The Worst Jazz Solo of All Time

this video was brought to you by curiosity stream I really hope they feel like they got their money's worth on this one because the saxophone solo that we're gonna be talking about today is really bad like if somebody ran a mile and was forced to breathe out of a saxophone it sounded like a goose having sex it's from an alternative take of the 1956 song the Jones girl by the five satins and Twitter seems to have this recurring fascination with it to be a hundred percent honest I also have a recurring fascination with it it's really truly atrocious it's not very good at all it's been called the worst jazz solo of all time but what do we really mean by that and we quantify that in any kind of meaningful way can we use some kind of music theory analysis to explain its badness well some people have tried one article called it atonal which just isn't true actually a tonality is the absence of tonal Center and in the recording the saxophonist keeps playing the same note over and over and over again it has a tonal Center a tonal center anyway the same article claims that the solo is a pale imitation of bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker which just is not true in fact the real history behind the solo and its musical lineage is a lot more interesting and believe it or not more nuanced we are here today to try and figure out what makes a solo bad we need to understand what it is we are listening to before we pass judgment it's easy to make fun of something but hard to come to grips with why exactly we do that solo means I only have to play one note right got the notes it's playing if the hit season not play you mean literally all other notes just have Jerry do the solo carry only knows one note be fine so grab a cup of coffee get comfortable we're here today analyzing the worst jazz solo of all time I got a laugh at myself right now I wrote that thing song called a Jones girl and I always thought it was the big time a big time hit record and it took sixty three years for recognises this style of soloing aggressively playing the same pitch over and over and over again on a 12 bar blues can actually be traced back to a single recording 1942 is flying home by Lionel Hamptons band featuring then 19 year old saxophonist Illinois Jacquet the king of the vibra harp the master of the drums with his all-time big record of ride home is Lila flying home was an enormous commercial success for Lionel Hampton Spann and ushered in an entirely new style of saxophone playing which audiences went crazy for it was aggressive is exciting it was primal jackets frenzied style developed as a stark contrast to the fluid and dense and cerebral melodic improvisations of bee boppers like save Charlie Parker the school of Charlie Parker's playing was sophisticated and urbane a school of Illinois Jacquet splaying was much more in-your-face this style would culminate in a series of concerts known as jazz at the Philharmonic these were called a gladiatorial arena a jazz critic Norman Krantz because they would pick different saxophones together and we could only really be described as jazz battles the ammunition that was volley back and forth in these jazz battles were things like multiphonics and altissimo squeals and incessant OneNote passages yeah man jazz battles we should have more jazz battles these days why why is there no jazz battles come on but like with any war the soldiers in these jazz battles were the ones to pay the price the incessant screeching night after night after night on tour was extraordinarily physically demanding and Jacquet had to quit Hamptons band after just a couple of years on tour sometimes you have to quit to save your life I looked in the mirror and said you're dying and Hampton is getting rich physical demands and saxophone battle fatigue aside the techniques that jazz musicians like Illinois Jacquet developed in the 1940s would go on to deeply influence the R&B musicians of the 1950s just check out red prysock playing on the tune hand clapping [Music] Zillow means I only have to play one note right just up Jerry do the solo Jerry only knows one note I'll be fine that's just one note play it over and over again that was an important part of the style in the 1950s and there was probably nobody who better embodied the style of the R&B saxophone Whaler than big Jay McNeely yes that is a glow-in-the-dark saxophone and I want one the avant-garde jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman would say of McNeely I saw this big looking guy all dressed up in this fine looking zoot suit and he was honking one note over and over and over with one of the biggest saxophone sounds I had ever heard Ornette Coleman and the rest of the free jazz avant-garde borrowed very heavily from R&B saxophone technique just listened to the intense altissimo squeal of big Jay McNeely on the tune real crazy cool it's the same altissimo hi-c over and over again the energy is just off the charts but it is kind of uncomfortable it might be a little bit hard to listen to the note is rather out of tune nobody on Twitter seems to be making fun of big Jay McNeely in fact the exact opposite was the case whenever he played reactions among his audiences were frenzied to say the least reactions like this one where a woman seems to be head-butting his saxophone the style and the technique of big Jay McNeely and the rawness that came with it is cut from the same cloth as Illinois Jacquet it was a very popular sound and it was bound to be imitated solo means I only have to play one note right my man Vinny they played the sax he only had a couple of minutes to rehearse with us so it wasn't like a thing of going over two songs that we did that particular session so maybe 10 minutes we got together and Vinny didn't know what the heck to do the Jones girl solo can be attributed to Vinny Mazetti a local Connecticut saxophone player that helped the five satins arrange a recording session in the basement of st. Bernadette Church in New Haven Connecticut now there are other 