz switched from drums to bass. This is something of an oversimplification, obv., but as Wynton Marsalis says:

"The bass player is the key. He needs to keep a steady pulse, to provide the bottom and to hold the music together. This frees up the drummer to play".

Insofar as this is true, the cymbal is not a necessary time keeping device (think of small jazz combos that don't have a drummer for example). But it's hugely helpful in enabling drummer and bassist to lock together to provide the rhythmic pulse. It's the dynamic give-and-take relationship between the drummer's sense of where the beat should be - evidenced by the very hard, defined trebly sound of the cymbal - and the bassists, evidenced by the fatter, less well defined sound of the bass - that defines the pulse of much jazz.

What I'm really saying is that to see the cymbal's function as time-keeping is overly simple. It's an aesthetic solution to an aesthetic problem. Other functional solutions could be found (eg leave it to the bassist to keep time) but that one has been preferred because to practitioners and fans of the music alike it best conveys the dynamic interplay of the rhythm section. In short, it sounds better.

In its crudest form, rock drumming often gets on my nerves as well.

Good to hear your alternate account, emphasizing the bass.

But:

Wynton Marsalis said on the Ken Burn's thing that his definition of jazz was music with a particular triplet-based rhythmic swing. (Despite having quoted WM twice approvingly on this thread I'm not a disciple or a particular fan). We are never going to get agreement on where the barrier between jazz and not-jazz should be drawn, but for various reasons I think this is the most practical place. The issue is clouded by the fact that "not-jazz" is too often used as a pejorative term by critics: in my view it should be a purely descriptive term with no value attached.

If you accept this definition "Bitches Brew", for example, is "not jazz" (I love "Bitches Brew" - this is not an attempt to sneak in a denigration of electric Miles).

You can see where my argument is headed: once you look at "jazz" that is influenced by Sly/JB, then if you accept my argument it is "not jazz" and even if you don't there is a quantum leap away from the jazz that went before. We are not talking subtle gradations of difference.

Looking at the characteristics of funk rhythm sections as opposed to jazz (caution: gross simplification/generalisations to follow)

- the implied triplet feel of jazz is replaced by a squarer 4/4 time where 8th beats are regularised.

- much more of the drum kit is given over to keeping time. Typically the bass drum and snare drum will play repetitive patterns as well as the cymbals. That so much more whole kit is dedicated to keeping time gives the drummer the choice of using cymbals to reinforce the regular pattern or frees them up for emphasis/decoration.

- These repetitive patterns can be extremely complex though. The mix of offbeats and on-beats is much more sophisticated than most earlier rock drumming. They would also vary between sections of the song (in some James Brown songs the tendency to stay on a single chord meant that subtle differences in the basic rhythm might be the only or main difference between verse and bridge, for example).

- Because many of the guys playing this style were virtuosi they could maintain and subtly vary these sophisticated patterns while

- The bassist will "lock" with this overall pattern (this is very different from the typical jazz pattern where, as mentioned, the bassist locks with the cymbal and the rest of the kit it freed up for more creative emphasis etc).

- The bassist will also play a repetitive rhythmic pattern, often on a single chord throughout. This has important implications:

1 In jazz the division of time into bars is much less obvious because there is a fairly even flow of quarter beats on cymbal and bass. In funk the more typical pattern is for the bass and drums to come together strongly on the "one" beat of the bar followed by the drums and bass playing divergent but complementary patterns of off and on beats. Hence in Funkadelic the constant quasi-mystical reference to the "One". (Just to illustrate how simplistic this is the repetition could be over two bars not one, so the "One" is emphasised only every second bar; and some patterns manage to emphasise the "One" even though neither the bass or drums play the one beat!

2 Funk tends to be harmonically very simple and is glued together by the bass playing a repetitive harmonic pattern. Jazz tunes tend to go on a harmonic journey coming "home" by resolving to the tonic periodically every 8 or 16 or 32 bars. Funk typically comes "home" harmonically at the beginning of every bar when the bass thumps out the root note of the chord. In any case the bass's use of repetitive patterns glues the harmony together.

One consequence of this is that extremely discordant elements can be introduced. The discordant elements in jazz tend to be "controlled": increasingly discordant harmonies are introduced as the music develops and the ear accepts these for two reasons:

1 These discordant harmonies are resolved to the more consonant tonic.

2. With familiarisation the jazz fan learns to regard these harmonies as beautiful (or semi-consonant) in themselves.

In funk the second reason can effectively be done away with: the "glue" of the harmonically repeated bassline and the return "home" to the root at the beginning of every bar means that the ear will tolerate a much greater amount of temporary dissonance, because it is so transient. There is no need for the dissonance to be controlled or consonant to the "educated" ear. This has huge implications for rap and other sample-based forms where the
samples of non-musical materials, or music from different keys can be collaged together and be made to sound congruous by the repetitive harmonic and rhythmic patterns of bass and drums.

(A similar effect is achieved in a lot of free jazz where the use of modal harmonic background means that extreme discordancy can be offset by a continual returning home to harmonic familiarity. That's why lots of listeners brought up on funk or certain rock forms can respond more easily to free jazz than to mainstream jazz: it's a smaller leap, because it's much closer to what they are musically familiar with).

One point (which doesn't contradict what you wrote above, I don't think) is that a lot of nonjazz uses the triplet-based rhythmic swing, too - if by "triplet-based rhythmic swing" you mean what I think you do: the basic time is 4/4, but each of the four beats subdivides into three rather than two, so that there would be twelve rather than eight of those short beats to the measure (12/8 would be a way of writing the time-signature, but that'd be extremely misleading, since the basic rhythm is still really 4/4; I think the usual way of writing it is "4/4, with swing feel," or something).

Anyway, when someone says "triplet-based rhythmic swing," I immediately think of boogie, not jazz (not that the two forms are unrelated, and obviously if Louis Jordan had been included within the definition of jazz way-back-when, a lot of subsequent music that ended up being called "pop" and "rock" would be called jazz; in another universe). Anyway, there are Slade songs with that triplet swing, there are hardcore punk songs with that triplet swing, and so forth.

Another question: What about Latin jazz, Palmieri and Puente and those guys? The bass is often in counterrhythm, playing in a three rhythm (though actually playing only two of the three notes) where the rest of the instruments are in two or four. What does this do to the drummer's role?

I agree the triplet-based swing thing appears in other places, and 12/8 is a characteristic blues shuffle and much rock derives from blues. And some of the early pop players (eg the Motown guys) were basically jazzers and that feel steals in all over the place. (One of the subtler things is that in some r'n'b eighth-note rythms are played straight but 16th notes are swung - "Until It Comes Back to Me" by Aretha, an underrated classic with great bass playing by Chuck Rainey is a good example.)

My preference for a rhythmic distinction between jazz and not jazz is not that its perfect. But it has the virtue of simplicity and I think it gets it right more of the time than any other method, especially since the area of contention most often discussed is between jazz and rock/pop.

If we're going to call Bitches Brew jazz I can't see where you stop as you move through to Mahavishnu and then to Carlos Santana or Cream. And the popular notion that jazz = improvision is a non-starter because it's easy to think of so much improvised music, from rock to raga that's clearly not jazz.

