Django and music theory

Jeff Moore

There is music. There is theory. But maybe there's only music.
If one asks; was Django was educated, schooled, and understood theory? The answer is clearly yes, yes, and yes, but not if your thinking of dots on paper, brick and mortar, and verbally communicable ideas, it's no. But to say Django was unschooled, uneducated, and a poor theorist, discounts everything you hear when he plays. The trick to the contradiction is in language not music! It's in the culture of academia which is hooked on phonics (communication) and which confuses ability to communicate ("education") with learning. Django was a bad communicator but a real good learner, obviously.
If someone told you that Mozart couldn't "improvise" because improv didn't happen until later. I hope you'd laugh, even if it sounded plausible. He improvised! It's just that the word and it's cultural construct came later. The act of improv must have existed pre-history but only in music. Words are cultural construct. Music is a separate cultural construct. This discussion at times is attempting to crush the two things together. The words can but often don't help understanding music. In Django's case, those words (school.....) don't help.
Do we really think that someone could be "taught" to play like Django with enough bricks (school), dots (education), and discussion (theory)? Wouldn't those things slow you down? Even if you learn only using Django's DIY methods, I doubt you'll play like Django. You won't even play like Birelli, you'll just play like yourself.

Charles Meadows

A lot of folks here seem to agree that knowing that playing a certain pattern of notes over a certain chord is the same whether or not you know the name of the chord or the arpeggio.

As someone who is NOT a natural improviser I have wondered if maybe the Birelis of the world are sometimes spontaneously playing a melody they hear in their head as opposed to thinking "this group of notes" or "this pattern". So maybe it's not just a matter of all players knowing the music and some just having names to attach to notes and scales. One thing I know is that the internalization that Denis has talked about is not something that everycame naturally to me. It's something I'm really trying to concentrate on now. And I've seem plenty of guys with less technical proficiency then me (I'm not claiming to be proficient though!) who just seem to internalize quickly without thinking about it!

It seems like there's different answers. A few weeks ago I asked Adrien Moignard and he said he thinks about which chord he's on and what the next chord he going to is, and not really about this or that scale or arp.

Lango-Django

T1mothy, welcome to my world!

Shemi

@Stuart I agree that Bireli and Django probably share a similar mental process when improvising, but I don't necessarily think that Adrien's approach would be any less valid musically, just different. I suspect that someone of Adrien's level is not devoting a great amount of his mental capacity when playing on thinking about the chords,etc... It's a process that becomes innate through years of practicing and runs in the background while the creative side can run with it. Maybe this is an approach more conducive to someone who hasn't got perfect pitch like Django or Bireli (not sure if Adrien has perfect pitch or not, but I feel that having perfect pitch or not must have an effect on how we mentally approach music). Indeed, I suspect that people improvise at extremely high levels of musicianship using many different approaches particular to them, their thought processes, mental capacity, experiences, exposures, personality, brain chemistry, etc.

woodamand

Jeff Moore wrote: »

......But to say Django was unschooled, uneducated, and a poor theorist, discounts everything you hear when he plays.

I didn't say anything like that, Django was brilliant obviously, otherwise why am I studying his playing? I simply asked a question.

Jazzaferri

Django could hear how harmony and melody worked....and was able to use that practical knowledge to create great artistry. He learned chord shapes and progressions, rhythms phrases and maybe even some scales. All by being shown and/or listening/ watching.

Theoretical knowledge gives the ability to explain what and why. For some people it is a help to understanding how harmony rhythm and melody work....for others it's not.

Hemert

stuart wrote: »

Martin Taylor, who also started young, says that when he's improvising, sometimes the guitar just seems to disappear.

Yes, I can relate to that.

First of all I struggled a lot to become a fluent improviser. 1000s upon 1000s of hours of practice to finally get it. I'm talking about the violin now. Suddenly about two years ago during a concert with the Rosenberg Trio I noticed that things all of sudden seemed to be very easy. Super fast tempos seemed relaxed, challenging chord changes were met with easy solutions, timing finally locked in with the rhythm section. From that moment on it only got easier and easier and now it is actually very easy.

During a wokshop I did in Estonia recently after a concert with the "Rosenberg Quartet feat. Christiaan van Hemert" a violin student asked how it was possible for me to stay so relaxed during a 105 min continuous set with a lot of very up tempo songs. She said "it looked so easy". But that's the thing "it is easy", I don't even feel the resistance of the fiddle. It's just effortless. I rarely practice violin these days and if I get a call tomorrow from whomever to come and play 3 hours of challenging songs I feel confident that it will be no problem, I will probably not open the violin case until the sound check before the concert without any worries.