12 bar blues solos that only use one notes that are rather unarmed to say the least like for example Brian ferries let's stick together [Music] sorry to all the brine ferry fans out there but Vinny Mazetti is solo on the alternate take of the Jones girl is especially unfortunate the solo is loosely built from a repetitive to bar pattern that centers around the tonic the one it doesn't repeat the same way every time though the first time that we hear the pattern the second note is on the end of two and there's a little bit of a fall but the second time we hear the pattern that second note is actually on the downbeat of three the third time we hear it Mazetti adds a pickup note but he doesn't articulate it very clearly he doesn't tongue it so the notes become slurred together in a way that's rather indistinct this slurring effect continues as the solo picks up more and more variations pile on so even though it's very repetitive the repetitions don't feel particularly intentional all of the variations feel like Mazetti doesn't have full control of his instrument and whatever's coming out is just whatever he can play at the time so even though repetition does serve to reinforce musical ideas that doesn't work when the repetition does not feel intentional then there's of course the gigantic elephants in the room the thing that people pick up on the most when they first listen to the solo and that is machetes intonation it is shall we say alternative the Jones girl itself is in the key of D flat but by the time we get to the solo Mazetti is playing so sharp that it sounds like he's actually playing a d natural over and over again but not quite d natural it's almost there we want to be very specific it's d-natural if a was tuned to 432 so who knows maybe Mazetti is just trying to get all the chakras in the band aligned or maybe he's trying to ascend to a higher spiritual plane by playing that D at a 432 who knows you can get away with this alternative intonation because there is no chordal accompaniment on the Jones girl there is no pianist and there is no guitarist the five satins are a do up group and all the harmonic information is coming from the vocal harmonies so by the time to hear the sax solo there are no chords as the solo progresses and the repetitions become more and more frantic Mazetti starts rushing out in front of the rest of the band leading to a fairly awkward rhythmic moment where Mazetti realizes that he is no longer in sync with the bass and the drums it's at this moment where you can really hear the panic and Mazetti saxophone playing he plays a couple of split tones which is that growling saxophone camera that's caused by over blowing on the reed split tones can sound really nice in certain contexts but only when they feel intentional and it certainly doesn't feel intentional here when Mazetti gets back on track and stops playing split tones and gets back together with the bassist in the drummer he abandons his first rhythmic pattern and starts a new one almost as if he forgot the one that he started with the new one that he starts was featured prominently in Bill Haley in the commets rock around the clock one two three or many light swing tins from this era that were 12 bar blues that featured one note to t-sections fun word you'd have a section of horn players playing the same rhythm but with one note staying the same on top for example woody Furman's would chocolate ball [Music] these two songs were very popular in their day and they were working with a ridiculously simple idea you take the root note of whatever key you're working in and then you just repeat it over and over again pop songs these days am i right is Etta and the five satins were a product of their time in the 1950s and likely were well aware of the established tropes and the popular music of that time they had a sense right or wrong of what might be popular it's the same note over and over and over again I thought I was gonna hit fart so what happened in his book the listening book waa matthew has this exercise pick a single note on your instrument or your voice preferably mid-range at first make a short piece using only that note perhaps this one note limit seems too austere or maybe too silly but when you take it to heart you will find an astonishing array of possible sounds I could for example play this G short or I could play it long I could play it loud I could play it medium I could play it soft I could play it as a harmonic good pop it I could slap it I could play it here or could play it here for a slightly different sound I could go back and forth between those two sounds which is something called a Tambor old trill saxophonist I love that idea I could put horizontal vibrato on the note I put vertical vibrato on the note I put a lot of vertical vibrato on the note I could bend up to the note I could bend down to though play the note towards the bridge towards the neck I play with my fingernail I could palm mute it with my right hand could meet it with my left hand but a bit here and a bit here of course I can string these ideas together with different rhythms and through rhythm we can make musical statements that might be meaningful like for example I could do a call-and-response between two different Tambor's I could play poly rhythms I could play drum rudiments like paradiddles I can let a harmonic ring while they play different rhythms on another string [Music] or you focus on this limitation the more you realize there's actually a lot to explore the Coquille come one note usually is in reference to something one-dimensional as in I found the presentation very one note and uninspired but for practitioners of one note solos one note can be anything but I'm enormous ly inspired by Evelyn Glenys solo snare drum performances they're dynamic they're exciting and they're really mostly emotionally moving pieces of music but because there's just one drum you can kind of think of it as a form of one note solo you have this one sound source so you can't rely on things like scales and melody and