A certain amount of music with a jazz feel contains little or no improvision (Sinatra with Nelson Riddle, etc). If Miles wrote out his trumpet parts on the Gil Evans stuff would it stop being jazz? Louis Jordan (or certainly early LJ) as far as I'm concerned, is jazz. I'm aware that he re-recorded a lot of stuff in the fifties with production-values and instrumentation designed to appeal to rock'n'roll fans (Scotty Moore-style guitar and a more heavily emphasised back-beat) but I'd need to hear that stuff again to offer an opinion on how far it moved away from a swing feel.

But this is semantics: I personally find it the most useful way to draw the distinction, and in an ideal world I'd like to see it become the norm, but realistically it ain't gonna happen. Record stores are not going to start filing pre IASW Miles in a different place from post.

Once you get into Latin music things start to get really hard to describe. Just to take the most basic traditional Cuban son, for example: the implicit feel is derived from the clave-pattern which can be 3-2 or 2-3. A 3-2 clave will involve a repeating 2 bar pattern. In the first bar the clave is struck 3 times, the first time on the one beat, the second and third time on the off beats ("2 and" and "3 and"); in the second bar the clave is struck twice (on the on beats 2 and 3). Against this the simplest bass can be a completely unsyncopated half note on 1 followed by quarter-notes on 3 and 4 (both bars). Two simple rhythms played against one another, but already the "egg rolling down a hill" feel of so much latin music is there. Against this the timbales might play 5 beats in the first bar (on one, 2, 2-and, 3-and, and 4) and 4 in the second (regular quarter note on-beats). You can see how complicated this is getting, but this is still the rhythm for a simple, rustic Cuban dance: think how rarely you hear a Cuban bass player playing regular on-beats and you'll realise just how much of a simplification it is.

The rhythms derive from traditional dances, and have their roots in African music. Already complex rhythms were made increasingly complex by brilliant innovators like Cachaito. And different parts of Latin America have different traditions.

Obviously people from a jazz or rock tradition will not import these rhythms unchanged: often they simplify them drastically , so that a basic bass rhythm in most jazz bossa is based on playing a dotted quarter note followed by an eighth note (the rhythm at the start of "Rikki Don't Lose That Number".

You're probably not going to find much of that helpful as it is overly technical but the subject is just so huge. I don't have much experience of playing Latin music and someone who does might be able to do a better job of simplifying the subject and extracting the essence.

Have you heard his solo album? It's great.

The problem with Marsalis is that he (being the ideological fool he is... doesn't he know that he is working to consign jazz to the role of mood music for white bobos?) leaves out a lot of techniques of avant-garde jazz drumming. AG drumming, or Aaron Grossman drumming (oopps haha I mean Avant Garde) can be very abstract. I would compare some of it to Abstract Impressionist painting. WIth Pollack, Rothko, etc., color and mood take precedent over direct figurative representation (the jazz analogue being ting-ting ta-ting). In AG drumming, the drumer can be more of a soloist on an equal level with the other players.
Here are some themes and highlights of post-bop drumming (a very incomplete survey):
* Tony Williams playing "So What" on Miles' 1964 Complete Concert. On this track, one can really hear Tony pushing the band. He plays very loudly at certain moments, pushing the rhythym section more towards the forefront. He also uses some rolls and a few minimal little repeated parts to break up the time. There is a moment in which he plays a roll during a solo where he starts off more intensly and then brings the volume (and pitch too) down and effectively guides the solo.
* Tony Williams playing on "Hat and Beard" on Eric Dolphy's "Out to Lunch". Listening to the beginning of this track, one can hear Marsalis' swing conception fall apart. Williams plays some very straightforward ideas. His playing at times is almost military.
* Milford Graves playing on all of Albert Ayler's "Love Cry". I still can't decipher much of the drumming on this album, but it is worth noting that just as Ayler tried to bring the music back to its more chaotic and melodic roots in New Orleans, Graves sounds like a marching band that has had too much to drink. He plays a lot of rolls all around the kit, and the rolls add color, and sometimes seem to not have anything to do with timekeeping at at all.
* Pete La Roca Sims playing "Sin Street" on his own album "Turkish Women at the Bath" This whole album is classic. It has John Gilmore on sax, a member of Sun Ra's band, and a major influence on Coltrane. It also has Chick Corea pre-scientology. Most importantly, Pete Sims plays very well on this record. Sims is one of the most underrated players in jazz. He played (undocumented) as one of the first drummer with John Coltrane's classic quartet, and he also worked with Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, and Jackie McLean (Sims' solo on "Minor Apprehension" on the album New Soil is supposed to be incredible but I have yet to hear it). Sims' playing on "Sin Street" is mind-boggling, as he manages to make the odd-time signature swing very hard. His solo, however, is incredibly loose and impressionistic.
* There are a lot of other great AG drummers out there, but two more I would like to mention are Jim Black and Susie Ibarra, who are both doing a lot to advance the idea of the drummer as creator of texture. They both utilize a whole range of percussion onstage (or so I have heard, as neither have made it to DC recently). They have both played on a lot of different sessions, so just go to Allmusic...

blah

And then on the record on which Miles most closely borrowed from funk, On the Corner, you could argue that the drumming in a sense takes funk's radicalism further, inasmuch as the drummer (I forget who it was) just plays the same extremely simple stacatto pattern for pretty much the whole 30 minutes (I don't know how to put it in technical terms, but it's a real short little riff on hi-hats, I think), with a breaks to lay out into the relatively straight-ahead, catchy rock groove, handclaps and whistles of "Black Satin" (maybe that's why that's the most well-known tune on the album).

If you compare it with Sly's "In Time" off Fresh, which was an inspiration for On the Corner, you can see how they sound similar, yet it's like Miles has cubed what Sly was doing. Not only is the basic drum pattern simpler, more aggressive and higher in the mix, but it's then supplemented by tablas (which lock into the drums' groove quite organically, unlike some of the other stuff on which Miles threw in tablas as superfluous atmosphere). Then you have the bass and the guitar playing these short, incredibly angular riffs against the grain of the drums, and the mix is panning around the soundfield, emphasizing and deemphasizing different elements with its own sense of rhythm, and the tabla is droning away in the backgroun... there's so much going on in that record.

The great thing about Miles' fusion stuff is that it's all so different. People tend to lump it altogether, but he was evolving from record to record just as fast as (or faster than) any other time in his career.

I think there was a lot of looping and splicing on On the Corner, but I haven't listened recently (and often can't tell when I listen, anyway).

Next question: what about no wave? When I was in New York in the late '70s early '80s, there were jazz musicians and nonjazz musicians going out of their way to play with each other, to see what would happen. Some of this was in no wave, some of this was in "improv." Bob Quine of the Voidoids and Jody Harris of the Contortions took lots from On the Corner, though they're guitarists, not drummers. Seems that there's so much ongoing cross-fertilization, and if you don't let it in to your sense of "jazz," you banish jazz from the present. It may be just the word jazz that gets banished, but nothing is just semantic.

