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

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