harmony to create musical interest you have to really dig deeper and explore things like dynamic tone color and of course rhythm these things are fundamental in expressing musical ideas and unfortunately are often neglected by musicians as well as people whose musical opinions should not matter there are three elements to music there is harmony there's there is melody and there's rhythm oh isn't that cute Ben's opinions on music are just so adorable sometimes there are three elements to muse now there are modern composers who have explored these elements like tone color and rhythm through OneNote music like for example the first movement of Hungarian composer Georgi Ligon ease musica Richard kata which just kind of chills on the note a the musical interest here comes from the rhythmic displacements as well as the shifting octaves sometimes you're hearing that a low sometimes you're hearing it high pretty cool rhythm is the primary motivator here there is no melody there is no harmony just sorry Ligety ben shapiro does not consider you a musician that there's not a lot of melody and there's not a lot of harmony to reach your cut that only fulfills one of these the rhythm section gotta pack it in man you're not a composer facts don't care about your feelings there are three elements to music you can also have one note music that's not particularly rhythmic in its conception like for example the seventh movement - Eliot Carter's eight heads and a fantasy it just kind of chills on the note G the musical interest here comes purely from dynamics and the shifting tone colors as different instruments come in and out it's very interesting and it's also very interesting to compare how Western classical composers use the idea of one note music with say how big J McNeely did there are fundamentally different philosophical and aesthetic goals at play here which lead to radically different artistic statements and radically different emotional states in the audience if I was going to do a hackneyed analogy which let's be fair is one of my favorite things to do I would say that the woodwind quintet music of Elliott Carter is like a Mark Rothko painting severe austere minimalist and rather for building no growth whereas the music of big J McNeely is more like a strobe light something that just punches you in the face over and over and over again with one note there's a diversity of purpose and musical effect here Mark Rothko and strobe lights elliott carter and big Jay McNeely but they both used the same musical technique so it's not really that useful to critique or analyze a piece of music solely based on cataloguing the techniques used that's not really enough to give you a full understanding of what's going on music theory without some kind of cultural or historical context just won't cut it yeah we can say that the alternative take of the Jones girl solo uses one note we have to dig a little bit deeper on what that one note means in context in this case it attempted to use a stylistic language that is altogether brash and arrogant and it wasn't Vinnie Mazetti wasn't he wasn't up to the challenge of speaking this language of arrogance with any degree of confidence and so his solo comes across sounding weak and impotent big Jay McNeely might sometimes sound like a screaming goat but damn it he is committed and because he is committed people respond that means I just have to play one note right [Music] have to play one [Music] ooh [Music] playing the same note over and over again creates musical attention even if that note is the tonic pitch which is traditionally a place of rest what you're doing is you're making the audience ask questions like when is the note going to change how will it change when it changes is the no point to change what's going to happen in the case of the Jones girl solo none of those questions are answered Mazetti just stops playing two bars before the solo ends and we're left with a rather awkward pause now there are other musical traditions that use one note that have this arrogant brashness to them like for example the tradition of the one note rock guitar solo Pete Townsend captures this kind of energy on the hoos I can see for miles Neil Young is especially well known for this kind of solo and you can hear it honest tune Cinnamon Girl in both the rock and R&B traditions of OneNote solos the one that was that I was attempting to emulate there's almost a statement being made it's almost as if saying cueing Vey Hugh Charlie Parker what you need a million notes to do I can do with just one note and I can do it better we cringe at Mazetti x' attempt because he can't do it better which just goes to show that it requires a musician of incredible finesse and confidence to be able to play one note it's not easy so normally I try not to make fun of people if they're doing things in good faith but yeah it's funny Miz that a solo is really bad and it's comically bad in fact comparing it to other musicians who did the same idea but better just underscores that fact no it probably isn't the worst to jazz solo of all time that honor would probably go to some boat that I played in freshman ensemble when I was in music school but it's not good it's really bad it's kind of funny in MS Etta's defense though there are a couple of things that I do want to mention the first one and probably the most obvious is that this was an alternative take of the Jones girl and it's probably a good reason why it was the alternative take it wasn't very good on the main version of the song Mazetti also takes a solo that has rather alternative intonation but it's not nearly as bad [Music] but another interesting wrinkle to this story is the fact that the five satins were not a no-name band they saw commercial success in their day and they continued to see commercial as well as critical success today in popular culture just not on Twitter and the reason for their commercial success comes from the exact same recording session that they recorded the Jones girl and its alternative take the so called worst jazz