Spontaneous Imrov vs. Playing Lines/Phrases

BluesBop Harry

For those who haven't heard, The Ferre bros in action:

Ando

Well said, Scot.

I've been listening to John Lewis's terrific work, which is rather carefully composed. His tune "Django" is a wonderful thing, amenable to all kinds of approaches. If you listen to how the MLQ deals with it, you can hear global differences in choruses: the elegiac first chorus, the subtle shift to swing!, the emergence of a more up-tempo feel, until you're back to elegy. It has a dramatic structure.

I'd like to hear more "suites" in the same vein. Koen De Cauter and Dick Van Der Harst recorded an incredible slab called "La Nuit Est Une Sorciere" like this. Koen wrote "Creperie La Menthe" for it. More! More!

I'm with Scot. Doing the Django thing is amazing and inspiring (I wish I could play like that!), but it would be a shame to keep playing the same tunes over and over with the same approach.

thomasbaggerman

djangology wrote:

It absolutely drives me nuts that a certain element of people who listen to and/or play in the GJ genre can't seem to step out of certain confines.

When gypsy jazz players come together, they share a common repoirtoire and style. They should stick to that. When you walk away from a gypsy jazz jam and do your own thing then THAT is the time to step out of your confines. It is annoying to me when people come into a jam and try to get everyone else to change with them. You need to remember that gypsy jazz is a facilitor in that it brings people together for the simple reason that it is gypsy jazz. If it was anything else then it wouldn't bring people together. When you go to a Djangofest you should play Django tunes and immerse yourself in all-things-Django and then when you get home you should step out and make it whatever you want. That way nobody else has to endure your boundary exploration when all they wanted was a Django jam. This gives each one of us at least 350+ days a year to be experimental and explore.

Django was always working on new things.
I've always seen everyone's eyes brighten up when there's a guy in town who gives his own twist to things. To me, you have 350 days a year to pratice Django solo's. If you want to play a 'Django-jam' then be like Django and try to talk. Offcourse there are trademark lines and endings, but the idea is to throw 'em in once in a while. And mix them with your own idea's. I look at it as talking or singing. Do you tell the same story over and over again, every time? I don't think that if you play like a discribed above you are playing fusion. It's still gypsy JAZZ.

Greetings from The Netherlands

Thomas

dennis

Adelaarvaren wrote:

Just for perspective, people were walking out on the Rosenbergs at DFNW Saturday night.

I think they either just didn't get it, couldn't process it because it was too fast, or were just old and tired and ready to go to bed.

i think they were leaving because it too damn hot in there!!

Bob Holo

Elderly people mostly... it happened at nearly every late show. Elderly couples probably leaving to go home so they can be in bed by 10pm. It's sort of cute actually. Though... I do think people were leaving the Ferre Brothers simply because they didn't understand the music and it challenged their notion of what the music should be. We had a bit of that when Stephan Wrembel came through town doing his (amazing and wonderful) fusion stuff. Most people said: "Damn... this is deep - I want to hear more." but some people were turned off. Ah well... art is not meant to please everyone... if it does, it's probably not art.

clausci

Ando wrote:

I don't know of any spontaneously generated ones, but here's a rough example of the kind of harmony involved:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh9-D6W3 ... re=related

I don't know if this is a traditional/set thing or not, but if you imagine the accompanist providing the harmony, it's easy to imagine how the soloist could come in on top of it.

As long as the harmony has a clear, strong root, even an intermediate soloist should be able to follow and do something with it.

The challenge would be in "modernizing" the harmony. If one starts with something simple, then any repetition could introduce substitutions, more altered tones, etc.

Of course, this leaves aside all the rhythmic permutations, and different stylistic directions, you could take things.

A valse is another structure that can be improvised completely because there are fairly clear and traditional ground rules.

