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He is well over eighty years old. When we talked he said that he had had tinitus from his mid sixties and that that had helped because it gave him a fixed pitch to measure all the other notes from so he could always jump in on the correct note. After that his relative pitch would take over everything.
I find that kind of insight much more interesting than the insight free sauvant myth from which we learn NOTHING.
Teddy do you know what instinct is ?
Instinct needs to be honed through millions of years of genetic selection. For anything to be instinctive then it needs to be conditioned through thousands of generations of repeated exposure to a given environmental factor. Such a factor has not been the guitar.
If it was then we would all have very similar instincts to the ones you seem to thing make Django unique. In much the same way that all members of a given species have similar instincts ( the question of sex for the time being being excluded).
Instincts simply do not emerge in a single individual, to suggest is simply untrue and makes it clear that the person producing the argument has not done the work to establish his terms accurately but is simply using buzz words as a barrier to logic.
I posted examples of how Django was using sounds that were very much in the air and being exploited in pre WW1 paris above. I also showed examples of pieces where he seemed to be making a deliberate attempt to change his melodic vocabulary.
I can agree with you that he did not need notes on paper. This is not so very uncommon, studies have been done on the matter and can be read. The links to the studies on tonal languages and perfect pitch (as well as others correlating perfect pitch with childhood exposure to various instruments) are available widely should you ever choose to calibrate your understanding with facts.
I think your definition of 'theory' is as disfunctional as your definition of instinctive. I posted a link to the word postulate earlier did you read it ? I posted it for a reason.
You are certainly postulating on this thread and it would be great if you could try and clarify, for honesty's sake, your own intent in doing so. It seems clear to me.
And if you are going to use a word with a concrete definition to try and lend weight to an argument you should make sure that you are using it accurately otherwise you will be leaning heavily on disinformation which is never good. And it is insulting because it presumes that others take no care over the true meaning of things and should be happily be lead to your conclusion without proper support.
Most of us are interested in the mechanics of learning more than the cliches of mythmaking.
I think Django was quite impressive enough without bolting on untruths thank you.
D.
I have no axe to grind here. I am simply repeating what people who actually knew Django and actually performed with Django have said. Words such as "instinctive" are words they used and may I suggest that some of the musicians involved were probably greater performers than yourself with a better understanding of music.
I am totally confused by your suggestion that anything I have said is untrue. Gerard Leveque was a classically trained musician and he used words like instinctive when describing Django's ability. I repeat what Stephane Grappelli said "......but he (Django) instinctively had knowledge of harmony". Are these people also liars or idiots?
The fact is that some people have a greater instinct for certain things than others and if you are trying to find a tangible explanation for Django's ability, I fear you are wasting your time.
You simply cannot quantify or explain exceptional ability even less so genius.
I think if you feel trying to understand Django's intellectual process rather than the music he produced will help your learning process, it will be a dead end
youtube.com/user/TheTeddyDupont
Hey Teddy thanks for the reply. Instinct is a word which is often misused, it doesn't matter who misuses it it still has a strict meaning and if it is to be invoked consideration should be taken.
Since many of those quotes the definition of instinct has been radically improved by such things as the discovery of DNA. There are many gifted Scientists who believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Whilst this misapprehension is patently false in the light of subsequent discovery. No amount of quoting from luminaries before the more accurate model was accepted makes their opinion ture.
With regards to your quote cited above I personally don't see any disconnect between studying the music and trying to second guess someone's processes. That is why I referenced specific examples of the music directly above. That is to say specific examples in the music that I thought illustrated the principle he was working on whether he himself was aware of his process or not. For example the earth rotates about the sun, whether the earth is cognizant of this fact or not that is its process.
If I was proposing solely a way of looking at the situation which didn't reference the music directly but instead listed other peoples comments and insisted that he had no process then I fear that that would be a certain dead end. Especially if they leaned on terms that had conclusively been shown to be false.
D.
Normally I think you would probably be right but Django is so fundamentally atypical that trying to determine how or why he got where he did in terms of his musical ideas would not achieve anything tangible or practically helpful to you. I do not believe Django knew or for that matter cared how he got there - he just did. For this reason, I believe attempting to ascertain his musical motivation/creative process rather than the form of his music he produced instinctively (there I've said it again!!! :-S ) will not help you with your playing.
However, I have just been trying to answer the original question which was "........ was Django mostly a by ear player or was he schooled in music theory?" The answers are without question (1) Yes and (2) No and I've quoted first hand testimony to substantiate them.
There are many slightly differing definitions of "instinct" but here are a few I have taken at random
(1) A way of behaving, thinking, or feeling that is not learned : a natural desire or tendency that makes you want to act in a particular way
(2) Something you know without learning it or thinking about it
(3) A natural ability
I do not see how these conflict in any way with what Gerard Leveque, Stephane Grappelli, Hubert Rostaing, Louis Vola, Charles Delaunay and many others have said about Django and what I have quoted here.
youtube.com/user/TheTeddyDupont
However, I have just been trying to answer the original question which was "........ was Django mostly a by ear player or was he schooled in music theory?" The answers are without question (1) Yes and (2) No and I've quoted first hand testimony to substantiate them.
[/quote]
But why is Django so atypical? There was and always will be people who are of a same intrinsic level of musicianship as him, dare I say even more so. That is not to say that he wasn't a genius, but one of many who exist in the musical world. He is also not the only "non-formally" trained musician to reach staggering levels on their instrument.
If Django was playing from a very young age, that was his musical training. He might not have learned the technical name of a ii - V - I cadence was but he would surely know what one sounded like. In his early years he probably practiced different ways of negotiating them without ever knowing what they were called because he was required to night after night. So to me, to say he was traditionally schooled in theory would be wrong, he clearly wasn't. But to say his musicality was completely driven by instinct is also wrong in my opinion. He "trained" in his art by doing it from a young age.
My point is that much of his "instinct" would probably have been formed in those early years, long before recordings of him or quotes from other people. I certainly don't believe he popped out of the womb with that level of musical understanding. If he could instinctively understand harmony, the foundation of this instinct probably came from way before he met Grapelli and was born out of his early musical experiences. By the time he met Grapelli that instinct was a well oiled machine.
The quotes you posted may show that he could't relate technical terms to the sounds in his head, but tells us little about the distinction of these sounds personal to his understanding, or if he distinguished "this" sound from "that"... which is kind of the ultimate reason for music theory to exist in the first place. It just gives a name to a sound that is already there. A sound you can hear even if you don't know it's theoretical name.
I don't think anyone would dispute the fact that Django's conception of soloing was heavily based upon a strong knowledge of arpeggios.
But when his amazing, intuitive ear took over, it would take his playing way beyond a mere recitation of arpeggios.
The other major figure of arpeggio-based jazz was Louis Armstrong.
We know a little more about the way he developed his overwhelming technique: he undertook a rigorous study of some of the better New Orleans clarinet players of the twenties and, with the help of his pianist first wife Lil Hardin, learned to mimic their arpeggios on his trumpet and incorporate these techniques into his own soloing.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3250562?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
But once again, with Armstrong's amazing ear and bravura high notes, the listener never feels that he is hearing a mere recitation of arpeggios.
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What Reinhardt and Armstrong also must have had in common was a determination, a work ethic that must have extended almost to the point of compulsion.
Imagine if two of YOUR fingers got fucked up in a fire... what would YOUR playing sound like?
Would YOU have what it takes to get your chops together all over again and become the GREATEST?
I don't think many of us mere mortals would...
Edgar Degas: "Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.... To draw, you must close your eyes and sing."
Georges Braque: "In art there is only one thing that counts: the bit that can’t be explained."