‘Nice Work if You Can Get It’ was one of Monk’s favourite standards - he recorded it several times in several different settings. it always sounds like Monk playing it, but you can hear the reverence in which he holds Gershwin - it’s never as quirky as Monk recording his own compositions.
That’s just my take on it–I’ve never really sat down and analyzed that solo, but I think it’s a pretty accurate deconstruction of what’s going on. (Plus I picked an easier style of jazz–modal jazz–to pick apart. Modal jazz tends to bias towards melody stronger than other forms.) But that perspective is also my approach to improvisation in any style–to find a motif and develop it rhythmically, melodically, harmonically, etc… A solo or lead can’t be completely disconnected from the song. I’m sure you can pick apart the classic rock solos the same way.
LOL, Le Ministre de l’au-delà! 
Add me to the list of those going “huh!” and nodding their head vigorously (even taking pulykamell’s excellent post into consideration). 
I think that is exactly what some people mean when they talk about a musician’s “jazz style” or “jazz feel.”
In some ways I think that jazz singers have things easier than instrumentalists, in that the Great American Songbook is called that for a reason: we can get away with less improv, because audience members are often happy just to hear a song that they love. But to me there’s a world of difference between someone who gets up there and sings a song straight, however prettily, and someone who makes it his/her own while taking the audience along for the ride: the former may be a good singer, but the latter is a good jazz singer. And the latter is what I’m working to become.
amen - and thank you for that great link (I gotta say: having that pretentious French dude do the intro could not be more perfectly illustrative of jazz stereotypes! ;))
But Monk? Oh man, I have to smile when I listen - even most of his downbeat stuff. The creativity! The weird notes that somehow work! How the *hell *does he get me to like that stuff?! It’s like insight into particle physics - whenever you grasp a cool insight, you can’t help but smile. And he’s *universally idiosyncratic * 
- he established his own voice in a way that everybody recognizes as his, and I have yet to hear anyone really replicate…
Oh and Misnomer? You are on a great and worthy quest!
When I first heard Monk, I thought he was fucking up, or rather almost fucking up…coming really close to it. Like, "that note was kind of a clunker…wait maybe it wasn’t…it sounds like he’s doing this on purpose, he’s still holding the basic melody line…those harmonies are weird but it’s sort of working…now he’s off time, he fucked up…wait a second he got it back…actually that worked out perfectly, how did he do that?
He initially sounds like he doesn’t know what he’s doing, until you hear how impeccably precise he really is, and how he always knows exactly what he’s doing. It’s like a juggling act where you keep waiting for hm to drop the balls but never does. The very definition of an eccentric musical genius, and one of a kind too. Intsantly recognizable, but no one can duplicate him. People who try to sound like Monk just sound like people trying to sound like Monk. He had a unique oddness all his own.
Really well stated - he’s always perfectly on the edge of slipping out of control of his chords…except he’s not. It’s really magic.
Here’s a great live recording of Blue Monk- captures all of this perfectly. Let the Man do his own talking…and is it possible to look cooler?
Actually, I would say Thelonius Monk is indeed a bit sloppy. But the way he plays the slop and the way his playing teeters against the rhythm, almost spinning out of control, is what makes his playing so exciting and interesting. He just holds it together and there’s just no way to possibly learn or imitate that idiosyncratic voice of his.
Waitaminnit - are we making another connection to Eddie Van Halen? That sounds just like him, too.
And yeah, no question - Thelonius was a slop-meister. In my humble opinion, all the best ones are! Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, EVH - if you don’t risk the slop, you aren’t pushing boundaries, man!
I like to think of it as an off-the-cuff speech. Great extemporaneous orators are not perfect. There’s unintended pauses, a few “uhs” and “ums” thrown in there, sometimes the exact right word doesn’t come to mind, but the one that does is close enough. The quality of an orator is in the delivery of their words, their conviction, their connection to the audience, and the overall impression. A good musical solo is much the same.
Great post, and great point. And, we don’t disagree, I think. My point, in the spirit of the thread, is that while many jazz solos get a lot of structure/inspiration from the source material, many of them don’t, and/or much of the source material is very similar, so that they lead to the same sorts of inspirations.
Coltrane is fabulous. Favorite Things is a nice, atypical song. You can point to the ‘giants’ and say, “see, jazz can be incredible,” and I wouldn’t argue. But, most players, most of the time, aren’t that good. I know plenty of professional jazz musicians, and while they’re all talented players, almost none of them are talented expressionists, beyond a basic jazz vocabularly of rhythms and scales. Take 10 of 'em, throw them together individually with a bass and drummer, give them all the same song to do, and most of them will sound fairly interchangable, particularly to the untrained/unfamiliar ear.
I give solos plenty of credit. Even an average player is doing much much more than noodling on scales. My point is that to make an improv over Ornithology interesting and unique in an enduring way is a gargantuan task, and one that few people are up to.
Nicely put! I think you could expand that analogy to describe good art in general.
One could say the same about blues, country and many forms of pop/rock. (I wouldn’t, because I like blues, country and many forms of pop/rock.) I remember bar bands in the 70s, where it took four agonizing minutes to realize "Oh, that’s supposed to be Led Zeppelin’s ‘Rock and Roll’.