As for defining jazz, some semi-famous musician (can't remember who) said that "the only tradition in jazz is innovation" and that is how I look at it. If one considers how quickly the music evolved over the last 100 years, reactionary attitudes make even less sense.

I don't think it was an identical pattern, but similar ones: he'd play consecutive sixteenth notes sometimes for just under a measure and sometimes just over a measure, and then stop dead for the next measure (plus or minus the remainder), which had the effect of screeching the car to a halt every other measure while the rest of the music tumbled forward into a ditch. I don't know enough about funk or jazz to know if this was unique to Miles' recordings, but I suspect it was; and it's related to what Miles himself would often do: just play a trumpet note or two, or a squiggle, and STOP. Same effect. (Or he'd fool around during the mixing, keep punching a hair-raising organ sound in and out, on and off; especially in "Rated X" (on Get Up With It), a track I refer to as "Shaft Goes To Hell." For better or worse, all this had an inspiring on my guitar playing, since I got the idea to play a couple notes and then stop and not play anything for a bar or two. I found this appealing because it seemed to give me great power to shape the music without having to actually play very much, which was good strategy, since I couldn't improvise for shit.

"Once a groove was established on 'Rated X,' at several points it was interrupted or suspended by the engineer's abruptly cutting off the rhythm tracks, leaving nothing but the sustained, floating sound of the held keyboard chords. A sudden loss of sound like this can feel like a physical leap into space, or something like a gravity-free move into another kind of music. It was very different from breaks in traditional jazz: if heard live, the listener could see that the musicians were still holding their instruments and would continue playing once the break ended, and through repeated listenings to recordings in the jazz tradition, one knew that the musicians would always start up again after the break. But this was something new. Using four tape recording machines in postproduction, the engineer switched from one tape to another, and some of the musicians were made to disappear--instantly, with no sonic residue or echo remaining. Adding to the indeterminacy was that 'the organ track came from Miles' contribution to a different song,' according to Teo. 'It had nothing to do with the song 'Rated X' originally. You hear this band drop out, right? The organ just sits on it. That was a loop. I brought the band in one or two bars later. That track was done in the editing room.'

Coming after the relentless tumult of the groove, the effect of the loss of rhythm is heart-stopping, if not apocalyptic. The return of the rhythm calls attention to the groove and forces the listener-dancer to attend to it, even in its absence. Once again, Miles had bared some of the work that went into the making of the recording and foregrounded the point at which the musicians end and the technology begins. Miles had been dropping free-floating passages into his music ever since 'Deception' in 1950, but this was more radical in intent and effect. He once spoke of doing music such as he had heard in Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck, where during the perforamce, 'A window is opened, suddenly the orchestra stops and you hear a marching band outside. When it's closed, the orchestra starts again. That's the kind of thing I want to do, open some windows.'"

These days we would probably call that the 'drop,' and of course it's standard operating procedure in dance music now.

I think ArfArf is right about Miles' fusion not being jazz, and I think Miles himself would have agreed. He wasn't actually listening to much jazz at this time, mostly disparaged it in interviews, was listening to a lot of pop and funk, and wanted to break out of what he saw as the jazz ghetto and over to a different audience.

I thought I would have mentioned this above, but I didn't: I think one of the big reasons that modern jazz drumming and the emphasis on the ride cymbal developed is its sonic place in a small group.

Since it's acoustic music, the musicians have to create their own natural balance obv., and it's natural to stay out of each other's way. The horns do their thing, the piano stays away from roots and the lower register to give room to the bass, and the ride cymbal cuts through clearly and takes up a lot of frequency room without covering anything up. It's all well and good to play more time on the toms 'Sing, Sing, Sing' style in a big band, where the volume is so much higher and the low brass are playing bass lines, but in a small group it would pretty much obviate the upright bass. Playing on the hi-hat all the time creates more white-noise wash when it's open and a too-small, too-tight sound when it's closed.

I don't know, I could write poetry about a nice ride cymbal. It just sounds so RIGHT in the context of that music, like it's the other half of the basscymbal. It completes the upper half of the bass, the half with the attack and sustain and defined swing. And I think drummers SHOULD use all the sound sources they can and be creative, and I do (christ, I bring a cooking pot to all my gigs), but it all comes back to the ride cymbal beat as home base, for sound musical reasons.

When you play jazz (or really any music where improvisation is a big factor), I think you have to use the whole kit is a single instrument, rather than thinking "snare for backbeat, hihat for time, bass for bass" etc etc. You can usually spot drummers with jazz backgrounds a mile away because of this - for example, listen to Bill Bruford play. I don't even think he's that great a *jazz* drummer, but it's obvious he isn't thinking in narrow "bass + snare + hihat" terms when he plays.

In another way, I approach playing drums in jazz the same way I approach arranging a composed piece, in that there is a responsibility to "support" the music but there shouldn't necessarily be only one way of delegating the various "jobs" you are performing to specific drums, styles, accents, licks, etc. If I'm listening to a drummer, and it seems he's just staying on the ride with the same pattern over and over, then I'll think:
a) he's either playing that because the band has bad time and he has to do it, or
b) because he's got other interesting things happening elsewhere, and the ride is merely setting that up, or
c) he's playing a chart that tells him to do it that way

Or it could be that he just isn't thinking about much other than keeping a pulse (which in jazz usually equates to really boring drumming - though even then there are exceptions like Tony Williams playing that hihat thing for 15 minutes on In A Silent Way, obv a considered compositional choice rather than him not being able to come up with something). But then, I don't really have a problem listening to someone play on the ride a lot. Good musicians tend to can make almost anything sound good.

. It's still a sound that bugs me most of the time

Can't argue with that I guess.

I just have a boom-box type CD player so that might be part of the problem, but I'm sure there are many people who have equally low quality stereos for whom that sound isn't a problem.

(I shouldn't have chimed in again, anyway. It's not as if this is the only thing preventing me from loving jazz.)

Boba Fett79 (not a name I recognize) (and why am I dredging up my own old threads I know I know), I don't know who that was addressed to, but according to the experts on this thread, I don't think it was thought up in New Orleans, and whatever bad things can be said about me, I am not a fey indie rock nerd.

I shouldn't keep reviving this thread just to repeat myself. That was a bad move on my part last night.

I would definitely like to like more jazz, but I continue to just like a small portion of it.

"Believe me, all these young kids growing up in inner city schools, before they get into the rap they should know who Coltrane and Ellington were"

"I just think we don’t require skill in art anymore. That’s what perplexes me, because it’s totally commercially driven. The lowest common denominator. But we have great musicians in this country. We just need to water them, like a flower, and let them grow, and respect them and encourage them. But we don’t."

blah blah, same old shit

I resent statements like this that imply that bop is neither "thoughful" nor "cerebral." What, do you think bop solos are just people playing scales really really fast?

But:

Wynton Marsalis said on the Ken Burn's thing that his definition of jazz was music with a particular triplet-based rhythmic swing. (Despite having quoted WM twice approvingly on this thread I'm not a disciple or a particular fan). We are never going to get agreement on where the barrier between jazz and not-jazz should be drawn, but for various reasons I think this is the most practical place. The issue is clouded by the fact that "not-jazz" is too often used as a pejorative term by critics: in my view it should be a purely descriptive term with no value attached.

