Playing Fast

Jazzaferri

Charles, Is a "wife" range of emotions the next level up from a wide range.

If a person does not have enough technique to express themselves ....well....then one is is in the other end of sterile boat without being able to admire the technique.

One of the things that I enjoy about SR. AD and JR. is their ability to express that fiery intensity and go on to haunting inner reflections etc. etc. I wish there were some current mainstream jazz guitar players who played with such feeling. There may well be, but I haven't heard them.

Bones

"I must admit though that I have a harder time appreciating a player who sounds like their lack of technique is limiting what they can say. "

Yep, exactly. Thanks Charles that is what I was trying to say. Why have limits?

I can't solo fast although I wish I could. But I'm not a pro. Nonetheless, aspire to the highest level of technical ability that you can achieve, use it as you will and have fun no matter what your level. No matter what you do some will like it and some will not. That's just subjective opinion and can be debated until the cows come home. But if someone has technique (and that IS necessary to play at the highest level) there isn't any debate about that. There are a finite number of contemporary players who can ACTUALLY hang at those tempos and I love to listen to all of them. And they are all 'artists' at the highest level and we are lucky that they are keeping the genre alive and healthy and moving forward.

Sure sometimes it comes across as a 'cutting session' when there are multiple high level players on stage at the same time. Cool, I love it, bring it on! They are just pushing each other. I'd love to be able to hang with those guys!

Russell Letson

Over the last fifty years or so I've gotten to watch both players and audiences in a number of traditions, and there is indeed some tension between "technique" and "art," and it looks to me like an interestingly complicated interaction. On the player side, I see a mix of ambition, exploration, and expression. The desire to master the instrument and take technique as far as possible can be like athletic ambition: play faster, louder, more complicated. And it can also be a reflection of artistic ambition: I need to be able to play fast in order to say what I want to say.

Over on the audience side, there are listeners who don't respond to much beyond faster/louder/more-complicated. They're the ones applauding or cheering at the flashy passages and getting restless during the ballads. I remember climbing my own youthful learning curve with classical music: at first it was all about the fast-loud parts of, say, a Beethoven symphony. Eventually I came to understand the Pastoral as well, and eventually worked my way to Bach solo instrumental pieces. Same thing happened with jazz.

I've spent decades in the fingerstyle-acoustic subculture, and I can always tell which pieces and passages the non-guitarists in an audience are going to clap for. They're not always the ones that the pickers themselves would choose, especially when we understand that some are stunts that can be mastered with a moderate amount of effort. And others might be truly difficult but are included in a performance precisely because they are impressively "technical" crowd-pleasers. And then there are the players with enormous technical facility who nevertheless remain interesting and moving because the technique really does serve the music: Lenny Breau, Tommy Emmanuel (at his best anyway), Michael Hedges, Pierre Bensusan, Led Kaapana.

To bring this meandering post back to gypsy jazz, I see a lot of speed/complexity that strikes me as expressive--but expressive of young-man exuberance and excitement with technique. This is not always very interesting to those less in love with athleticism for its own sake.* One of the reasons I'm not in love with the usual guitar circle (aside from the too-many-guitars issue) is the tendency toward shredding sessions. But then, I'm Old and came to jazz via swing and dance and song, and my expectations have a somewhat lower default metronome setting.

* Of course, fast/complicated/loud is part of the musician's toolkit--it's handy to have it available to contrast with slow/simple/quiet. Entire genres depend of that contrast, for example the czárdás. As Woody Allen has pointed out, man does not live by bread alone. Frequently there must be a beverage.

Chiefbigeasy

Couldn't ask for more insightful observation about this topic than Russell's. But here's the thing: from the beginning – in the beginning, here, meaning Django – a lot of gypsy jazz has always been played fast. There's no getting around it.

I think most of us who love this music and study it can tell the difference between flash and artistry. I don't think I've ever heard a phrase Stochelo played that I wouldn't want to be able to do myself.

To that end, I always spend part of my practice time on fluid speed exercises (thanks, Michael, for Gypsy Picking). It's just a fact of life. I posted an earlier thread about this topic with the heading that included the word "efficient" picking. While we all have to figure out whatever personal physical mechanics need to be mastered, there is a lot of standard good advice to be had on this topic, and I don't think you'll find any better information than the players at this forum.

Buco

I think half the ability of playing fast lays in a fact that most of the guys who are at that level started at the very young age and went full throttle very early on without thinking of it as anything particularly hard, just something that needs to be done in order to sound like their elders.

There was a joke circulating in Bosnia I remember, kinda dumb and funny at the same, that illustrates that sort of kids' mentality: Hey man I just saw your kid (imaging this kid being a constant up to no good type) drag a 50 foot train rail to your backyard???!!! Father that's resigned to his child's ways waves his arm and replies: meh, kid has no clue what a 50 foot piece of train rail is.

As plain as it may sound, the first thing to do is to approach it as something that can be done. Then practice your ass off.
One way to practice I used that got me to play some things I previously thought were way out of my reach is to take the piece and practice at half speed and after a while go full throttle. Gradually you might start breaking that barrier.