solo of all time we came a long way as far as as far as the song goes there was just look I guess and I like to say that this was recorded it in a church basement it was it was blessed in the very same recording session in which the Jones girl was recorded in the basement of Saint Bernadette Church the five satins also recorded their smash hit in the still of the night a doo-wop song that went on to sell over a million copies same band now what's interesting is that it was recently featured in a Martin Scorsese film the Irishman and it also has a saxophone solo from Vinnie Mazetti that has intonation that shall we say is less than perfect but people on the internet have not made fun of in the still of the night the same way that they did of the Jones girl alternative take in the context of the Irishman the sound of the saxophone comes across as well a little rough around the edges but maybe quaint or nostalgic or wistful that should tell you is that the way we interpret music the way that we hear music is often very very dependent on context on Twitter we might mock it on the big screen we might consider it art I mean don't get me wrong the saxophone solo on the Jones girl is not very good but the reason why it's not very good has little to do with the fact that it's one note after all musicians have been working within that limitation for a long time and have been able to create pretty amazing pieces of music and it doesn't really have anything to do with the fact that it's kind of out of tune or it's not very rhythmically concise what it really boils down to at least in my opinion is the fact that Vinnie Mazetti is not really saying a whole lot big J McNeely an Illinois Jacquet simply say more with one note solos that's a hard thing to quantify but it's also a hard thing to deny like how would we even begin to quantify that right if we started to look through all the sheet music transcriptions of the solos that we listened to today and we tried to find some kind of common thread which says this solo is good and this is bad we'd come up entirely empty yeah the Jones girl solo only has one note but so does flying home and that was an international sensation yeah the Jones girl solo was rhythmically awkward and out of tune but so was real crazy cool by big Jay McNeely who inspired an entire generation of saxophonist yeah the Jones girls solo had inconsistent variations but so did hand clapping by red prysock and that tune just sounds awesome it's easy to reduce a critique to a soundbite solo bad because out of tune solo bad because one note but as in anything in life worth doing music is a little bit more nuanced than that there are some things that we can explore and they so-called worst jazz solo of all time that might be worth our while like for example the idea of a one note solo there are contemporary one note soloists that we could turn to here like for example Leo P very much is continuing in the arrogant swagger tradition of Illinois Jacquet in the big J McNeely then there are others who take the more conceptual and textual approach of modern classical music like for example creative youtubers like Rob Scallon but I would be remiss in this video if I did not at least mention the most famous piece of OneNote music there is I'm talking of course about Antonio Carlos Jobim 'he's OneNote Samba which as you can tell contains quite a bit more than just one note but hey that's besides the point the main musical idea of the one note Samba is to take one note place it in the melody and then move chords around underneath it the shifting harmonic colors underneath that one note give that note new meanings every time you hear it it's a remarkably effective idea harmony changes musical context what if we took my Zetas solo and changed the harmony underneath how would that change the story being told curious [Music] [Music] you might notice that I used a fair number of musical recordings in this video as examples which is something that unfortunately I haven't been able to do that frequently because of the stresses of battling major music labels over content ID and issues of Faerie use and monetization that's been a huge drag but thankfully I can do it for this video thanks to today's sponsor curiosity stream who has partnered with nebula a creator own streaming service that I recently joined specifically so I could make this kind of video free of that kind of worry nebula features many of YouTube's favorite educational channels like Wendover productions twelve-tone legal eagle real engineering polyphonic and many many more it's a great place to watch and discover really quality content ad free and support your favorite creators it's also a home to bonus content like for example instead of this ad read in the video that I uploaded to nebula you'll be giving a harmonic analysis of the music that you're listening to right now yay so what does this have to do with curiosity stream well as the go-to source for the best documentaries on the internet like the very excellent documentary the jazz loft according to W Eugene Smith all about jazz musicians in mid-century Manhattan curiosity stream has a vested interest in educational content and educational creators [Music] you can click on the link in the description or go to curiosity stream comm / Adam Ely to get started with your free trial [Music] by clicking the link you're directly helping out this channel as well as many other channels on YouTube and to be clear this nebula subscription is not a trial as free as long as you're a curiosity stream number [Applause] [Music] a great solo Zack zinger everybody he did play more than one note but we'll forgive them if you have any examples of one note solos that you'd like for me to check out please leave them in the comment section I think that window solos are an awesome idea I think there's a lot of music that can be made with just one note so let me know and remember everybody it's not the notes that you play it's what you do with the notes that you do that's not it better in my head [Music]