If you accept this definition "Bitches Brew", for example, is "not jazz" (I love "Bitches Brew" - this is not an attempt to sneak in a denigration of electric Miles).

You can see where my argument is headed: once you look at "jazz" that is influenced by Sly/JB, then if you accept my argument it is "not jazz" and even if you don't there is a quantum leap away from the jazz that went before. We are not talking subtle gradations of difference.

Looking at the characteristics of funk rhythm sections as opposed to jazz (caution: gross simplification/generalisations to follow)

- the implied triplet feel of jazz is replaced by a squarer 4/4 time where 8th beats are regularised.

- much more of the drum kit is given over to keeping time. Typically the bass drum and snare drum will play repetitive patterns as well as the cymbals. That so much more whole kit is dedicated to keeping time gives the drummer the choice of using cymbals to reinforce the regular pattern or frees them up for emphasis/decoration.

- These repetitive patterns can be extremely complex though. The mix of offbeats and on-beats is much more sophisticated than most earlier rock drumming. They would also vary between sections of the song (in some James Brown songs the tendency to stay on a single chord meant that subtle differences in the basic rhythm might be the only or main difference between verse and bridge, for example).

- Because many of the guys playing this style were virtuosi they could maintain and subtly vary these sophisticated patterns while

- The bassist will "lock" with this overall pattern (this is very different from the typical jazz pattern where, as mentioned, the bassist locks with the cymbal and the rest of the kit it freed up for more creative emphasis etc).

- The bassist will also play a repetitive rhythmic pattern, often on a single chord throughout. This has important implications:

1 In jazz the division of time into bars is much less obvious because there is a fairly even flow of quarter beats on cymbal and bass. In funk the more typical pattern is for the bass and drums to come together strongly on the "one" beat of the bar followed by the drums and bass playing divergent but complementary patterns of off and on beats. Hence in Funkadelic the constant quasi-mystical reference to the "One". (Just to illustrate how simplistic this is the repetition could be over two bars not one, so the "One" is emphasised only every second bar; and some patterns manage to emphasise the "One" even though neither the bass or drums play the one beat!

2 Funk tends to be harmonically very simple and is glued together by the bass playing a repetitive harmonic pattern. Jazz tunes tend to go on a harmonic journey coming "home" by resolving to the tonic periodically every 8 or 16 or 32 bars. Funk typically comes "home" harmonically at the beginning of every bar when the bass thumps out the root note of the chord. In any case the bass's use of repetitive patterns glues the harmony together.

One consequence of this is that extremely discordant elements can be introduced. The discordant elements in jazz tend to be "controlled": increasingly discordant harmonies are introduced as the music develops and the ear accepts these for two reasons:

1 These discordant harmonies are resolved to the more consonant tonic.

2. With familiarisation the jazz fan learns to regard these harmonies as beautiful (or semi-consonant) in themselves.

In funk the second reason can effectively be done away with: the "glue" of the harmonically repeated bassline and the return "home" to the root at the beginning of every bar means that the ear will tolerate a much greater amount of temporary dissonance, because it is so transient. There is no need for the dissonance to be controlled or consonant to the "educated" ear. This has huge implications for rap and other sample-based forms where the
samples of non-musical materials, or music from different keys can be collaged together and be made to sound congruous by the repetitive harmonic and rhythmic patterns of bass and drums.

(A similar effect is achieved in a lot of free jazz where the use of modal harmonic background means that extreme discordancy can be offset by a continual returning home to harmonic familiarity. That's why lots of listeners brought up on funk or certain rock forms can respond more easily to free jazz than to mainstream jazz: it's a smaller leap, because it's much closer to what they are musically familiar with).

-- ArfArf (ArfAr...) (webmail), January 16th, 2003 6:18 AM. (link)

best post on ILM i've read in two years

(Wish I had something of importance to add to it...)

The bass is the pulse, the drums are also to a certain extent, but they're more there to provide color and accents. There's a soloist trying to play over chord changes on top, so you can't have the drummer playing all this thunderous stuff all over the kit (at least in swing, bop, etc.) Jazz drumming is significantly more subtle than rock drums, and if you listen closely, you may realize that there's a lot more going on besides the ride cymbal than you realize (light comping on the snare, kick etc.)

If you want examples of music where I especially like the sound of the percussion and like the rhythmic approach, I would point to: most Arabic music (limiting it to styles from before the 80s) and most salsa, as well as most Sun Ra. There are some examples in rock, but not all that many really.

Granted, it was kind of a dumb question to ask, or to phrase the way I phrased it, but sometimes bluntly asking things that way can lead to some interesting responses. I was pretty impressed with a lot of the responses here.

I just don't like the sound of most jazz drumming (with the ride cymbal tapping as the ultimate annoyance) or relate to its rhythmic sense, at least when it gets into Elvin Jones territory. For color and timbre, I'll take a combination of congas, bongos, and timbales over the standard drum kit any day. Ditto for the typical Egyptian or Lebanese percussion combination (though I don't know the names of all of that).

I don't think it's right to just look at as the primitive ancestor of jazz drumming, because the style has continued to develop there for the last, oh, century or so (both on drumset and the street music bass drummer/snare drummer configuration). It's still jazz, but it's focused on the drums rather than the cymbals and it's dance music first and foremost. For modern New Orleans drumming, I'd check out:

Leroy Jones, Mo' Cream from the Crop (w/Shannon Powell)
Derek Shezbie, Spodie's Back (w/Herlin Riley et al)
Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Shake That Thing
New Birth Brass Band, D-Boy
Rebirth Brass Band, We Come to Party, Hot Venom

Rockist, given what you like (Latin music, etc.), I really think you'd like New Orleans brass bands .

Yes. Ole I didn't like, but it may have had more to do with other things in the music. I did try to listen to what you or someone pointed out about Afro-Blue, but I didn't get it. I do like some Coltrane, but often in spite of the drumming.

(I do like a fair amount of traditional African drumming that I've heard, though I didn't mention that hear, but that's kind of implied in my mention of salsa, so you are right to mention Africanicity.)

Basically, brass bands and trad bands can both do the traditional New Orleans jazz/gospel thing, but modern brass band music can also have a lot more clave and r&b in it.

Great moments on the ride cymbal

xpost:
Yeah, I tink you guys are right, I just wanted to discuss the triplet thing a little and copied that stuff from some web site. In any case, on my instrument I play mostly quarter notes.

That may be so if they're a little corny and riki-tiki, but I find that one of the most important things about the New Orleans feel is that its right inbetween straight 8ths and triplet-based swing.

Then it's usually one or two racks and a floor tom, and your standard snare. At least one ride cymbal, probably a crash too. I'd stay away from the Avedis Zildjians -- try to get a K ride maybe. Ride sound is VERY important in jazz drumming. Then again, for a starter kit, this might be out of your price range -- cymbals can be pricy.