I also remember Cham Paine, a fabulous pianist, band leader and educator from my home town, who at times was the only member of the musician’s union in the city. (And even when he had company, it was usually the rest of his current band.) He was tireless in his dedication to the music and to developing the talents of the musicians he surrounded himself with. No, he was not Bill Evans, but it was through him that I discovered and ‘heard’ what Bill Evans was about. You didn’t leave one of Cham’s concerts feeling like you should have done something else with your evening. I’ve often remarked how lucky I was to grow up in a city of ~25,000 people that had such remarkable mentors for musicians, and he’s usually the first names I say, with a smile of gratitude.
So, uh, maybe you’re right, Eonwe, but that certainly hasn’t been my experience.
Well, it didn’t tranlate ‘cowboy’ nor ‘gangster of’, so I’m guessing it wouldn’t translate ‘toker’ either.
A better stab at it might be ‘bibulus fumandum’ which is a little like ‘drunken smoker’…
I have to agree, the OP was well done.
I personally dislike jazz, even positively hate some forms, but not through ignorance - my sister was a professional jazz musician for quite some time, and her entire family are jazz enthusiasts. I could not help but be educated, which is one of the reasons I appreciated the OP and would encourage WordMan to, um spread the word, man! People should make their aesthetic choices based on knowledge, not ignorance.
(I still don’t like jazz myself, but I appreciate the fact that others adore it. To each their own. I like some forms of music many others don’t. Go figger.)
I love this thread. I’m not a hater, but I’m not all that knowledgeable.
And I love this attitude. I wish more enthusaiasts of any genre (of any art form) had this outlook. It’s one I know I strive for.
Now this isn’t true of all flavors of jazz, right? Seems to my (mostly ignorant) observations that the old Dixieland style isn’t so dependent on improv. Am I right? Or way off?
It’s a BBC comedy from the 90s called The Fast Show, whose targets for satire were obscure to say the least. One of the funniest comedies since Monty Python, IMO. The key comedians are just miming over the music but there are real musicians on stage too.
There was one sketch with the Jazz Club where the guy said something like: "and now, a classical quartet plays jazz standards - in a classical style.
[turns to camera conspiratorially] “… Crap.”
Le Ministre - I hear some pain in your post: the pain of the performing musician who hears someone they don’t know well say “but it all comes down to X or Y” when it feels completely different to you.
What I read in **Eonwe’s **post was: “small-combo jazz is designed to feature solos, and your average jazz soloist has big shoes to fill - both in terms of length of time and saying something on a level with the Greats. It’s hard.”
What I am hearing you say in your reply is “that’s true within any form - given that genre’s rules, there is stuff that most players struggle with - and yeah, an audience can suffer as a result. But there can still be a ton of entertainment, value and fun.”
How’d I do?
If I did okay, then I would say: you’re both right. The challenge for jazz is back to the OP - folks who don’t get jazz are sometimes put off by the ***complexity ***of it and sometimes by the ***execution ***of it. Face it: jazz has barriers to entry for the average listener - hence this thread.
In terms of leads and solos - there was this threadfrom a couple of years ago about to approach/structure rock leads. In it, I had stated this:
I think this is a bit of what **pulykamell **is talking about upthread: you have a sense of entry and exit and a sense of structure, and a bag of licks, tricks and theory that has become second nature enough for you to access. So - how does all that come together to make a solo? Within jazz, those pieces - the entry, exit, structure, licks, tricks, theory, etc. - are very different vs. rock, say, even over similar chords and rhythms…
ETA: oh and jjimm, thanks for that background; crap indeed!
I think you’re exactly right about blues, but would argue this point about rock. The beauty about a lot of rock is that any group of halfway decent players who have a good ear for the big picture, and don’t play songs that are technically beyond them can get a bar shouting, singing along and on their feet with just about any familiar rock tune. Or, even karaoke. I mean, sometimes the performances suck, but audiences love it because of the song not the singer. No crowd is going to enjoy a mediocre version of All of Me, but a crappy band playing Wanted Dead or Alive is going to be able to get a positive response out of a decent chunk of the crowd.
But, I’m getting a little off track, and kind of playing devil’s advocate. I’m trying to look at it from an ‘uneducated’ perspective and argue why might a person dislike jazz. And, one of the biggest differences between jazz and most other popular forms of music is that jazz is so much more about the performer than it is about the song. You go listen to Keith Jarrett or Hiromi Uehara because of the way they play; the average listener doesn’t care about the program. You go listen to Bon Jovi because you want to hear them play their hits.
A rock band can have 10s of bland, boring songs, but get one hit, for whatever reason, and they’ll have a following. A jazzer can’t rely on the “hit song” to blind people to his or her other failings.
I hope that makes a little more sense. And, what WordMan said as well, who seems better at figuring out what I’m trying to say than I am myself.
That makes a ton of sense to me - and I think jazz players start with standards to anchor their explorations with some familiarity, but they don’t have nearly the same number of “automatic shout-along/flick your lighter/pump your fist/get up and dance” cues as your average hit cover song…
I, in fact, love jazz. I’m an aficionado, and an avid collector. I have family member who has a jazz quartet, out of NYC, who routinely play overseas.
My favorite vocalist, Chaka Khan’s jazz outing, “Echoes of An Era”, which was Grammy-nominated, turned me on to progressive jazz, and I have been a fan and collector since. I’m also a huge fan of Joni Mitchell, Joe Sample, Dianne Reeves, Betty Carter, Joe Williams, Jeff Lorber, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Cassandra Wilson, and Paul English, to name but a few.