Phrasing

trumbology

Ando wrote:

More practically, it might mean playing an opening phrase and using its rhythm as a loose template for other phrases, or playing with a particular interval color and using that same color elsewhere in the chorus, or making a certain flash effect (e.g. tremolo chords) the principle of an entire chorus, and so on.

Excellent point, well stated. Solos (and heads or melodys) have hard-to-quantize proportions--a little of this tremolo, which balances out a long, delicate phrase, which is broken up by a couple of staccato notes... It's a cliché to say, but it's like cooking or painting. Lots of folks can get the proportions pretty good through hard work, and a few just have the intuition or the eye which when combined with hard work results in genius.

Ando wrote:

These things make the solos we most often remember because often what we remember best is what we grasp the basic logic of. Think of heads to bebop tunes. Which ones do you remember best? Really, now. I remember the ones I can sing (e.g. Well You Needn't), and these turn out to be the ones the most obvious organizing phrase principles.
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Django's best solos to my ear are the ones that are most extroverted and joyous, and I don't care if they're chaotic and all over the place.
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But in both cases, you get the sense that, while improvising, they were listening to what they were playing and letting it take a life of its own: as if they were listening to their own hearts and realizing how those hearts were connected to everything that was vital and alive.

I like your point about bop heads, and I think you can make it explicitly about solos to--one's favorites are often the ones that flow together logically and have a sort of song-like quality, even if they are too "note-y" to sound good being sung.

Corny analogy--the guitar solos in "Stairway to Heaven" and "Freebird." Or less corny, the solos on "Reelin' in the Years" and "Kid Charlemagne". I know they were pieced together over hours or days in the studio. But you hear them two or three times, and they are locked in your mind just as solidly as the melodies and changes. Plenty of FM rock staples don't have solos that play themselves in your head as you listen along.

When someone like Lester Young or Django creates a solo in real time that has that kind of memorability factor, it's just dang amazing. Even knowing that they are stringing together lines they've played for years, it's still amazing. Because if it were easy to do, they'd do it every time out.

Neil

nym

Hi!
I found interesting what Michael said about Django playing basically same phrases throuht his career. I think that all great guitar players do or did the same: Wes, Hendrix etc.

a

i know someone who has a gigantic book that contains almost all of the leitmotifs/phrases/etc. used in classical music. it would be cool if someone published a complete django encyclopedia of phrases and the ways in which he used them.