Gretsch actually makes a great little starter jazz kit with an 18 or 20" and a snare that's actually made of wood for not too much money (maybe 5-600?) I think it's called the Catalina Club or something like that.

You could also go for vintage -- Ludwigs are great, or old Premier if you can find it. Old Gretsch drums are the best, but tend to be pricier. There are also japanese kits from the 60s/70s that sound passably good.

I've been using my beautiful little four piece kit with an 18" bass drum and two 20" rides for everything for a few years now, but I've gotten to the point where I don't really like using it for anything but jazz/bebop. Anything else (be it trad jazz or rock) needs a bigger, deeper kick drum with a sharper attack.

Pretty much, yeah. I go in and out of phases of trying to give mainstream jazz a chance. One reason I would bother to start this sort of thread is that I keep coming back to give jazz a chance, and then being put off by it. If I were to just give up on it completely, I probably would never make the types of comments I've made here, since it wouldn't matter any more. I'm still enjoying a very narrow sliver of contemporary a.g. stuff, and that keeps me happy for now. (I really wish Hopscotch records would respond to the check and e-mails I sent them about two months ago. Fuckin' bohemians.) Anyway, I haven't been testing the mainstream jazz waters much lately.

-- Oblivious Lad. (mjlazowsk...), May 6th, 2005.

I have an Avedis ride that I really like -- it's a 21" "Sweet Ride" -- but I generally find I don't like the sound of the newer A Zildjians, especially rides. It's really all about the individual cymbal and your individual tastes though. It's not like the A Zildjians are

It's also worth considering what kind of music you're going to use it for. If you're playing jazz, or anything relatively quiet, a nice complex, dark ride can really add a lot. But if you're playing loud rock it's just going to get lost in the mix anyway and maybe even cause problems.

anyone wanna buy some of the turk hi hats off me? ;)

My current fave ride is a Sabian AAX dry ride.

I haven't had time to read the whole thread so some one may have mentioned it but I think I have a partial answer to the original question.

Early records were acoustically recorded. The band would crowd into a room and a large horn would capture the sound directly into a mechanical cutting device. If you listen to popular music from this time you will notice an absence of drums or sudden noises as these would make the mechanical cutting needle jump out of its groove. As a result many bands would leave their drum kits at home and improvise the rhythm section on wooden blocks and tiny hand cymbals. There are stories of early jazz bands traveling to Europe with full kits and seeing the locals replicate their thin recorded drums and then of course... blowing them away.

In 1925 electric recording became feasible but it took a ridiculously long time for the modern drum sound to appear in most recordings. This was in part due to slow to adapt engineers and producers and also the depression, during which record sales fells from historic highs of 150 mill in 1929 to 15 million by 1933. (proving that out of the old adage of entertainment and the price of heroin, only one is recession proof.)

By then, I guess, the sound was pretty well ingrained.

So maybe the cymbal was a technical thing as much as much as a musical one?

Occurs to me that there are a few jazz drummers I really dig who have a more drum-centered, less ride-heavy approach -- Hamid Drake comes to mind, and Ed Blackwell.

for some reason this thread title is cracking me up

could be a pavlovian response to the seinfeldesque phrasing

at first I thought you meant the cymbal tapping was a response to seinfeldesque bass phrasing

I am not completely alone (but I don't really hate trap drums the way Fiol does, and I love timbales, which he sees as almost as bad as trap drums):

Let me preface my response by saying that one's likes and dislikes in music are quite similar to one's likes and dislikes when it comes to food. Some people can think of nothing better and more enjoyable than the taste and feel of eating a raw oyster, while others are horrified just at the thought of a fishy-tasting, phlem-like substance slithering down their throat. This is not to say that raw oysters are no good or that they are not a legitimate and valuable food source, it's simply a matter of taste. Having said this, let me say that I think one of the reasons why I got into Latin music in the first place, is because I detest the sound of trap drums or drum kit - especially when played by heavy-handed, tasteless percussionists who overplay. (The Brazilian trap drummers are the only ones who can make this obnoxious instrument sound appealing to me.) In fact, I'd like to know who invented this awful, one-man-band percussion concept, with the abrasive and irritating sound of the snare drum (a military drum that was designed to cut through gunfire) leading the charge, and the cymbals clinging and clanging away behind it at full tilt. I'd like to dance a guaguancó on his grave.

http://www.descarga.com/cgi-bin/db/archives/Interview58?Mogw6uXn;;12

lol

I'd like to know who invented this awful, one-man-band percussion concept

He can thank vaudeville.

this thread very informative

Far too many Robert Wyatt tracks are spoiled by this...

Don't think they are jazz tracks (from the little solo Wyatt I've heard anyway)...

hah just yesterday i bought End of an Ear for £3 quid in Fopp and was surprised (and pleased!) to find that its pretty much a free jazz alb (had never heard it before) - on one listen i didn't hear much 'constant' anything tho

What's awesome is people who walk around making "tsss-ts-ts-tsss-ts-ts" noises with their mouths!

You don't even have to like jazz to do that, I've found out.

iirc this thread is all-time

for some reason this thread title is cracking me up

― n/a is just more of a character....in a genre polluted by clones (n/a), Friday, 12 December 2008 23:09 (1 year ago)

"Honey, do you hear that constant cymbal tapping? Can you go see what that is?"

What's awesome is people who walk around making "tsss-ts-ts-tsss-ts-ts" noises with their mouths!

I've caught myself doing this loads lately. I blame Jimmy Cobb.

lol at this thread. I assumed kate had started it

great revive

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/black-sabbath-jazz-swing-influence-bill-ward-948231/

“I remember quite vividly listening to Black Sabbath, and it was the self-titled record,” Gaster recalls. “I think in particular it was the first song on Side Two, ‘Wicked World.’ Bill Ward opens up that tune by playing jazz time on the hi-hat. He’s playing that figure that you hear so many of those big-band guys play: ‘spang-a-lang, spang-a-lang.’ And that drives the band. There’s no backbeat; there’s no bass drum there in particular. It’s really just the sound of those hi-hats that’s pushing the band along.

lots of meat in that article, good stuff

That seems like kind of an obvious observation about that tune though? And lots of drummers of the time and preceding Ward were incorporating jazz influence. Mitch Mitchell comes to mind as someone who did so way more than Ward.

lmao at this thread

xp I like the perspective the article gives on the early Sabbath sound ... it's not that what Ward was doing was so unusual or innovative in itself, it's just cool to see the jazz-influenced aspects spelled out in some detail

always glad to see this thread revived, truly an ILM classic

The really funny thing is that it's actually a pretty deep question, with a lot of history behind the answer

I like imagining that the thread title was created by someone who lived next door to a jazz practice space. "ARGH, WHAT'S WITH THAT CONSTANT CYMBAL TAPPING!"

When I hear people pine for the early days of ILM, I think of threads like this and laugh.

I don't know of anyone who pines for the ILM/ILX of 2001 or 2002 tbf.

i do

What's with every jazz record having to have at least one ballad on it? Most jazz ballads are complete snoozes, very few players do them in a way I want to hear.

I don't know of anyone who pines for the ILM/ILX of 2001 or 2002 tbf.

