Indigestible Jazz: I'm stuck in the "Classical" idiom!

Hello Chaps.

I've been struggling a bit with some new Jazz tunes lately. In the absence of lessons or a band to play with (due to lockdown) I've been using iReal Pro to provide some backing tracks to play along to to try and keep things going as much as I can.

I don't know or listen to a lot of Jazz, and maybe that's what's defeating me here, but I've been trying to learn about it as a way of keeping the boredom at bay. Most of the songs on the app seem to be Jazz tunes and I've been reading a bit of the musical theory presented on Welcome to JazzGuitarLessons.net and other websites.

The thing is, some of the songs just completely defeat me. I don't mean that in the sense of difficulty, although clearly there are some really fast, hard-to-play songs on there. What I mean, I think, is that they just don't make any damn kind of sense.

When I read the websites, it's all unfamiliar content, but the understanding is straightforward. Without meaning to sound like a **** - I know a lot of theory. Terms and signage, harmonic progressions and the stuff they write out to explain it all - I get it. I'm classically-trained, play the organ, piano, guitar, sing, etc., so when they talk about ii7-V7-I7, substitutions and interpolations, I promise you, I really get it.

I think the problem is the Jazz idiom. I see something like this:



and I can spot the patterns, interpolation, modulations, quite a bit of chromaticism and it seems to make a kind of sense in my head. I can play around it all pretty well - runs, arpeggios / melodic bass, walking bass - it's near enough to what I'm used to to make a good hash of it with some improv thrown in.

Then I look at something like this:



And I'm ashamed to admit, I'm dumbfounded. *** and all that. It. Just. Doesn't. Make. Any. Musical. Sense.

So I go and read and I learn about how it's all constructed from swapping 3rds / 7ths and then altering them to smooth things out; read the examples; understand the harmony. I read about Coltrane changes and think they're wacky but make a kind of sense. I go to YouTube and listen to the recordings and sure enough it sounds like the bassist is basically playing 1-1-2-3 in every bar, starting on a different root each time. Sounds easy enough, even at 240bpm.

But then I play through the chords without the backing track and I just can't find any route between the roots (let alone making things interesting) that doesn't sound like a pile of crap. I put the backing track on and its just the same, except now I know I can't keep up with the beat either.

The whole thing just feels like an unconnected jumble of notes and it makes me feel like I should just give up and go and hide in a Double Open Diapason somewhere (really big organ pipe) until I expire from the shame of it. I mean - I'm a serious musician, semi-professional on some of my other instruments, of about 30 years experience now. What's wrong with me? Why can't I get this?

I want to be able to play this stuff and I'm pretty sure that it's my previous musical experience and a total inability to "think Jazz" is what's stopping me from getting there. Is it even possible when I've got this much "structured diatonic Classical harmony" loaded into my head? What do I do? How do I learn to think the right way about this stuff?

Any and all advice will be welcome at this point. I know lockdown is getting a lot of us down, but my teacher has gone AWOL and I'm finding the struggle to make any kind of progress really demoralizing at the moment.

Thanks,

Adam.

 

Thank you, all three of you, for your replies.

I can accept that there isn't a magic bullet here and that my previous experience is working against me and I certainly take the point about not being able to confound expectations unless you know exactly what they'll be. Perhaps in a few years, with a lot of practice, I'll be able to talk about that and recognize exactly how guys like Correa are achieving that and see their genius (which is what I assume it is).

After BassChuck imagined the experience of meeting Bach for the first time, having heard nothing but modern Jazz, I tried to recall whether it was like that when I met Bach for the first time - I seem to remember I was pretty confused by the dissonance and even by his occasional habit of jumping into some very "distant" keys and sliding back out of them - and that was coming from the same idiom, let alone somewhere else. Now of course, it makes sense, but it took years.

Atonal music though, remains a mystery to me, as we've already established.

To give this post a more practical bent: I've seen some names go past - Coltrane, Correa, Coleman. I'm guessing they are on the more atonal end of the spectrum, whilst Irving Berlin is clearly on the "settled tonality" end. So, some questions:

• Could someone tell me whether those approaches have particular names (e.g. is it "traditional" vs "modern" Jazz or something like that)?
  
• Are there distinct categories of (approaches to) tonality / atonality? (I.e. are there patterns or recognizable ways of confounding expectations whose names I could put into google and read about?)
  
• Can anyone suggest some composers - or if the range of styles is too great for individual composers, some songs - which would fall into different places on the tonal <==> atonal spectrum, from traditional to "way out there"?

