Speed kills the swing/time to get back to dancing.

rimm · July 2012

I was'nt trying even remotely to give a shitty compliment-they are probably my two favourite players-I've bought everything they have released.

klaatu · July 2012

Bob Holo wrote:

... "Nah, you were great - it's just stylistically different - you're used to standing pretty far back from the canvas and throwing a lot of paint at it and you're going for wild exciting contrasts and explosive movement. We get right up on the canvas and paint a nude or a landscape. Neither is easy to do well, and both are easy to do poorly." ...

Great post, Bob, as always. This statement captures the idea so well.

One of my favorite guitarists is Lindsey Buckingham during his Fleetwood Mac years. He never played in a showy fashion, never sprayed a thousand notes a second, just always seemed to play the right ones to enhance the song. Here's a great quote from Wikipedia:

In an interview with Guitar World Acoustic Magazine, Buckingham said:

"I've always believed that you play to highlight the song, not to highlight the player. The song is all that matters. There are two ways you can choose to go. You can try to be someone like Eddie Van Halen, who is a great guitar player, a virtuoso. Yet he doesn't make good records because what he plays is totally lost in the context of this band's music.

Then there are guitar players like Chet Atkins, who weren't out there trying to show themselves off as guitar players per se, but were using the guitar as a tool to make good records. I remember loving Chet's work when I was a kid, but it was only later, when I really listened to his guitar parts, that I realized how much they were a part of the song's fabric, and how much you'd be going 'Oh, that song just isn't working' if they weren't there."

Jazzaferri · July 2012

Bob's brother's words were very kind words,and left the artistry bit unstated. Anybody can throw a bunch of paint at a canvas and splash it on. Not very many can paint a Mona Lisa and have the wolrd talking about it for centuries. In the words od Salvador Dali "painter, no matter how hard you try to paint very badly, it will still be evident if you ate mediocre"

It probably takes most musicians lots of time in trade and years in age before they come to unserstand the "artistry thing" some never do. I truly hope that some of the hot younger players read this thread, reflect on our commentary and learn from it.

Lango-Django · July 2012

[quote]"painter, no matter how hard you try to paint very badly, it will still be evident if you ate mediocre"[/quote]

Yeah, dammit, Jay, I know exactly what you mean---- I ate at Burger King last week and after that, I couldn't play worth a @#$%!

Seriously, I read something yesterday which I'm still thinking about... perhaps others will find it inspirational, too.

This is a quote from a turn-of-the-previous-century music instructional book entitled [b]Josef Lhevinne: Basic pinciples in pianoforte playing, with a new forward by Rosina Lhevinne[/b]:

[i]"Music is painted upon a canvas of silence. Mozart used to say: 'Silence is the greatest effect in music.' The student does not realize, however, the artistic value of silence."[/i]

Right now I'm so preoccupied with arps, LH fingering patterns and keeping that steady stream of eighth notes going that it's real easy to lose track of this idea--- but I swear that I'm [b]not[/b] going to forget the artistic value of silence!

klaatu · July 2012

What a wonderful quote. Years ago, John Hartford wrote the liner notes for a CD by the great bluegrass banjo player J. D. Crowe and his group The New South. In it he rhapsodized about Crowe's playing, emphasizing the "spaces between the notes." Same idea.

Ahab · July 2012

Space is an incredibly important part of music, without it the notes have no form, hence the original posters comments that some improviastions done at speed lose their meaning because the notes become a kind of musical blur.

In Japanese music space is an integral part of the way the music is constructed. It is far more an inherant concept than it is in western music. The word that they us is Ma, which means negative space. There isn't a direct translation into English, which is quite telling I think. The best way this concept was described to me was to compare it to one of those pictures of two heads facing each other from the side where the space in the middle looks like a candle holder. Are we looking at two faces, or a candle holder? We see both, because their both part of the same picture. I believe this concept is equally valid in a musical context, and the endless note-spinning you get in some improvisations is the antithesis of this.

TimmyHawken · July 2012

Jazzaferri wrote:

It probably takes most musicians lots of time in trade and years in age before they come to unserstand the "artistry thing" some never do. I truly hope that some of the hot younger players read this thread, reflect on our commentary and learn from it.

This statement is pretty condescending. I'm becoming annoyed with a lot of these posts and people insinuating that these great up-in-coming guitarists are not artists. Maybe I'm reading into these posts too much, but that's vibe I'm getting from a lot of you.

I'm not sure what the motivation is here to passive aggressivesly trash talk certain players--a way to cope with your own limitations or maybe it's a 'these youngin's today all have it wrong" type of thing--but I think it's very rude. This is a small community overall and these players maybe will read this and they might think "what a bunch of assholes, I go to jam and have some fun playing with other great guitar players and now I'm not a real musician".

It's not like these guys are doing it for the money, only a handful of GJ musicians, luthiers, vendors and teachers can sustain a living without a side job. It's a sacrifice for them with little reward. The only fame they'll get is from this community. Let the "jazz purists" criticize them, but not the good people of the Djangobooks forum.

Jazzaferri · July 2012

Well Timmy. Personally speaking i think you are way over reacting however.

Why do yo find that statement you quoted condescending. If i had a dollar for every time i heard a complaint about young musicians playing too fast and focussing too much on technique rather than artistry i could buy you all your personal Grand vielle reserve axe and still afford a nice holiday

. I have been playing music since i was 6 which makes it now 56 years. I have played swing, GJ classical, blues, jazz even tried my hand at bluegrass..at which i can play lots of notes but i completely suck at. I even played professionally for a few years.

Too many notes too fast is one of the most common complaints I hear today and going back to when I was young same deal. The quote that my first music mentor gave me "musicians spend the first part of their career seeing how many notes they can put into a piece and the latter part of their career seeing how many they can take out" was not his creation. Django commented on it as have thousands and thousands of others.

Ever heard a Berklee jazz sax grad play (and incidentally Berklee graduated over 900 students, thankfully not all sax, this year). I have heard concert goers complain about it, seasoned touring jazz pros complain about it, record producers complain about it yada yada yada.

No one is saying that the current crop of young players dont have some extremely talented ARTISTS coming up. Reread these posts if you will, take some time to think on it before you react and then comment again if you like. Or not. I am certain that everyone of the people who i know who has contributed to this thread would wish to see the genre continue to grow and prosper.

As Yehudi Menuhin, commented in hisminterview about playing with Stephane Grappelli " you dont find the music in the notes, you find the music in the spaces between the notes"

rimm · July 2012

Timmy, I don't think you quite grasp the title of the post-I personally feel that 'Speed DOES kill the swing', and I have first hand exprience of this. The tempos Django played at were, on a whole way slower than the tempos incorporated by a LOT of the younger generation of players- For me thats a lot like running through an art gallery.

Not to take anything away from the skill required to do this but the physical act of 'dancing' is going to be next to impossible. If you look at the pressings from the 1930's/40's they were often clearly labeled 'foxtrot'. 'waltz' etc. And I have to mention again in passing that Adrien Moignard and Gonzalo could, if they wanted play as quick as anyone for long periods, but the fact is that they don't. .

So not a jot of me being condescending can be garnered from my posts

As a foot note, if a younger player think that advice given from working musicians makes them 'assholes' then they are total 'dicks'.