― High profile Tom D (Tom D.), mercredi 12 février 2020 17:46 (eleven months ago) bookmarkflaglink

i do

― j., mercredi 12 février 2020 21:35 (eleven months ago) bookmarkflaglink

Same. And Jordan was right, this was actually a good question and discussion working out how a genre convention came to be.

Man alive, do you specifically mean the inclusion of vocal ballads on otherwise mostly instrumental albums, which always strikes me as a bit of a funny phenomenon, or just slower ballad tracks more generally?

Funny, I've only recently come to love the ballad. Partly because of work from home chill ambient playlist vibes (sorry), and partly because of some gigs with a serious trumpet player last year that made me realize how truly difficult they are to play well.

Like, I'd always heard people say that, and I consciously knew that keeping a steady quarter note gets harder the slower the tempo is. But if you're playing in school, at a jam session, or with anyone under 60 years old, no one is really going to call you out if the tempo fluctuates a tiny bit. And on these gigs there were ballads in that old-school tempo range that's not funereal nor is it approaching medium swing. Think 66 bpm, tempos that people used to slow dance to. Literally, if the first three quarter notes were not as counted off, the rhythm section would be getting snaps and stomps and glares. It was the hardest part of the night and I dreaded it. Not that I'm great at it now, but I did learn some things about lightening up my approach and practicing those tempos.

Also I was listening to Steve Jordan on a podcast and was glad to hear him say that everyone skips the ballads on records when they're young, but now they're his favorite (he was talking about 'Basin St Blues' on Seven Steps to Heaven).

and what's the deal with those slow movements in classical symphonies, bunch of filler if you ask me

Jordan's post reminds me of someone on ILM commenting that Grant Green's "Idle Moments" (the title track) sounds like a competition for who can play slower

I'd always heard people say that, and I consciously knew that keeping a steady quarter note gets harder the slower the tempo is.

seriously true. Like, it also gets harder as you play faster and exceed the comfort zone, but it isn't as obvious as when your time slips when playing slower (especially live, because the audience generally is just going apeshit and doesn't really care as much as you, the drummer, do)

also I don't think anyone so far has mentioned that the swing rhythm is basically 1/2 (as in one hand) of the standard paradiddle rudiment?

I still often skip the ballads on a typical jazz record, though obviously I can listen to Coltrane or Bill Evans play ballads for three hours straight -- if anything I'm more likely to skip the up tempo tune on a Bill Evans record.

also I don't think anyone so far has mentioned that the swing rhythm is basically 1/2 (as in one hand) of the standard paradiddle rudiment?

― sarahell, Thursday, January 14, 2021 4:55 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

true, although only one-handed, normally you'd switch lead hands when you play paradiddles

idle moments is so great, i think the meaning of life might be in there somewhere

I think even the most incorrigible ballad hater should enjoy monk ballads (especially as played by him). in the robin kelley bio monk is constantly tripping up talented players who love to show off by doing things like unexpectedly calling fast tunes at ballad tempo and such

Monk ballads are some of the best music ever made!

it was tylerw btw:

title track on that is ridic, some sort of competition between the players on who could play the slowest. i think joe henderson wins, because he sounds totally chill and totally tense at the same time.

― tylerw, Tuesday, August 30, 2011 4:30 PM (nine years ago)

xp man alive - L (R) L-L (R) L (R-R) (repeat) -- isn't this what I said? Isn't this the basic jazz ride pattern? the (R) being the other hand that would be played in a paradiddle but is omitted ?

this is such a funny thread. hi hats are like one of the most beautiful sounds ever in the hands of a skilled drummer.

still need to listen to so much more jazz but my favorite ballads ever are on "out to lunch!" just so haunting.

That reminds me of another story I heard from Bill Stewart on a podcast, about how impressed he was with Eddie Harris on a slow tune on the Hand Jive record. How most saxophonists play kind of floaty and rubato on ballads, but Eddie Harris played super clear actual note values for the whole tune, with perfect time.

I saw Bernard Purdie give a lecture/demonstration once, and he talked about how impossible it was to play with Ray Charles, specifically the glacial pace of what Purdie called Charles’ “death tempo.” (Think “I Believe To My Soul” at half the tempo of the recording.)

looool

xp man alive - L (R) L-L (R) L (R-R) (repeat) -- isn't this what I said? Isn't this the basic jazz ride pattern? the (R) being the other hand that would be played in a paradiddle but is omitted ?

― sarahell, Thursday, January 14, 2021 5:11 PM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

No I mean the typical way to practice paradiddles would be RLRRLRLLRLRRLRLL, so you're only getting the RLRR part.

I'm sure there's an actual answer out there for where the pattern comes from, but my speculation would be that it's more likely something that came from the Caribbean via New Orleans. Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin musics tend to have a lot more emphasis on the "a" (as in "one-e-and-a"), which is where the third cymbal tap falls -- you can really hear it if you straighten out the cymbal pattern a bit.

fwiw I love playing slow tempos because you have so much elasticity and space to play with.

xp, just for example, you can hear the "constant cymbal tapping" rhythm a lot here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs9ZHIWYZC0

Also I meant to say as far as man alive's original comment about always including ballads on records, I feel like I was kind of ruined by the jazz idea that you need to keep switching up the feel during a set or record. Play a fast tune? Then you need to play a ballad next. A thirty two bar tune? Time for a blues. Play two swing tunes in a row? Better mix it up with a Latin tune.

There's obviously something to it in terms of keeping the audience engaged, especially in jazz where it's mostly instrumental soloing. But I don't think it applies as well to sequencing in other genres where keeping up a sustained mood might be more valuable.

Jordan yeah that's exactly what I'm talking about really, I find it very boring usually when jazz records follow that kind of formula. I love an album that sustains a single mood or stays within greater constraints, much more interesting.

But also, to do that AND sustain attention you have to be way better. But you have to be way better to play ballads well too.

No I mean the typical way to practice paradiddles would be RLRRLRLLRLRRLRLL, so you're only getting the RLRR part.

ah yes, I realize that I reversed it because I am left-handed and I play my kit that way. But regardless, if you played the dominant hand part on the ride cymbal (and omitted the weak hand part) you would basically have the first part of the jazz ride pattern.

Ballads are where horn players really get into tone like guitarists get gaga about various types of distortion. I think the line in many jazz books/articles often throw in a line about Ben Webster's tone.

I know the 'ballads are way harder to play than the fast ones' is also mentioned in a few jazz players bios at some point too. Fast ones can cover up the slop or just wrong notes, can't hide on a ballad its all out there in the open.

Man alive 100% otm today.

Ballads kill the momentum, and they're just ubiquitous. The only thing that saps the energy worse are bass solos.

please, suck the air out of the room with yet another rendition of Polka Dots and Moonbeams. Here comes the tinkly piano intro that doesn't have the same chords as the song, can't wait...