When I started with guitar the struggle started all over again, very very frustrating. You manage to do something at home with a play along and on a gig everything fails: timing, notes, sound. Your pick feels weird, the strings feel unresponsive, you feel very uneasy, it's miserable. I had to deal with that for the better part of 3,5 years (while 5 hours a day practicing).

During Samois this year things started to change a little bit, I started to feel a lot better. I still struggled sometimes but I had moments of comfort, creativity and pure bliss. Two months later I'm at Paulus Schafer's house jamming. I felt very relaxed and played with a lot of ease. Paulus asked what the hell happened to my guitar playing (he heard me last somewhere before Samois) and how I managed to improve that ridiculously fast. That was an illusion of course, I practiced every skill I used there for a long time but it now started to click.

Skip to this week. I was playing guitar duo in a noisy bar with a very good French player that lives here and this was THE gig I was waiting for. Everything worked, no more struggle, all my ideas fit the chords, timing was solid. I felt completely free the whole night, maybe for the first time since I started with guitar. I didn't want to stop, it was glorious. I'm confident that it will only become more and more free, creative and easy and fun from now on. I knew it would happen eventually (due to the experience with the fiddle) but it took about 4800 hours of focused practice to get there (that probably would have been 6800 hours if I would have started from apoint where I didn't know anything about gypsy jazz when I started with guitar).

I've said it before: ANYONE can do this. Just stick with it, never give up and practice the RIGHT way. If you don't know how, find an expert to put you on the right path!

Jazzaferri

@ Stuart .....from what I have read in peer reviewed papers, the phenomenon of savant syndrome is not well enough understood to know the boundaries.

Reading about his behaviour it is not beyond the realm of possibility that he might have had some degree of or something akin to "savant syndrome". All t he extreme examples do reflect that lack of social skill development and they are the ones that attract the attention and the scientific study.

Jazzaferri

You are correct my friend. None of them fit the parameters as currently defined for Savant Syndrome.

But the leading researcher did make some comments that left the door open. I will dig through my old files and see if I can dig up both my paper and the relevant studies.

It's more of a scientific explanation why some people have such an incredible gift. Kind of like the blind from birth artist who draws and paints with perspective.

dennis

I cannot speak for Django but I can definitely talk about Bireli. Ultimately, as I've said many times, I think it's all about awareness of quality.

If one is highly aware of:

-sound (articulation, tone, intonation)
-rhythm/timing
-ear training (my definition of ear training not christiaan's ;-) )

Then it's really just a matter of putting in the hours. That's how Bireli was since the age of 4. He does not lie about it, he practiced all the freakin time when he was a kid.

When he says he plays what he hears, that's what he does, that does not mean that he doesn't think about chords. Of course he does. He studied harmony a lot. On his own and in his own way of course. He's very conscious about the chords he's playing over, so it's not so different from what Adrien Moignard says.

There's one thing about Bireli that's interesting though. He is someone who is very honest with himself. He really really really does not like to be forced to do things, so he's generally very selective about the projects that come his way... Anything he does, he does it because he wants to. He was never forced to practice. He just enjoyed (still does) doing it.

If he learned an entire django solo by heart, it's because he wanted to, not because he would tell himself, i need to learn this django solo by heart because it will make me a better musician. He is very very natural in that respect. He's just lucky that he had the urge to actively listen to all kidns of music and absorb it.

The reason I mention this is because he doesn't really know any licks per se. He doesn't have a lick that starts on beat X and ends on beat Y, with downstroke on this note , upstroke there, pull off there.

He does not think that way at all. He takes the general idea, and always manipulates it. Within the same solo he might use similar ideas but it will never exactly be the same.

When they recorded Love Me Tender for one of his albums, there is a unison solo between him and franck wolf. The story is that the solo was Bireli's improvisation. Franck was recording in another booth, so he was isolated. He liked the solo so much he decided to learn it note for note.

But the problem is Bireli could never reproduce the same solo live. He s not interested in relearning his solo. He managed to get the first two choruses, but even then he 's always using different fingerings and articulations. I played rhythm for him on 4 concerts, it was different every single time, even though he was playing a recorded solo. That's just how he is.