Basically, the trick is establishing a discernible "game." If you don't, or if it's too complicated or imperceptible, listeners won't have anything to pay attention to -- they won't be able to distinguish order from randomness.

i think ive understood youre purpose,and thanks for talking of hungarian music, is justanother way to think.
Sorry but theexample u bring doesnt have re-harmonization,just some melodies variations.
instead, harmony variation in hungarian and rumanian melodies, this has been done with a great maestry by angelo de barre , in the manouches.
Exactly in the album with frank anastasio.
The exmple u've posted is not an hungarian composition ,but the"csarda di monti" wich is a classical piece written by an italian composer in the style, and played by hungarians too, the most famous piece in hungarian style was written by an italian...from napoli :vittorio monti.( andin youre example played by russians, with russian instruments)
but this piece dont match with what you are sayng because ,being a classic piece, apiece of "effect", its a synthesys of the csrdas style playedby the gypsyes in the 1800-900.and it doesnt have all the peculiarity of the harmony uwas talking about.
But the style (magyar nóták, hungarian melodies) involves, as you say, in the tradition, more harmonic rules .is not "free". yes its true they use a lot of diminished and m6 and a lot of passing chords.but is not really easy to work out a reorganizationin a modern language, angelo de barre did , but he is a gypsy, and he knows the language.
example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlh2GOKHAvg
try to find all the passing chords! there are a lot...so it is already "modern" in a way, isnt it?

for understand better what im talkin about (and i think, what also Ando was talking about) i show you that in hungarian music is the bràcsa (the viola) in a role of accompainment , instead of the guitar,often the cymbalom accompain also.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-wY9fwQ9As
so the viola does a lot of passing chords, with smooth movements in the rubato.

and for the improvistion in the real sense of this word..there is few.
the gypsies also in hungary base all the music in the concept of the "variation" , as scot said, all the gypsies make a lot of variations that are not really improvised often , but seems like that. and aofcourse there is a language that allows to improvise, or better to "speak":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlNM438__7Y

Ando

Claudio

Thank you for such a thought-provoking post. Yes, you're right that the video I linked to was not a good example at all of harmonic improvisation, and thank you for all the videos of Hungarian primas playing their variations, which are truly virtuosic! Amazing. You're right, too, about Angelo Debarre's substitutions on his recording with Camps and Anastasio.

What I mean to suggest is that it should be possible to invent a harmonic progression in a minor key, on the spot, in a loosely rubato "Hungarian" style. Diminished chords are full of clear tensions -- they pull in predictable directions. You can sense where a dominant seventh chord might be going, too. You can, after some perfect cadence, transition into some other rhythm. If you listen to enough of this music, its characteristic gestures become clear, its "game" becomes comprehensible -- and can be imitated.

Just for fun. I don't mean to make this sound like more than it is.

Cheers,
A

clausci

yes i understand, you're right, there are some "cliche" movements of the bass and the chords in the rubato, and in general in this music. this is the tradition.you talk about the valse and in the valse is the same thing more or less.
..But, my question is this: the armony on the valse and hungarian music, is stricly a "slave" of the melody, thats why we are talking about theme variation. The curious thing is that the other "chanche" in traditional music is to do another melody on the main part instead of the theme, or variation (also a lot) on theme, that (the "alternative melody or variation") was often conserved in the local tradition in towns or villages. this is also the gypsy approach often.
So Django maybe was influenced by this concept, and applied to jazz, he has given to the jazz a particular lyrism that was pretty far by the american "blues-concept" in that times. (I think it was also because the swing concept in europe was a little different from the american concept in general, cause all the musicians were trained in a different culture)
I think that is the main concept, how can i say..the "approach"... also if i know that the music of Django involves a lot of other elements, and i think that is just the concept, the musical concept, i think that he improvised in general, like all the great musicians did, also in the classical music.

Ando

Ah, ho capito! Ha ragione.

Saluti,
A

a

I used to think it was a sense of total freedom that made improvisation worthwhile. But now, I believe that there needs to be more... it must be something that can't be gained from pre-composing, and must also be engaging in a way that maintains the "wow, this person can play anything," and the "this person can play exactly what they hear" vibe, but also needs to be very compelling in some other way...

Beyond playing phrases (which I see as a sort of exquisite-corpse kind of linear thought- chord > phrase, chord>phrase, etc.), and beyond modal stuff (which to me is more like playing drums), how does a musician reconcile the the ease/certainty/rigidity/linear of the first with open-ended/more options to deal with/more thoughts to juggle of the second?

And as guitar players, if we really want to get the most out of the instrument- there are so many ways to play one thing- it's so different from piano where there is a 1 to 1 relation between the notes and the possible ways to play them (even though fingering can be very complicated), how do we achieve a sense of both certainty and freedom without having to either play rigid phrases or having to stick to the middle position and play vertically? We have to consider enharmonic strategies more than a drummer or piano player.