Hot take: good ballads are good, shitty ballads are shitty.

good ballads are good but the whole concept of ballads is shitty

philistines

So much crazy talk itt

ballads are terrible, who wants to hear beautiful romantic music that makes you ruminate on life love & longing, what a dumb idea lol

ballads are good especially in jazz

What's people's opinion on free jazz ballads?

does this count? if so great https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT-yCncB2mU

Milford Graves said that, during an Albert Ayler residency at Slug's in 1967, they had to play four sets a night. Because everyone was so exhausted, the fourth set was always very slow pieces.

ornette also has plenty of great ones, in a less fiery mode

coltrane wrote fantastic ballads until the end but his very late solos are less obviously ballad-like than the tunes would suggest

maybe if things get less tonal or less conventionally jazzy it gets harder to identify ballads regardless of tempo

remember an interview with Mark Hollis years ago where he talked about the Coltrane/Ellington version of "In A Sentimental Mood" and how it sounds as if the drummer is setting up his kit during the track

haha yeah it sounds great though

really interesting tension (in the least hostile sense of the word) on that whole album

I'm being a little grumpy and trollish, obv there are lots of jazz ballad performances I like. It also overlaps with my feeling about standards generally -- not that they shouldn't be played, but that they can take on the quality of the dead hands of composers past at times. Because when standards were played by bebop and post-bop groups, the audiences were still full of people who knew those songs as pop songs/showtunes. As Marc Ribot once said, a standard is like playing a duet with the audience's memory. Only modern audiences no longer have that memory, or else they have the memory primarily from hearing other jazz recordings of the standards rather than the standards themselves. And for that reason, they can come to feel very stale, and jazz standard ballads particularly so imo.

Like earlnash says above, I love them now just for ruminating on the textures and tone. Brushes, sizzle cymbals, nice breathy long tones...it's the jazz version of ambient music or asmr.

Does this count?

https://img.discogs.com/epdO_h7rdg3s_KbSKaA9Z9Gt6Lc=/fit-in/500x500/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-510204-1375409025-3072.jpeg.jpg

yes "I'm not jazz" fuck off del boy

I agree with most of man alive's post though and I like standards. but is playing e.g. i got rhythm really any less stale than playing e.g. body and soul

Marc Ribot and man alive otm

what does this make those hugely popular old classical works which include homages to/parodies of long forgotten folk melodies, popular trends etc

part of me wants to rebel against the demand for popular relevance and celebrate these tunes or this style as a folk tradition and part of me sees this kind of traditionalism as irrelevant or potentially reactionary so idk

what do people think about the attempts to turn "smells like teen spirit" or some Radiohead song into standards? I have mixed feelings

The idea of turning some Radiohead song into a standard does not exactly thrill me. Not sure how something becomes a standard though.

I have mixed feelings about those too. I mean this is kind of a central tension in modern jazz since at least the 90s (maybe earlier I just wasn't old enough to know) -- standards formed a lot of the harmonic language of jazz up to a certain point, but the originals are lost on modern audience and the harmonic vocabulary itself is also a bit more obscure today. So do you just abandon them? Try to make "new standards" out of songs that mostly don't lend themselves as well to jazz improv? I like what Mehldau has done with a lot of pop and rock songs, but I don't know that they lend themselves to being "standards" in the sense that lots of different people would record their takes.

what do people think about the attempts to turn "smells like teen spirit" or some Radiohead song into standards? I have mixed feelings

I've heard way more jazz versions of the Beatles' "Blackbird" than I've heard interpretations of Nirvana and Radiohead combined, though I know the latter exist, obviously.

My take on standards is sort of mixed/bifurcated: I don't ever need to hear "What Is This Thing Called Love" or any of the other "standard standards" again. They've lost all their cultural relevance because, to put it crudely, most of the people who knew them as pop songs are dead now, so they exist only as re-interpreted jazz tunes, as discussed above. And players who spent the bulk of their careers just reinterpreting standards (the worst example, to me, is Lee Konitz) do absolutely nothing for me. So, you played the intro phrase to the bridge backwards, the 1001st time you played that song? Woo fucking hoo. Here's a dog biscuit.

The problem is, those tunes are objectively better than the tunes most jazz artists these days are writing themselves. Because they're whole songs, not just heads or a complex little melodic math problem you and your three buddies spent a week figuring out. So until jazz artists can figure out a way to write memorable, crowd-pleasing songs, we're probably gonna be stuck hearing "All The Things You Are" for another eighty years.

xpost with others

Does anyone actually intend those to become standards as such? I thought they were just trying to interpret newer songs. xp

Beatles songs otoh yeah, some are even in the Real Book.

"The people don't come because you grandiose motherfuckers don't play shit that they like."

(i agree)

The only thing that saps the energy worse are bass solos.

I've thought about posting this in 'controversial music opinions' a few times.

I don't see the preservation of standards as that different from the preservation in the repertoire of classical and folk pieces. A Bach mass doesn't mean the same thing to people today that it meant to a Lutheran congregation in 18th century Germany but that doesn't mean it is not still great music worth preserving or that what it means to people now is less valuable. Even "Stairway to Heaven" probably hit people differently in 1971 than it does today. If artists really wanted to be 'relevant' in the nonsense way that music critics use the term, they would make pop records and wouldn't be playing classical or jazz at all.

Bill Dixon on his (and the new music's) development, as musicians moved away from standards:

It's very simple. I no longer felt the need to be playing the standard literature within the vernacular. I felt that you can't improve on that, so there must be something else. Because how many times can you play "'Round Midnight" or any of those beautiful tunes? All the pieces that we liked were already heavily identified with someone else's rendition anyway. What are you going to do? Change a key every eight bars? We tried all of that. We did a lot of crazy things in those days, trying to formulate a way of thinking for yourself. We listened, we analyzed. It didn't just happen with people standing up and blowing their brains out. This is what a lot of people don't understand.

xpost

I would be fine if "no bass solos on uptempo tunes" became Jazz Law. On ballads (which I'm fine with!), sure, go for it. But when the band's slamming along and all of a sudden the drummer has to stop so the bassist can whip his bow out? Fuuuuuck that.

The only bassist allowed to take a solo is Tim Bogert, RIP.

what about mingus

RIP too

Unperson otm. And there was discussion on the 2020 jazz thread (also mostly unperson I believe) about how the culture and marketplace around contemporary jazz is much more about creating your own identity, so even when someone does write a fantastic original, it's relatively rare for that to be recorded by another jazz artist. Although those standout tunes are still probably performed by university ensembles, which after all is where a lot of jazz lives these days.

If this is just standard jazz pet peeves, i'm going to open myself to the firing squad and say 'death to all saxophones'. I'll take an entire album of nothing but tippy-tappy ride cymbals over a single bleat from a saxophone.

The problem is, those tunes are objectively better than the tunes most jazz artists these days are writing themselves. Because they're whole songs, not just heads or a complex little melodic math problem you and your three buddies spent a week figuring out.

this is painfully otm. only thing worse than a contemporary jazz album thats all hoary old standards is one that is all hoary old standards plus one lone original, extra demerits if the title includes the name of a band member, "danny's riff" or w/e. sends a chill up my spine when i see a tracklisting like that.

