Django and music theory

NylonDave

scot wrote: »

Must have been before the corruption of science.

Scot I have been out running the past few hours and that phrase has been haunting me. Genuinely concerning me and making me feel sad.

If you want corruption look at politics and the media. But not for too long because if you do they will get in your head.

Whenever someone asks you to pick a card, ALWAYS look at what they are doing with their other hand.

D.

Buco

NylonDave wrote: »

The way I see it is that improvisation is theory in practice, if a chorus holds water then the theory just has to be good.

That's nicely put.

Russell Letson

In the arts, "theory" is descriptive and (if I may use a five-dollar term) posterior to practice. Despite attempts to use theoretical systems to generate work, I suspect (on the basis of personal experience) that it is the ear, the eye, and the body that really power effective and affecting work. My musical education is limited (more like paper-training a puppy, actually), but I've had the whole enchilada in literature, have taught and practiced writing (and am married to a writer to boot), and I can guarantee that literary and rhetorical criticism serve to explain what happens after it has happened. They are enormously useful tools for an audience that cares about more than the immediate sensation of the work--and even for the creator who wants to get a grip on the machineries of a poem or novel.

On the other hand, there's more than 2000 years of descriptive rhetoric that an educated writer can draw on to bolster the gut-and-ear part of writing. A grounding in prosody won't guarantee a good sonnet, but it provides a framework that holds an enormous number of options. Of course, the exemplary model is derived from the repertory, and it's probably more important to have read/heard a lot than to merely be able to name the components and rule-sets (octave/sestet, quatrains/couplet, Petrarchan/English, etc.).

But to move back to music: Most of the people who have guided me over the last fifty-odd years knew something of "theory"--which I am going to assume includes things like what chords are made of and how they fit together in a given key, which a college friend explained to me in 1962. I could already hear the I-ii-IV-V relationships, but his quick-and-dirty pencilled outline sketch about stacking thirds and keys and such (which I still have) gave me a framework on which to build my decent ear-intuition. Decades later, the people who explained shell chords and how they work (and how to make them work together ergonomically) tied knowing-why to knowing-that and knowing-how. I suppose I could have just asked "what's that chord shape?" and learned the fingerings and maybe their names--but even as a non-reading player, that framework of chord-construction and voicings made things come faster and easier. As Charlie the anvil salesman insists, "You gotta know the territory!"

NylonDave

Hi Russell, nice comparison with literature. The last two writing manuals I read (an from which I all too obviously learned nothing) were by Stephen King and Steven Pinker. I really enjoyed both.

They can be boiled down and translated to music pretty much directly in just two phrases.

KING. The main work of a writer is to read. (as is the case with listening to a musician)

PINKER. Advice on writing should be descriptive and not prescriptive. (in music it is best to describe what is actually done and not what is allegedly correct).

Thanks for the interesting post.

Lango-Django

I've been thinking lately about this topic, and it seems to me that Django is just one more example of what was actually quite a widespread phenomenon in jazz: the musician who comes to jazz from a different ethnic background.

The clarinet player who leads my trio was talking about this the other night:

Q: Why were most of the best (white) clarinet players of the 20's and 30's, with few exceptions, either Italian or Jewish?

A: Because both Italian and Jewish cultures already had an existing clarinet tradition that these players came out of.

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Then there are the guys like Jimmy Dorsey, a whiz on both clarinet and sax, and brother Tommy, trombone player extraordinaire.

The brothers came from an Irish-American family in Scranton, PA, but their musical training was forced upon them by their dad, a coal miner, who used to lock them in their rooms and force them to practise for hours every day.

**************

Admittedly, there are a few musicians who seem to be genuine freaks of nature...

Bix Beiderbecke's musical self-training was playing his cornet along with ODJB records in front of the family gramophone in Davenport, Iowa...

According to those who knew Art Tatum, he never actually practiced his amazing jazz piano technique, but would occasionally visit a pool hall which had a piano on which he would run through some arpeggios for a few minutes.

And Chico Marx's wonderful comic piano style, according to his brother Harpo, was built on the following regime: before playing, Chico would wash his hands in a basin of warm water!

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One of my all-time favourite jazz musicians is violinist Joe Venuti, who was classically trained and was even offered a chair with the Philadelphia Symphony in the 1920's.

Which may sound like a nice kind of musical training for a jazz musician to have, until you stop and consider: how many other 'legit' violinists do you know besides Joe Venuti who could also play excellent jazz?

Answer: zero.

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So putting all this together, what can we modern day aspiring players learn?

-musical theory and training are sort of "optional"

- a love of jazz and desire to play it is not

- nor is a confidence in, and enjoyment of, "playing by ear"

-unless you are another Bix or Tatum, don't forget those 10,000+ hours of playing/practising!



Will