My band is dreaming in color

Phil Mastro · #1 10-26-2005, 06:26 PM

I've been playing with my band for about a year now, and we're a rock cover band. We have the chance of playing a sorta jazz gig for a university psychology party or something. Remember, my band consists of ROCK GUYS. I'm more of a jazz player myself, and each time I try to jazz things up, the rest of my band doesn't really follow. Initially, I was thinking, "eh, no problem, we'll just play All Blues, So What and Impressions", hoping that my band could figure those tunes out pretty quickly. They're still pretty good musicians. And then it started...

"We should play Take 5" "We should play Autumn Leaves" "Why don't we play some song that has one bar of 6 and one bar of 5?"

This coming from my band, who just a few months ago, would not, and I repeat, would NOT try to jam in Bb. And all of a sudden they have these dreams of grandeur playing all these fairly hard tunes. I don't think they realise at what point improvising in an interesting manner on autumn leaves is hard. And they don't have a jazz vocabulary at all, any of them, whether soloing or comping, or playing leads.

Has anyone been in a similar situation? Is there ANY way I can bring my band back to earth?

Bushfire · #2 10-27-2005, 03:04 AM

Hit them with a large salmon? if that doesn't work, I'm completley spent.

But seriously, have you tried talking to them?

bassicinstinct · #3 10-27-2005, 03:27 AM

Illusion of adequacy is a terrible thing.

wulf · #4 10-27-2005, 04:11 AM

Don't just talk about it. Get the music and start playing. If they can name songs like Autumn Leaves, then maybe they've got more of a handle on the jazz thing than you give them credit for?

However, until you've tried it you won't know...

Wulf