Vamping. e.g.playing the same 2 bars eight times in a row. The keyboard player is almost always the perp in this one. Usually done with a smirk and a wink - “Yes, I’m doing this intentionally, how cool is that?”.
Interpolating ditties. Sticking “Pop Goes The Weasel” in the middle of “All The Things You Are” does not improve “All The Things You Are”. Neither does “The Theme From The Flintstones”.
Bass solos. I play Bass myself but I wouldn’t dream of killing the groove with two minutes of tuneless rubber-band twanging.
I’m not a big jazz fan but I know what you’re talking about and it has never bothered me. I mean, done at the right time, in the right way, it can be pretty intense actually.
I’m also not thrilled by this, but I take it to be basically like a joke. A one-liner.
Could it be that you have low frequency hearing loss?
Preach it, bruddah. Especially number two. Yeah, jazz bass solos are generally boring as hell unless you’re another bass player. I’ve heard a couple of local bassists that can really shred that thing, but otherwise. . .big yawn. Organ numbers almost invariably start grating on my auditory nerve about midway through, when the vamping begins. Even worse, the drawn out single high-pitched note that just goes on and on until you start looking for the razor blades.
I think the problem with most jazz bass solos is rooted in traditions that go back to the days when, aside from perhaps a microphone for a singer or emcee, jazz groups performed unamplified. Without amplification, it’s a simple fact that just about every other instrument in a jazz ensemble can completely drown out an upright bass (there’s a reason that symphony orchestras have so many basses: to make it louder). So it became standard practice, when the bassist took a solo, for most of the other players to drop out entirely while the pianist and drummer played very quietly behind the solo.
That behavior became so entrenched that it continued on long after the electric bass and decent amplification became common. And the problem with the practice is just what you stated: it immediately sucks all the groove and energy out of the song. It’s something I read years ago, from a jazz group whose name I can’t recall. They mentioned the “everybody play softer during the bass solo” thing, and asked, “Why?” Their solution was for everybody to keep playing with the same intensity and simply have the bassist turn it up during his solo. I think Hiromi and her band get that right - I don’t notice any diminishment in the groove or energy while Tony solos. And I think this is also the reason that so many modern bass-playing jazz frontmen bring along a second bassist to keep the bass groove going while the main guy solos.
What’s wrong with vamping? “Take 5” begins with a vamp. Never bugged me in the least in that context or any other. Not sure what the smirk and wink means exactly, either. To me, it’s just grooving out before the solo begins. Nothing wrong with that, IMHO.
I’ll somewhat agree with you on #2 (but I do kind of see them as cutesy one-liners, and can forgive it), and completely disagree with you on #3. I like a nice jazz bass solo.
Brubeck always admitted that the original version of Take Five was vamped, as they were very unsure of themselves with the 5/4 time signature. So they played it safe, taking no chances on screwing it up. The difference between that version and later versions is marked.
The injection of the ditties was probably cute the first 700 times that musicians did it. But it became a cliche pretty rapidly and it annoys me when musicians do it now, although sometimes it just seems that in the execution of the improvisation, the music just takes them to a note progression that is familiar as part of another tune, and they quickly depart from it. If that makes sense.
I actually find that surprising, as 5/4 is not really that difficult a time signature. But maybe that’s speaking from a modern context, where we might be more familiar with “non-standard” time signatures in music.
Making weird and awful noises instead of playing their instruments — Burned into my mind is a torturous jazz concert (guitar-drums-bass) in which the bass player kept making screeching noises by skating his fingers all the way down the fingerboard at random intervals. <shudder>
The technical term is “quoting”. In one of those Hiromi Uehara videos I linked, Hiromi quotes a little snippet of “Flight of the Bumblebee” in one of her synth solos. But it’s so brief and fits in so well with the rest of her improvisation that I never even noticed it the first dozen or so times I watched that video.
Even Morello’s drumming is very restrained in the original, but changed over time, unlike the opening chords by Brubeck, which are one of those iconic riffs that everyone immediately recognizes.
But my experience is the Glen Moore who played beautiful, disciplined jazz with Paul McCandless and David Darling in the band Oregon.
I can’t imagine sitting through a free-form bass solo. Or “playing the same 2 bars eight times in a row” (seriously? I’d walk out)… or Pop Goes The Weasel, so I’m with the OP.
Used sparingly, those little squawks and other awkward harmonics can add a lot to a song. But it seems like they must be fun to do, for some trumpeteers throw that stuff in every other bar it seems.
Unnecessary noodling. Yes, it can show great technical skill, mastery over scales and modes and blah blah, and it’s really fun to do, but oftentimes solos just show absolutely no restraint and it hurts the piece as a whole. In a jam session, sure go nuts, but in an actual performance, try to actually give the overall piece a distinct structure and personality. Some jazz bands have a lot of songs sounding the same because the instruments’ solo bits go on forever and don’t necessarily complement the current song any more than they’d complement some other random song. Restraint, people!
I don’t know about 8 times in a row, but 4 times in a row for 8 measures doesn’t sound at all weird to me. A solo ends, the band vamps to re-establish the groove, and the next solo builds. It’s a perfectly cromulent way to structure a song, IMHO.