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 1,431,130

Rating: 4.9222331 out of 5

Keywords: adam, neely, jazz, fusion, bass, guitar, lesson, theory, music

Id: eSuK_5zW2iM

Length: 28min 25sec (1705 seconds)

Published: Mon May 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/2Dprinter]

Love this solo! Always makes me think of the legendary two-note punk guitar solo in The Buzzcocks’ “Boredom”

[u/Jon-A]

Haven't listened to the whole of the video yet, but I have listened to the whole of The Jones Girl by The Five Satins. It's great. It's raw, exciting, and a style I've never heard before but could come to love: Punk Doo-wop. The solo is perfect. Maybe the technique is a bit shaky, but so what? The conception is just brilliant. It actually is not just the same note, and the inspired melodic architecture reminds me, in its shape and inevitability, of John Tchicai's great alto solo on the master take of Coltrane's Ascension.

The alternate Jones Girl take is, admittedly, a bit less inspired. But still raggedly engaging.

Now, the video: does this just reek of entitled hipster know-it-all arrogance, or what? Start with the title: 'Jazz'? - no, it's not even Jazz, you dope. It's Doo-wop, R&B! OK, I'll watch the video now...

Update: Watched the video...unconvinced. He starts by tracing the origin of the 'one note solo' to Illinois Jacquet's celebrated solo on Lionel Hampton's Flying Home. "Jacquet's frenzied style developed as a stark contrast" to Charlie Parker and the beboppers, he says. Except Flying Home preceded the emergence of Bird & the boppers by 2 or 3 years.

[u/VOTE_MILES]

Interesting video. I learned a lot. But it was a bit too “one note” and about 10 minutes too long, and I ended up bailing on it.

[u/mikefan]

Here's one of the few times that I recall of people applauding in the middle of a solo. It's Michel Petrucciani and NHOP playing Oleo, and Petrucciani solo is repeating a B-flat. It's funny what people are impressed by.

https://youtu.be/0eARxDr7RMk?t=136