At the moment I'm picking the songs from iReal Pro basically at random, but it would probably make it easier to learn the ways if I could work through a few pieces that were mostly in the traditional idiom, then some that had some atonal features, then more, and so on, and so on... I suspect it would also make me feel better about failing to play them if I could always fall back to something like How Deep Is The Ocean and say to myself, "well, I can't play Humpty Dumpty yet, but I can do this...".

Any and all direction will be appreciated.

Thanks,

Adam.

 

I really enjoyed reading the thread you linked and I found the YouTube video about the seven levels of Jazz harmony linked within that thread really enlightening - so I wanted to say thank you very much. I think that was what I was looking for. I found myself sitting at the piano this morning, playing with tritone substitutions and finding all sorts of harmonies that had never really occurred to me before (and, gratifyingly, a few which already had).

Suffice to say I'm happiest with the levels 1-4 described in the video - they all seemed familiar to some degree and then it all got a bit wacky although "level 7" was - oddly - the exception and made a kind of sense: I'd never thought of adjusting the temperament for every chord (and I'm not clear how you could actually perform music where that was the requirement without, say, a computer to synthesize it) but the principal behind it seemed perfectly comprehensible.

Some of my study on the organ has looked at why historical temperaments / historically-tempered instruments tend to produce more pleasing performances of certain historic works through practice of adjusting the intervals to make the temperament more suited to a particular key, so with the exception of the frequency of adjustment, that seemed perfectly ordinary. I guess in some ways, music goes full circle just like the rest of life.

Anyway, thank you again - I now feel that I have a sense of direction and things that I can look into / experiment with.

 

Thank you all, again, for your insights which continue to be appreciated. Let me offer some replies:

Since reading the above earlier on, I've ordered some compilations of the works of the three artists above. Plenty to be going on with, although I was very tempted to add a Bill Evans collection too, as I can actually play along to (I won't say really play) some of his songs already. My teacher has had me working out some bass lines to Miles Davis tracks in the past, so hopefully I should be able to approach the music of his that I haven't heard and make something of it once I've listened to it a few hundred times. I'm assuming here that I'm listening out for ideas rather than parts to replicate verbatim, given the emphasis on improvisation...

This is the hard bit to explain, possibly bordering on the ridiculous. So sorry if what follows is a little long-winded and esoteric.

Basically, the band I usually play with is the worship band at my wife's church. There had been a lot of people coming and going, but just before this damned lock down, everything had settled down and we were starting to sound really good, in a way that I guess we / they haven't for some years. I basically picked up a bass last year for the first time in about 20 years to help them out when their usual bassist (my teacher) had to spend some time away. Anyway - I don't go in for the religion particularly, but playing in the band is pretty much the best thing I do (did) in the average week and I got hooked.

So there I am, playing the roots and so on for a while, whilst trying to remember all of the stuff I used to know as a kid when I last played, and at some point the old bassist returns. We get on, he offers lessons, I say "yes" and he gets me started on a mixture of rock, worship songs and jazz using a mixture of backing tracks / CDs and iReal Pro to play along to. I felt like I was making progress.

Anyway. At some point, just before lockdown started, my teacher disappeared again (life stuff) and the lessons stopped, but I carried on with the band. Now we have lockdown and all I have to play along to is the iReal Pro thing on the computer, which is mostly Jazz songs with a few bits of other genres.

However, much like it's been since I started playing again, I don't really know what direction I should be going in. I picked up the bass again last year because it was something I started as a child of 12 or so, and really loved, but then circumstances changed and it all stopped after a year or so.

Now I'm back reliving my childhood, I know I don't want to give it up again (I play most days), but it's always been a bit removed from a purpose (worship songs aren't terribly demanding usually) and although I can appreciate most kinds of music, I don't have any particular upbringing in blues, or jazz, or rock, so I'm basically having to manufacture an interest in one of those to provide the outlet for what I really want to do, which is play bass guitar competently and hopefully one day, find some people to play it competently with.

In short, Jazz seemed most interesting and unusual (and therefore ripe for learning), given my other musical background, serves a purpose and is intellectually challenging enough that it'll hopefully provide fuel for the fire until (and beyond) lockdown ends, my teacher reappears (or I get another one) and keeps me motivated to pick up the bass as often as possible.

So no - I don't love it - but I hope I might learn to.

You have no idea how much I appreciate hearing someone say that!

Right - I'm off to try and find something simple that I can play along to.

Thank you all, again.