Sadly I am giving up Gypsy Jazz

diminishedrun

Yes I agree that’s very good - thank you for posting.

Chiefbigeasy

I don't know how old you are, but I'm pretty old myself and have been playing a lot of different kinds of music all my life. Three things have become apparent.

1. Music comes and goes out of favor, including the people around you who like to play it. If you'd told some band nerd kid here in a New Orleans high school in my day that brass band music was going to emerge as one of the funkiest, coolest genres of music, he would not have believed you. Check out the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, The Soul Rebels, etc.
2. Skills and ear training you learned in this music will help you no matter what kind of music you pursue.
3. I've regretted every guitar I let go. I wish I had them all back.

Scoredog

GJ can be quite demanding and there is only so many hours in a day. If one likes more current pop or folk pop or whatever then that is what one likes. GJ can be extremely time consuming to get good at. I applaud that diminishedrun can make a clear cut decision, that's pretty important. Maybe in a couple of years he finds his way back, maybe not, but if not then he made the right choice.

Scoredog

Chiefbigeasy wrote: »

I don't know how old you are, but I'm pretty old myself and have been playing a lot of different kinds of music all my life. Three things have become apparent.

1. Music comes and goes out of favor, including the people around you who like to play it. If you'd told some band nerd kid here in a New Orleans high school in my day that brass band music was going to emerge as one of the funkiest, coolest genres of music, he would not have believed you. Check out the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, The Soul Rebels, etc.
2. Skills and ear training you learned in this music will help you no matter what kind of music you pursue.
3. I've regretted every guitar I let go. I wish I had them all back.

It's kind of interesting and i think you make great points but I can't think of a guitar I wish I had back that I sold. I know many guitar players say they wish they had this back or that back but when i get rid of a guitar it is usually w/o trepidation. The one guitar I sold this year and almost immediately went uh oh (before it had even left my house) was my Holo D when I realized it is really great but had already agreed to get rid of it, but fortunately the buyer didn't love it. I now used it daily. i should add I decided to get rid of it before Neil Andersson did a setup on it.

Buco

Your star burned short but bright
Don't forget to pop in once in awhile.

terrassier

My way to survive ATM is to keep playing something less challenging every so often to remind myself I am not utterly crap - then I doggedly go back to my consecutive double down stroke battles.

diminishedrun

I feel that these were the main issues that I was concerned about. Some of them may be fact (gypsy jazz is hard) and some may be just plain old opinion. I’d like to here views though as it may be that I’ll hang around. The link to the guy singing the standards is intriguing.

1. I wanted badly to play lead, but at 56 it seems that not only time is against me (although I am very fit athletically from a life of sport). I don’t seem to posess the required discipline or patience to play lead.

2. Opinion. I find the improvisational aspect of gypsy jazz to be at odds with the music but of course this is the genre. For example, a tune commences with a catchy recognised melody but then quickly progresses to improvisation, taking turns to have a go at soloing before returning to remind the audience what the song started out as. Now, this is where I feel I’m at odds with the genre: if you don’t particularly enjoy jazz improvisation then it’s a bit of a struggle because that’s what this genre is about.

There is a lack of opportunity to play with others in my location so if like me you are not keen on playing to backing tracks then it’s a bit tough.

But the big one for me is that I am, and always have been moved by lyrics. All music has the capacity to move people emotionally but my own view is that the marrying of music with words is hard to beat. We communicate with language and I guess it’s just the way I am.

Scoredog

I was in a somewhat similar position...picked up GJ late (age 56) and also fit (Mountain Biking, no big air, at least not on purpose, and part time tennis instructor). Difference might be I was also in a life of music as a profession and when I got the GJ bug my attitude was "I have to figure this out".

I have been to a few festivals and gone to a few workshops and guess what at 56 you would be one of the younger ones. it seems when some men get older they decide this is what they want to do with some of their spare time. Even though i have trouble with this because of my goal orientated personality the main reason to do this is to have fun, if you can do that then why not, if it's too much of a struggle then why? Still as we get older accomplishing something new is a great way to feel good about life.

Jazz means improvisation so if you are at odds with that you certainly have an issue. You might look for a soloist who does not play a zillion notes a bar but whose emphasis is on embellishing melodies. If that does not work you are kind of done.

Bones

Yeah if you don't like improv then jazz is definitely NOT for you. Improv is what it is really all about IMHO. No one hardly ever plays the head verbatim as 'written' (even if it was actually written out which I doubt Django even did since he couldn't read music) or even necessarily play it the exact same way twice. Being stuck to a set arrangement is VERY claustrophobic/stressful to me and not very fun. Improv is so much more 'freeing'. And it leads to less performance anxiety.

That said, one does need to be 'able' to state the head more or less and some are pretty challenging. I like to practice them for working on technique and melodic ideas. But the nice thing about being able to improvise is during performance if you 'mess up' a bit you don't have a complete train wreck because it's easy to just recover. You don't get completely derailed if you come off the 'tracks' of the straight-as-written melody a bit.

And to me it would get boring really fast to hear same "solo" stated note for note over and over....unless it is a REALLY darn good one (and we all know those Django and contemporary classics).

PS- sure lyrics are cool. Plenty of great jazz songs with lyrics. And a great way to 'state' the head.

PPS- now if you had the ability to improvise with lyrics you'd really have something. Kind of like scat singing but with words.

Jazzaferri

IMO the music is what it is all about. Improv is cool but so is singing. My band Swingsation, is styled after GJ but we have a female vocalist who loves the swing style of music. Lots of improv. solo's as well and we do a few instrumentals to give her a break.

Learning to improvise starting at 56 will be a challenge indeed, but you will find that even if you never improvise on stage , what you learn and the opening of your ears to the harmonic understanding necessary to improvise will help you in all your musical endeavours.