I love this album full of ballads and bass solos:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71ssWfclzfL._SL1400_.jpg

this is painfully otm. only thing worse than a contemporary jazz album thats all hoary old standards is one that is all hoary old standards plus one lone original, extra demerits if the title includes the name of a band member, "danny's riff" or w/e. sends a chill up my spine when i see a tracklisting like that.

― nobody like my rap (One Eye Open), Friday, January 15, 2021 2:15 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol, jazz sucks doesn't it

Song for Jeremy [the bass player]

It does seem like there was a brief era, from roughly bebop through maybe mid 60s, where there was a focus on writing *new standards* and a bunch of those are in the real book and get played on gigs. All the main Charlie Parker tunes come to mind, Herbie tunes like Cantaloupe Island, various Coltrane compositions, Footprints, etc. There are even a few from later, like Chick Corea's Spain. I wonder if there are any original jazz tunes from, like, the 80s onward that get played with any regularity by others.

I think I said this on the other thread, but there definitely are. When I was in college in the early '00s, it was stuff like Kenny Garrett's 'Sing a Song of Song', Mo' Betta Blues, and a bunch more that maybe you couldn't call at a jam session, but young groups would play at school and on gigs (thinking tunes by Joshua Redman, John Scofield, Leon Parker, etc).

I don't know to what degree that's happening now exactly, but you do see it a fair amount on youtube with people doing drum covers, breaking down licks, etc.

Is there an updated version of the real book that has more recent tunes in it? Would be really curious to see what's in it.

Prob also bears noting that the 60s was a time when jazz composers were very deliberately trying to create a repertoire outside of standards, in part for reasons that I guess you would call black empowerment or something along those lines.

I would be fine if "no bass solos on uptempo tunes" became Jazz Law. On ballads (which I'm fine with!), sure, go for it. But when the band's slamming along and all of a sudden the drummer has to stop so the bassist can whip his bow out? Fuuuuuck that.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Friday, January 15, 2021 1:25 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

The only kind of uptempo bass solo I like is one based around walking with the drummer still comping. I guess that's a little more like a rhythm section break than a solo, but I enjoy those.

what do people think about the attempts to turn "smells like teen spirit" or some Radiohead song into standards? I have mixed feelings

I think it generally smells like novelty, but the likes of Brad Mehldau or Bad Plus and Bill Frisell before them have done some incredible stuff in this vein.

I've been more annoyed when jazz groups have recorded versions of Aphex Twin pieces, but that's at least partly because I hate his stuff to begin with.

what do people think about the attempts to turn "smells like teen spirit" or some Radiohead song into standards? I have mixed feelings

all for this tbh

I would be fine if "no bass solos on uptempo tunes" became Jazz Law. On ballads (which I'm fine with!), sure, go for it. But when the band's slamming along and all of a sudden the drummer has to stop so the bassist can whip his bow out? Fuuuuuck that.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Friday, January 15, 2021 1:25 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

The only kind of uptempo bass solo I like is one based around walking with the drummer still comping. I guess that's a little more like a rhythm section break than a solo, but I enjoy those.

what do people think about the attempts to turn "smells like teen spirit" or some Radiohead song into standards? I have mixed feelings

There have been so many jazz recordings of "Black Hole Sun," and I know I've seen several jazz groups perform it live, that it seems as if it has become a "contemporary" jazz standard. I wonder what it is about that song that draws the attention of jazzers. Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gorme recorded it back in 1997!

brotherlovesdub at 12:52 15 Jan 21

If this is just standard jazz pet peeves, i'm going to open myself to the firing squad and say 'death to all saxophones'. I'll take an entire album of nothing but tippy-tappy ride cymbals over a single bleat from a saxophone.

there are a number of the most demented opinions on this thread

That opinion was clearly coming from a jazz lover trying to work out a genre convention that puzzles them in their regular listening, though.

I can see why Radiohead and Sting/Police songs work in a jazz context but "Smells Like Teen Spirit" doesn't really seem like it offers that much to work with, although I love it (and like the Bad Plus version)? Maybe "Lithium"?

Man, y'all would be furious about the acoustic / folkie scene, in which the standards are currently "Wagon Wheel," "City of New Orleans," and "Hallelujah."

There's a (or, you know, there was) a bluegrass circle at the farmer's market every Saturday, with like 20 people or so with everything from fiddle to upright bass and then a few other more exotic things. I asked my guitar teacher if he's ever felt like sitting in, and he rolled his eyes and complained that it's basically just 30 minutes of "Wagon Wheel."

Yep, I have spent many an open mic night placing bets with my drunken friends on whether the next song would be "Country Roads," "Hurt," or, alas, "Wagon Wheel."

That said, I miss those nights. And every once in a while you'd get an unexpected gem. I once heard a 14-year-old kid play an exquisite fingerstyle version of "Desafinado" and my heart grew three sizes.

Flabbergasted unperson doesn’t like Lee Konitz. I have some calzino-like thoughts going through my head for that one.

I remember a 20something student wanted to learn "Don't Dream It's Over" so I pulled up the Crowded House video and started demonstrating the sus chords in the intro. She stopped me and said she preferred the 'other version', which, apparently, consists of strumming open-position triads with the campfire rhythm.

(It's the version she was familiar with from open mics.)

Why do u hate fun, sund4r?

The Bad Plus version of Lithium is also fantastic.

the funny thing is whenever I see this thread title I think of the beginning of “pharoah’s dance”

I just hate that the bad plus or whoever it was chose “flim” as the afx song to cover because that song sucks and he has way more songs with more “jazzy” chords to play with

So many wild opinions in this thread!

A whole lot of pop music now does not really have that much harmonic information to really use it for something to improvise over. Some stuff is just a 4 bar beat loop, a sustained pad sound (maybe not even a chord) and then multi tracked vocal melody and a sample sound of some sort. Chord progression...eh, maybe kinda. Bassline...sometimes not even used. Vocal melody...lots are pretty childrens song like, which is often catchy, but not exactly some great leaps in intervals and the music juice that jazz musicians like, which is often a bit more obscure than the usual listener (at least now).

There have been so many jazz recordings of "Black Hole Sun," and I know I've seen several jazz groups perform it live, that it seems as if it has become a "contemporary" jazz standard. I wonder what it is about that song that draws the attention of jazzers.

I didn't know that but going over it rn, it makes sense. The harmony and melody are filled with modal mixture, with a lot of bIII and bVI, and both major and minor versions of the 3rd and 7th scale degrees in the melody, and that weird bII at the ends of cadences in the verse, while the chorus ends with a good proper V chord. The melody is also syncopated and lends itself well to jazz rhythm.

no one ever said jazz has to have constant cymbals - and have I not been constant?

If a steady yet subtly syncopated ride cymbal (with a good balance of ping and wash) is wrong, I don't wanna be right.

Jazz ride cymbal is one of the most satisfying of all sounds, imo

Saw some interesting social media post yesterday in my feed about Stewart Copeland discussing the Jazz influence on Charlie Watts and how he could perceive it in a general sense even if Charlie never ever did the cymbal tapping thing.

now yarn mallets on a cybal bringin a creshendo is a thing to be cherished - like in THE OCEAN by Lou Reed

Lol